Nougatine of Nevers #7
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Thank you my faithful English subscribers ! From now you will receive each Thursday “Nougatine of Nevers” in this format ! I added you email in this list because you already received it by email. You can know easily share this newsletter, navigate in the other articles and unsubscribe by yourself (at the end of the email).
It is with a lot of energy that this week we embark on a trip to :
Street art and copyrights
Doing the right thing for yourself
Definitely heroines
If you have ideas for topics, remarks or want to say hi, you can answer this email or contact me via Linkedin!
For the most daring, the French version is here : French Nougatine #7
🎨Street-art and copyright
In the newsletters #N1 and #N4 I made you discover street-art works that I like a lot, either taken in pictures in a Berlin street or bought in a Parisian gallery. These buds in our streets have some rather special characteristics: ephemeral, anonymous, in the open air, random conservation, often illegal... We are far from the infrastructures of museums! How does the law apprehend them?
What is street-art?
Street art refers to an artistic movement that emerged with the invention of spray paint in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement then develops in New York with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and in France with Ernest Pignon Ernest (no, there's no mistake, that's his name).
The street is an ideal public space for this form of expression often carrying a message of protest with high visibility. The graffiti are generally carried out in an anonymous, illegal way and are therefore not intended to last in time.
Ornamented walls, street art is therefore "public, ephemeral and illegal". These characteristic elements partly explain the difficulties encountered in setting up copyright protection.
Is a street-art a work of art in the legal sense?
According to you, is a graffiti, a collage, a work of art?
The French law defines it as "any work of the mind, whatever its form of expression [...]". A very broad and abstract definition that could be very useful when talking about ephemeral graphic works like street art...!
According to the law and case law, the main criterion for obtaining copyright protection is the originality of the work. This means that it must bear the "imprint of the author's personality", i.e. an independent, uncopied creation, with a minimum of creativity, left to the judge's discretion.
The second criterion is the formalization of the work. A solo idea cannot be protected, it is when it takes shape, when it materializes (drawing, poster, collage on wall) that it is likely to be protected by intellectual property law.
Thus the fact that street-art is sometimes illegal and doomed to destruction are not criteria that exclude protection.
Strange conflicts
In fact the legal questioning of the rights on these works arises in case of conflicts:
(1) destruction of the work, whether it is covered or its support demolished.
(2) reproduction and commercial appropriation without the author's consent
(3) theft and sale on the art market.
On the one hand, when copyright applies, street-artists have economic and economic rights over their work, in particular the right of reproduction, the right of exploitation of the work, the right of distribution. Street-artists appreciate having their work photographed and distributed by passers-by. But this is not the case when a brand appropriates their work (see the Revok and H&M case).
On the other hand, these artists have moral rights, i.e. to disclose them, to set the conditions for their exploitation and to defend their integrity. In principle, this right means that the artist has the right to undo his work before it is destroyed. But what if the artistic creation cannot be removed without damaging the support? Jurisprudence tends to favour the destruction of the work, because the right of the owner of the property takes precedence.
The new forms of street-art exhibition
Can a museum be outside and composed of street-art works? This is a question posed by the approach of the street-art museum in Amsterdam. The aim is to create open spaces so that the internationally renowned artists who have created our collection can share their skills and techniques in complete safety, while at the same time extending the life of their works in Amsterdam as long as possible. The idea is to "feed the artist" rather than generate profits. Take a look at it and tell me what you think!
To go further on this subject, I recommend the great dissertation "The legal status of street-art in France and the United States" by Louise Carron, with a great synthesis in English !
Did you like it? Which street-artists do you know?
☯️ Doing what's right for you
Do what you want to do: sometimes this is negatively connoted as the expression "do as you please". Yet I feel that it's time to come back to it and face this pure and sincere question: what do I want to do?
Doing what is right for oneself means fulfilling one's desires, objectives, priority projects at a given time. And you, what are your main goals and projects at this moment in your life?
This questioning is sowed at many moments of life from "what do I want to eat" to "do I want to go on a trip around the world for 2 years? "to "what will be my job in 3 years? ".
Space exploration
Clearly taking such steps opens up a galaxy of questions of varying depth. Well, I confess the apprehension is less when I hesitate between a chicken curry and a steak with béarnaise sauce. But it becomes abysmal when I wonder what meaning I want to give to my life and what actions to take to make my values a reality.
It's a real effort to listen to your desire. Try this exercise to reintroduce the reflex of asking yourself on many different occasions "do I want to? ".
The second thing to undertake this space exploration is to detect the injunctions in presence, which can partially or totally prevent the desire to express itself. Family or social injunctions or self-limiting barriers, they can take different forms. My advice:
1° make explicit the fears present. "I cannot undertake deep learning training because...". To hear the fears, it is necessary to give importance to the answer, whether it is "my relatives advise me against it", "I am afraid of failing", "it is a very masculine universe and I am a woman". Then ask yourself sincerely: "is this a situation that I want to overcome"; "is the situation ok for me?". It is quite possible that the answer is positive, and it is a beautiful victory of the listening of oneself. If this is not the case, then it is necessary to
2° evaluate the risks in the most concrete way possible: financial, emotional or ego consequences. Rationalizing risks, by giving them a unit of measurement, quantifying them and establishing the probability that they will occur, allows me to reduce my fears considerably.
Learning to give up what is good
It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes what's right for you is not necessarily what's good. "Good" is a matter of an objective scientific standard ("it's not right to eat candy") or a social standard ("this job is the best") that risks creating a compartmentalization of the mind.
In both cases, the norm can be questioned and questioned with what is important to me? What meaning do I want to give to my actions? At the same time, how do I apprehend the way others look at this decision that is mine?
To conclude, I see two beneficial effects of doing the right thing, and sometimes good things:
there is no possible regret, after weighing the disadvantages, advantages, injunctions, solutions, you make a decision that has a T moment is the best for you.
a large amount of energy is released as it is aligned with one's desires. Of course the journey of introspection is tiring, stirring and even upsetting, but with this chosen path and the repeated conquests one comes out of it with a lot of energy and pride.
Do you manage to listen to your desires? your fears? do you try to overcome them to do what is right for you?
👻 Definitely Heroines
History books have made women invisible. They have made generations of schoolchildren - and especially schoolgirls - believe that the earth has produced only heroes, certainly not heroines.
Une farouche liberté - Gisèle Halimi
When I felt the need to be inspired by female role models, I realized that I knew few names and backgrounds of women who have made history. I then detected that women were under-represented in prestigious fields and in the public space. Since 2014, the proportion of Parisian lanes bearing the name of a woman has doubled, reaching 12% today.
So to restore the place of women and heroines in history, in our minds and in our lives, I recommend the channel V like Virago, which honors exceptional women, all in a very funny tone! You can put on the English subtitles !!