Can artists weather the COVID-19 storm?
In June of this year, the US Internet Archive ended its National Emergency Library programme, which provided free access to almost 1.5 million books. Before the pandemic, the Internet Archive had permitted access to scanned books, which could be checked out digitally, to its users, one user at a time, not unlike a bricks-and-mortar library.
But the emergency programme provided free access to anyone anywhere, without reader waitlists, and effectively substituted for a purchased copy, thereby eradicating the revenue stream for publishing houses and authors alike.
Publishers including Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, John Wiley & Sons, and HarperCollins filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive on June 1 pointing out the programme’s disregard for copyright law, and the programme was, at least temporarily, ended.
In July, however, the Internet Archive filed a brief at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, attempting to defend its programme without addressing its piratical nature: “Every book in the collection has already been published and most are out of print. Patrons can borrow and read entire volumes, to be sure, but that is what it means to check a book out from a library.
“As for its effect on the market: for the works in question, the books have already been bought and paid for by the libraries that own them.”
Visual arts
Rather than delve into the merits of the book publishers’’ case, this article will look briefly at its sister industry: visual arts. While less high-profile in many cases, the rights of visual artists and the institutions that support them have also suffered from the pandemic’s prescription that the world stay home.
While millions of us have turned to online content to distract, entertain, and soothe ourselves, artists’ rights have not always been respected.
As early as April of this year, Nina Obuljen-Koržinek, minister of culture of Croatia, noted to an assembly at UNESCO that, within weeks of the pandemic’s spread: “The whole environment in which the artists have been creating and in which we have been putting in measures to support the arts has been fundamentally changed.”
Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, wrote in an email to Artnet News in September that “every cultural institution, at every scale in New York City, has been hit hard by COVID-19, each in its own way”.
Her institution has now announced its 2020–21 artist residencies, which will take place remotely instead of on site.
The Studio Museum’s associate curator for exhibitions, Legacy Russell, noted to The New York Times that “it’s a year to experiment” and ask ourselves what it looks like “to support artists right now”.
Four artists have been selected as residents: two photographers, an artist who works with paint and mixed media, and—in a new category for the museum’s programme which is so well-known for kickstarting the careers of new artists—a midcareer artist who works with software to reflect his conceptual work.
