Art since 1960 has forged a contradictory alliance between the legal field of intellectual property and the expanded tradition of poststructural thought. Taking its title from conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, this course navigates this contradiction via four units, each corresponding to a specific artistic strategy: appropriation, scoring, collaboration, and participation. Testing the limits of the signable, saleable, and stealable, such techniques have thrown traditional concepts of originality and possessive individualism into arrears while giving rise, quite paradoxically, to some of the most celebrated careers and widely reported lawsuits involving allegations of creative property theft. Do such maneuvers amount to specious self-aggrandizement? Or do they indicate a renewed search to locate, foment, and protect sources of creative invention? The ever-expanding horizon of collaborative media access and increased pressures to enclose this new electronic commons have made such questions all the more urgent today. Artists considered include Claire Fontaine, General Idea, Pierre Huyghe, Juliana Huxtable, Sherrie Levine, Tino Sehgal, Sturtevant, Hito Steyerl, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner. |