What is Art For?
Awesome piece in the NYTimes Magazine about Lewis Hyde:
In the course of writing “The Gift,” Hyde underwent an intellectual transformation on this subject. He began the work believing there was “an irreconcilable conflict” between gift exchange and the market; the enduring (if not necessarily the happy) artist was the one who most successfully fended off commercial demands. By the time he was finished, Hyde had come to a less-dogmatic conclusion. It was still true, he believed, that the marketplace could destroy an artist’s gift, but it was equally true that the marketplace wasn’t going anywhere; it had always existed, and it always would. The key was to find a good way to reconcile the two economies.
And, bonus, the event I helped organized is mentioned!
For all his activism, however, Hyde maintains that little of true political worth will be accomplished until the very terms of the “intellectual property” debate are changed. This was brought home to me one rainy evening last April, when Hyde and I met at a Harvard auditorium to attend a lecture on corruption in Congress by Lawrence Lessig. For a decade, Lessig has been the most-visible exponent of the position that institutions like Berkman were founded to promote: that the Internet should serve as a virtual communal space. In 2002, Lessig helped found Creative Commons, an organization that carves a middle path between the near-absolute stringency of intellectual-property law and absolute generosity by allowing creators to specify the level of control they want to maintain over their work.
