Since I have been playing around with philosophical ideas and forms of late I attempted to create a code of ethics for artists. I was challenged by Peter J Slack an engineer/musician/friend who argued that professionally he has to conform to an Engineer's Code of Ethics and artists should do the same. So here is my first attempt. The form is my own.
Code of Creative Ethics
In a creative universe experienced by individuals
through the common and uncommon senses there is
an objective experience that is relatively common to all.
Experiences are defined as 'relative' based on the health and
attunement of an individual's senses, as well as on their
predilections and the cultural norms to which they were/are subjected.
The expression of an individual's understanding of
their sensory experiences are thus subjectively their own,
and they are free to express their understandings in whatever
medium or means they see fit.
An artist is therefore by definition an individual.
Notwithstanding personal freedoms, subjective expressions that effect
other individuals or groups of individuals do not come with a license to violate the established rights and freedoms of others.
Artists must therefor be governed by the principles of fair practices,
co-operate for the purposes of addressing common causes and should support
the rights of all artists to be recognized for individual initiatives
via copyright protection, as well as the right of artists to be acknowledged
as foundational, essential or successive to someone else copyrights.
An individual is necessarily free to waive their own copyrights
whenever they desire, whether for reasons known only to themselves,
as an act of good will, or as an act of indifference.
No artist can be forced to surrender their legitimate
claims to a created work.
Within the context of the recognized rights of others,
all artists are free to learn whatever they can
about whatever they desire in order to explore
their own creativity in whatever way they want.
They are free to teach or not teach what they learn,
they are free to teach whoever they want to teach
or not teach whoever they don't want to teach.
Artists are free to work with whoever wants to work
with them, and they are free to work alone.
They are free to organize, associate or otherwise create
with whoever wants to do the same with them.
They are not licensed to organize, associate or otherwise
create harm for whoever they might want to harm, using definitions
of harm dictated by libel and defamation laws, except to the degree
that those definitions become unduly broad.
The responsibility of all artists is therefor to defend
their own freedom of expression without believing
they have a license to deny anyone else that same freedom.
The responsibility of all artists to one another is to preserve
freedom of expression from those who seek to license it.
The responsibilities of artists to the rest of the world
are honest expression,honest dealing and the defense of
the freedoms enjoyed by all individuals in a creative universe.
Artists are free to go to hell, and back, or not.
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2 comments:
Hello! Yesterday I was thinking in a philosophical context, and I stumbled upon a thought I had not encountered today: creative ethics. I have spent some time pondering creative ethics and I wanted to find out if creative ethics had already been put down, and so I stumbled on your page. However, the thing that strikes me funny is the relatively recent posting. Once again I am late on something new, but this time only a year :). I hope to hear back from you.
Zach,
I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one to consider an artist's code of ethics, so I suspect there's no point in thinking of yourself as being too late for the party. This code was designed for a creative commons that didn't get off the ground. In some ways a blog is little more than a publicly accessible filing cabinet, where you put stuff and slowly forget it until someone rummages through your old posts and says hey, what's this.
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