ABSTRACT

Legislators, attorneys, librarians, slide curators, even art historians have been discussing intellectual property and copyright with an intensity unmatched for the past twenty years. Barometric readings of the number of scholarly and professional society conference sessions devoted to copyright indicates increased levels of preoccupation. The 1996 College Art Association (CAA) annual conference, often the setting for high-level semiotic and deconstructivist art discourse, presented a slew of intellectual property and digital pedagogy sessions. Attendees at the concurrent Visual Resources Association (VRA) conference were able to attend sessions on various aspects of intellectual property, copyright, fair use in the electronic environment, and digital pedagogy. The diversity of topics and speaker affiliations reflected a surprising breadth of discussion within what is essentially a narrow range of concern: art and architectural history instruction, and its supportive professional specialization, visual resources curatorship. Session titles ranged from the boldly discursive (“Making money, making art in the new media: law, business, policy, and ethics in the digital environment”), the straight-forward (“Intellectual property rights in the electronic age: the issues for librarians, visual resources curators, scholars, and artists”), the polemical (“Who owns the Mona Lisa?”), to the bedrock of pedagogy in art and architectural history, the status of copy photography (“The visual surrogate as intellectual property: is ‘Fair Use’ on the verge of extinction?”).