> The painter Salvador Dalí had a particular attachment to Millet’s The Angelus, and he also had a premonition about it. He saw in the shape of its figures and the hue of its light a scene of mourning, not just work and prayer. This was not a widely accepted interpretation until, sure enough, the Louvre had the painting examined by x-ray, and the outline of a child's coffin could be seen under the basket of potatoes. The steeple in the distance, too, was a late addition.
Thank you...that's nowhere near as compelling as I thought it might be. And I feel like it would be strange for farmers to bury their child in a field that they till...
Sure, but once created, a painting isn't burning resources by just existing, nor is the provenance of a piece of art nor a contract.
But y'know what these crowds are like, one week it's "crypto gud. invest in me startup that uses NFTs or ERC-20 tokens to XYZ", the next it's "nobody here ever supported NFTs or crypto, I don't know what you're talking about". Selective memory abounds, throw around buzzwords like "rentseeking" like the company they dev SaaS for isn't doing that.
What's up with the negativity? The fact that the contract is enforced automatically, the dues are paid irrevocably on every sale, and depending on the blockchain in a censorship resistant way seem like some innovation... Good luck getting paid your "droit de suite" once your painting is outside of the almost only jurisdiction where it *was* practiced.
Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income)
Why stop at paintings, what renders a painting more deserving of payments in perpetuity for the author over, say a chair or some piece of furniture. Or a car, or any of the other myriad of goods people make.
> expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income)
I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with this. Imagine if you made a car and "sold" it to me for $100, on the condition that I pay you $30k if/when I resell it. I'd think that would be actually incredibly nice of you. I wouldn't think you're somehow a worse person for selling it under those terms rather than demanding a $30k payment today. You're lowering my initial barrier at the expense of recouping some of the payment when I resell it. That's not inherently bad.
Of course you can do this in an exploitative way too; no doubt about that. But determining this requires analyzing many more factors than just the licensing or pricing model.
Why something like a piece of furniture for this example?
Why not the infamous Nike logo? Designed for $35 by student Carolyn Davidson.
She was later compensated heavily, and so she should have been. It was the morally right thing to do, regardless of how "simple" or "meh" you think the logo may be, there's no denying how effective and recognizable it is.
Would it have been "rentseeking behaviour" for her to ask to be compensated? No. It'd have been reasonable. At $35 and a student, that would have otherwise been exploitation.
Artists and artisans are exploited constantly. I don't think laws like these are unreasonable. If the object still commands value, and there's only one of it, why shouldn't the artist be compensated? They can only create x works in their lifetime, at some point they must retire.
>> Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income)
Sounds like most SaaS companies.
>> Why stop at paintings, what renders a painting more deserving of payments in perpetuity for the author over, say a chair or some piece of furniture. Or a car, or any of the other myriad of goods people make.
The fact that those things can be replicated and/or mass produced? If it was a one-off handcrafted car or piece of furniture then I agree, it should be covered under the same law.
For art, I see it more as a way for the artist to focus on his art, and allowing to sell (even cheap) his art, and still be rewarded (e.g. 5%) each time his art changes hand if it does hold value.
It does not have to be in perpetuity as explained in the article, it can stop after the death of the artist or 50 years (to prevent incentive to kill artists).
You do not have to stop at paintings. Some NFTs implement royalties too. It would be more difficult though to implement on fungible items (cars, etc.) but some chairs are unique piece of arts and could probably benefit from the Droit de Suite.
In the actual sense of the word, it's arguable that it is.
However, this specific example is not rent-seeking behavior because the artist created the thing and its associated value.
People in this community tend to misuse "rent-seeking" to mean anything they don't believe its creator should be making money from. An example of this is, "Apple's cut of app sales is rent-seeking."
The logic is really about helping starving or struggling artists.
They sell their work for "cheap" while broke because they're struggling. Later (often too late) their talent is recognized and the same work is re-sold at a huge markup.
The idea is to give the original artist (or his heirs) a part of that new value.
It’s pretty clearly a way to allow the artist (or their heirs, in the event of their passing) to benefit from their works being labeled Valuable long after they parted with it for a commodity price, instead of solely profiting some “art investor”. The exact opposite of serving the smarmy capitalist class that your label of “rent seeking” conjures.
Because fine artists are something cultural that adds beauty and a new way of looking at the world around us. The Mona Lisa is different from a 1982 Ford Escort.
I mean, maybe you don't see it that way, but most of humanity does.
This is exactly correct, I'm surprised to learn there is a term for it, and it makes no sense whatsoever outside of some unsustainable attempted monopoly. This is exactly why intellectual property should not be recognized.
Because laws are there to fix asymmetries in negotiation power between parties. As you can imagine, artists and art collectors/galleries are not really on the same level.
That's actually reasonable. If you're eating out of tins every night you might sell your upside for a pittance.
However, there's still the question of why this particular thing should have that protection. You could well stretch this and say engineers with massive student loans are equally up against the wall, and should get paid a piece if the code they write turns out to be very profitable later on. They don't all get equity in the company.
A sales contract is always a bilateral agreement between two clubs. Hence you cannot stipulate that the selling club will earn a share in ALL future sales of the player. Only a law could do that.
Also, you might consider how in the case of real estate, a restrictive covenant that runs with the land would make all your true statements open to more interpretation once the scope is expanded beyond contracts for good and services.
> The painter Salvador Dalí had a particular attachment to Millet’s The Angelus, and he also had a premonition about it. He saw in the shape of its figures and the hue of its light a scene of mourning, not just work and prayer. This was not a widely accepted interpretation until, sure enough, the Louvre had the painting examined by x-ray, and the outline of a child's coffin could be seen under the basket of potatoes. The steeple in the distance, too, was a late addition.