This was an excellent Real Life Situation chosen for a student presentation (see Wired magazine). The student correctly focused on whether Art would be held back by the idea of ‘exclusive rights’. What was also interesting was how this raised the question of what type of knowledge Art produces? Is it “self-knowledge”? Is it knowledge about what it means to be human? Here is a previous prescribed title on this theme “…we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Noam Chomsky). To what extent would you agree?
Here is the critical issue. Students will often see the subjective nature of the Arts as a weakness, “..it is too dependent on opinion”.But the subjective, the individual voice reaching out to you from painfully personal lyrics of John Lennon or the emotional insight gained by looking into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait*, this subjective knowledge has its value in being personal and making the experience feel unique. Science will measure, categorise and make objective statements but will not aim to tell the story of the individual. For the Arts, being subjective is a strength!
Has Anish Kapoor taken the ‘individuality’ of knowledge too far? In the Wired article another artist described Kapoor as “a major ego and is a narcissistic maniac, but his work is so good, he’s earned the right to be”. The individual unique voice in the Arts has now become, with Kapoor, individuality taken to the point of ownership. My experience, my message is so unique it cannot be replicated.
The student’s presentation moved on to look at how people collaborate to make art and produce knowledge. For example, classical music is often a reworking of themes, open collaborations or replications. You can hear how Mozart builds upon Bach and then Beethoven takes the baton (!?) This process is similar to that in the Natural Sciences “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” Newton. Each successive generation pays tribute to the work of the previous. Science itself would be held back if the knowledge produced became the exclusive property of the individual scientist. Students will be too young to remember the furore that greeted attempts to patent the human genome. This was an attempt to own the ‘code of life’, human DNA.
It would be great to finish a TOK presentation and ask a class how does an Artist collaborate, who owns knowledge, should research/creativity be patented? Can you compare collaboration in the Arts with the Sciences? I think every TOK presentation should finish with more questions and open up new areas of thinking.
My own personal question would be, “..what processes have made the nature of knowledge more individual“. I wonder whether the individual is feeling lost and over-awed by the modern age. This clip from an old classic film “The Crowd”. represents this idea perfectly. The first 55 seconds are claustrophobic shots of crowds and from then on the camera picks out one skyscraper and then chooses one window in the skyscraper, it moves through the window to show rows and rows of desks but it focuses on one desk to tell the story of that one individual. Art tells the story of the individual so we can know what it is to ‘be human’ but the story cannot belong to any single individual.
*“Why did Rembrandt show such an untiring interest in his own features?…Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life….In this constant and penetrating exploration of his own self, his range went far beyond an egotistic perspective to one of universal significance.” Jakob Rosenberg
