Copyright, Market economy and the awfully unromantic flip side of style

This is the second letter dealing with style, but this time, instead of focusing on where style comes from and what it is, I would like to talk about what style is for and what it does. Often times, it seems that finding a style and sticking to it can be a daunting task for a creative, so what does this incentive of coherence and uniqueness in style aim to achieve, what is its social role for the actors of the illustration world?

Style and Copyright

I should acknowledge that deconstructing a concept like style is a tricky endeavor; the more I talk about it, the more I attribute some particularities to it; the more I end up reifying style as a “real” thing, existing in itself. This is part of the nature of style too, it is called a style ontology, meaning that “the cultural and legal notion that things such as styles exist and have specific properties”(Wilf, 2014). According to Wilf (an anthropologist working on creativity), the flip side of the style ontology is copyright. An idea that we can find during 18th century debates about whether copyright should be a fundamental right of the author, ” […] the proponents of copyright responded that the property claimed was neither the physical book nor the ideas communicated by it but something else, an entity consisting of style and sentiment combined.” (Rose, 1993 : 109). Before diving deep into this statement, let’s briefly define copyright.

Today, we tend to think of copyright and intellectual property as a natural right of the author, but as Mark Rose (1993) explains :

“copyright, the practice of securing marketable rights in texts [or any type of artwork] that are treated as commodities is a specifically modern institution, the creature of the printing press, the individualization of authorship in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the development of the advanced marketplace society in the seventeenth an eighteenth centuries.”

The nature of copyright is first and foremost economic and the XVIII century debates I referred to mostly involved booksellers, who had much to lose from a limited copyright and broader rights for authors. Style became a proof of authorship, and therefore, a way for authors to make money from their work. Like two sides of the same coin, style and copyright create the possibilities for the existence of each other. Copyright gives a legal framework through which style can create value (by allowing to sue plagiarists for example), and the idea of a style provides the artist with a legitimate proof of authorship (“this is my work, this my style”).

Quick recap dear reader:

Discourses of style and copyright emerge roughly at the same period;
they build upon romantic ideas of creativity in order to grant economic and legal rights to authors;

Since copyright and style are so linked, it may be worth talking about style in economic terms rather than artistic ones. A bit of a disclaimer here, looking at the economy of style doesn’t mean to reduce style as an economic transaction. My objective is merely to shed light on another side of style.

The market of style / the style of market

As we just saw, as early as the XVIII century, style was presented as a tool to prove the authorship of an artist and therefore secure income from his/her artwork. But style is linked to the market in many more ways. I would like to talk here about two of them, (1) the constraints of the market of illustration onto aesthetic features, and (2) the way certain styles become naturalized as belonging to certain economic niches.

Illustration is a commercial art, we deal with clients every day and are getting paid (most of the time) in exchange for the use of our artwork. These clients have an agenda of their own — time and budget constraints that stem from the particularities of their industry. A weekly magazine will have shorter deadlines than a design agency working on an ad campaign for example. These constraints are not anecdotical parameters that only affect our work life balance as freelance workers, they also permeate the qualitative aspect of our work, by allowing or discouraging certain practices.

If I’m used to work on short deadlines, with potentially a lot of rounds of revisions on the final artwork as is often the case in editorial work, can someone who has a very intricate and detailed style be as competitive as another illustrator whose work is made of simple, digitally drawn shapes? The changes in the printed magazine industry have moved a lot of content to online platforms, which allows, for example, the use of animation in more and more illustrations. Inevitably, this creates a gap between illustrators working with traditional media, and the ones working fully digitally in terms of possibility.

The second link I see between style and economy is the one created through what we can call a process of naturalization. Naturalization occurs when something becomes so very often associated with something else that, overtime, we come to believe these two things are and have always been related.

The best example is probably the recent tweet of an art director about her bemusement upon receiving “cutesy/friendly utopian flat aesthetic” illustrations portfolios for their leftist magazine. In this statement, we can clearly see the naturalization of certain aesthetic features into being part of, or in this case, being excluded from a particular political orientation. And we humans do that all the time, we do know that there is nothing intrinsically neoliberal about flat shapes and bright colours, nor is there anything naturally radical or punk about a shaky lines with dark colours. But somehow, we expect certain environments to use certain style of illustrations. But beyond the mere expectations of what certain market sectors look like, these environments, whether it is a punk concert or a big social media company, come with different budgets.

In that sense, your style becomes a key to access different market niches, some being very lucrative, other less. And your work can look like a certain market, just like a market can look like it was illustrated by the same person’s style.

Selling out/Styling out

By now I start to feel like I’m depicting an artist’s worst nightmare, a world devoid of creative freedom, where creatives are highly pragmatic marketers strategizing every aspect of their work in order to maximize profit. This is not what I’m saying. I merely want to reframe the discussion around style by incorporating these deeply economic aspects that to me, are part of the fabric of style, and have always been, for worse but also for better. What I find damageable is the idea that we, as commercial artists, can exist in a capitalist world without understanding how this economic model impacts our work.

The pressure we put on young artists’ style is enormous, I remember discussions in art schools about some artists “selling-out” as if art and money were opposites. But these romantic expectations about creative work are completely unrealistic in our contemporary society and eventually can become toxic to illustrators trying to navigate a new economy with outdated conceptual notions.

Thinking of the economic bearings of style, or its distributed nature like discussed in the previous letter, can help us increase our agency as main actors within our own industry. Illustration is a fundamental player in the creative world and it’s only through developing a solid critical and reflexive understanding of our practice and its history that we will be able to stand for our rights and create even better work. And I believe defining our own tools, like “style”, in more complex, inclusive and healthy terms, can help us do that.
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Further readings
Rose, Mark. Authors and owners: The invention of copyright. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Wilf, Eitan. “Semiotic dimensions of creativity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 397–412.
Woodmansee, Martha. The author, art, and the market: Rereading the history of aesthetics. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Who gets to define illustration ?

I listen to a lot of podcasts about illustration and design. It’s always interesting to hear the voices of people we usually equate with images. Sometimes these are stimulating, some other times, they are reassuring. Recently, I came across an interview with an agent that was plain outrageous. This is not an article about how illustration agents are good or bad — I’m actually often interested in what they have to say about the industry as they have a great vantage point on different aspects of it. This is an article about definitions, and who gets to make them.
Because as illustrators, letting other people define what illustration is and is not may limit the space we are allowed to occupy.

During the interview, the agent, with decades of experience in the business, distinguishes artists and illustrators. The artist, they tell us, is someone who creates for themselves an image on which they have total control, including its format, time frame, colours, etc. On the other hand, an illustrator is commissioned to create an image with specifications and restrictions. This statement appears as a banal definition, full of common sense, that the interviewer can only agree with (and they did). But from my perspective, it poses the question of who gets to define illustration, in what terms, and to what effect. Because as illustrators, letting other people define what illustration is and is not may limit the space we are allowed to occupy.

But first, a bit of theory. Definitions are a tricky linguistic object, and we should be mindful of people claiming to define things. As “a statement expressing the essential nature of something” (Merriam-Webster), a definition is either true or false and thereby merely *describing* reality. But as a speech act (i.e. an utterance that is used to perform requests, warnings, promises, etc.), a definition can *create* new reality. We often forget this, because the nature of definitions is to state the truth. But as any utterances, definitions have a tremendous social impact and they should never be taken as face value.

Of course, not everyone gets to give random definitions of things as they please. A key condition to a successful speech act is authority. An extreme example of authoritative definition is that of presidential speech, studied by communication scholar David Zarefsky:
“Because of his prominent political position and his access to the means of communication, the president, by defining a situation, might be able to shape the context in which events or proposals are viewed by the public.”
Agents are not presidents, but they are powerful figures of the creative industry, and many illustrators look up to what they have to say. This (plus the fact of being invited to speak on a podcast for example) gives them a platform that can turn a mere definition into a powerful speech act. But let’s go back to what is so problematic about the statement of this agent.
From cultural sensitivity to complex semiotic layering of meaning, illustrators have been decoding and encoding the visual fabric of our societies for a long time.

I’ll start with the obvious : These definitions of artists and illustrators are profoundly historically inaccurate. “Artists” were always and still are, commissioned. “Illustrators” were always and still are, creating artworks in their own terms. Most artists we admire today were not only commissioned, but under strict constraints. The historian David Baxandall, in Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy shows that economic transaction and commissions are at the heart of the most famous paintings of the era : “The better sort of fifteenth century painting was made on a bespoke basis, the client asking for a manufacture after his own specifications”. Mantegna was literally working for hire his whole life for Ludovico Gonzaga in exchange of a yearly salary, food and accommodation. The phantasmagorical notion that artists are existing beyond economic ties and clientelism only reifies the romantic idea of genius, which capitalism has been milking for decades.

And while we are reifying surreal assumptions about artists, why not relegate illustrators to a position of space fillers ? Illustrators should not shy away from the economic aspects of the job, but defining illustration as just a drawing that is sold dismisses centuries of expertise. From cultural sensitivity to complex semiotic layering of meaning, illustrators have been decoding and encoding the visual fabric of our societies for a long time. In his autobiography, Norman Rockwell, from the authority provided by the end of his careers, says :
“[…] illustrators who are given ideas won’t do as good work; they won’t *feel* the pictures they are painting […]. An artist can’t surrender himself, becoming just an executor of another’s idea. Or, rather, he can but he *shouldn’t*”.
Illustrators ought to be collaborators, not executors, and our role in the industry should be ours to define. I’ve been lucky enough to work with people (art directors mostly) who truly valued my input as a visual communication expert and this helped shape the way I see my work today. But self worth has to come from within nonetheless.

As a rule of thumb, people who are trying to force rigid categories on fluid experiences are often the ones who are benefiting the most from such categorization.
I’ll conclude with the general obsession some people have with distinguishing artists and illustrators. This has been going on forever and I’ve rarely seen it play in favour of illustrators. But maybe we shouldn’t be looking at illustrators and artists to understand this issue, but rather at the people who seem to ask this question. As a rule of thumb, people who are trying to force rigid categories on fluid experiences are often the ones who are benefiting the most from such categorization. So when an agent is defining illustration in these terms, it is sure to advance their own agenda. Which is completely fine, but in this case we are not talking about a definition, but about a very subjective and very pragmatic version of reality.

Nonetheless, power dynamics are a real thing, and who gets to define the terms we use everyday is an important question. People listening to these podcasts are often new illustrators (like me) and looking to get represented for the first time or simply to get insights into the industry. And people being invited to speak are already likely to be established figures. Who gets to define illustration in these moments, if that person is in a position of authority, is who gets to set the rules of the game. And like Elphaba, the witch of the musical *Wicked*, “I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game”. Illustrators need to be in charge of defining illustration, and create definitions that are not limited by someone else’s agenda but enabling their own creative potential.

During the Q&A of a talk he gave at the Walker Art Center, Geoff McFetridge explains his relationship to the word illustration : “If I say I’m an illustrator, then I have to wait for a designer to hire me for a job, so why don’t I be a designer, and then I’ll just do it.” And then ends his answer by saying “ I guess I could call myself an illustrator, but why would I ?”. In this intervention, we can see how illustration is defined according to its hierarchical position in the industry, not by its specificities. Definitions of illustration like the one we’ve talked about earlier are the reason why McFetridge is absolutely right in asking “why would I [call myself an illustrator]?”. Why would you call yourself a name that has been trivialized and relegated to a position of the subaltern ?

Defining is power. And I wish to see more and more illustrators grabbing that power and defining their roles in their own terms. There can be as many definitions of illustration as there are illustrators, but we need each definition to come from the people whose lives are going to be the most affected by it. Defining the terms we use everyday is crucial. It’s a way to spot and resist abusive practices and discourses, a way to reclaim agency, a way to chose what you want to be.

“How to find my style” : A (short) critical history of an illustration myth

Copyright, Market economy and the awfully unromantic flip side of style

Do illustrators need to talk about ethics ?

Who gets to define illustration ?