Socialising the Arts

I have been struggling to write an essay on copyright, all of my arguments are easily broken and stand on weak legs; only because I am trying to protect us consumers, and if I want to do that I need to try and balance the current hierarchy, producers and distributors in place number one, established artists following in second place, and us consumers and emerging artists with a big gap follow in third place.

I really like listening to music, watching movies and reading books, but if I want to have access to these kind of content, I need to spend huge amounts of money, putting me as a consumer in a very tough situation.

Now, one of the biggest problems of copyright from my point of view is for the new artists. They need to create something completely new, from scratch, never made before, otherwise they will easily be braking copyright laws. It is relatively easier for established artists to create new work, since they have the backings of big corporations that are ready to pay the right to any copyrighted material if they need to use it. So if a new artist creates something by taking little pieces of music from different artist and wants to bring his hard labour into light, he maybe give up his dreams because he is to afraid he will get a law suit.

So after a lot of thought I came up with an idea that may help to solve the issue. Socialising the arts; nowadays people is very concern with their wellbeing specially with their physical health, and the government spends millions every year in order to look after our health. But what about our mental and social health? Arts is very important in this aspect, it helps with our education, it helps us expand our minds and think more critically.

However, now all we get is a flood of external culture, and little by little our own culture and our own issues are being neglected. The point I am trying to make in this post is a call for the government to spend more money on local artists, generating a safer market for them, without forcing the need for them to compete so much with 50cents, Kristina Aguilera…etc for our attention. And at the same time allowing the work generated by these local artists to be more accessible to consumers, without the need for us to spend hundreds of dollars in order to access their work.