That's right, I said it. Gauntlet thrown.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
So there has been a lot of Discourse™ that I've seen from anarchists about how artists shouldn't demand credit for their art, you should be anti-copyright, you should only care about Sharing Ideas™ and not putting your name on it.
My initial response to this is, ok, but people are trying to survive in this capitalist hellscape, and I'd rather someone be able to do that making art that they love than have to work a shitty job they hate. And I still stand by that statement.
The whole "it's gross if people want credit" idea smells really badly like the Christian Purity All The Glory To God Artists Shouldn't Sign Their Names To Work Pride Is A Sin idea that was prominent in the Christian world until Michelangelo chiseled his name onto Mary's bag strap or sash or whatever that is across her chest in The Pieta:
Michelangelo, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons
I was taught in art history class in college that his patron had invited some Big Important People to come and preview the statue before it's public reveal and they didn't believe that such a young man (he was young and not super famous yet) could have created such a masterpiece and he heard that and got so mad that he went back and chiseled something like "Michelangelo made this" onto her sash so that no one would ever question it again.
And ya know what? I'm glad he did. BECAUSE PRIDE ISN'T A SIN.
He SHOULD have been proud of that work. Look at it. It's amazing.
Don't you want to know who made the amazing art you enjoy? I do.
This whole icky-sin thing is such a means of killing people's spirits, which is what anarchists don't want, no? Hear me out here, because in the Discourse™, they are not using the word "sin" so I'm sure I lost a lot of people as soon as I made the comparison. I'm sure moderns would say it more like, it's "all for the people" or "for the greater good" or "for society" or whatever, but the end result is the same: the notion that pride in your work is bad, and you should be fine dying in anonymity without anyone ever knowing the cool things you created, because "that isn't important" or "fame is gross."
Do you know how terrible it feels to put your heart and soul into a work and absolutely no one gives one half of one shit about it? Your whole life? No notice, no "hey, that was cool" no indication that anybody cares at all? You feel worthless. You feel as though your work has no value, and subsequently, that you have no value. It's really unrealistic to expect everyone to toil forever without so much as a "good job." Don't you feel good when someone notices your effort? I do. I get positively giddy when someone leaves me a book review.
Hey, I wrote a BOOK several years ago! And I'm gonna put the cover image here because PRIDE ISN'T BAD! This is not an excuse to call me by my middle name tho! (And the torcs were made and photographed by Crafty Celts and used with their permission, because they rule)!
I'm never going to be famous, and most of us aren't. But there's nothing bad or gross about telling someone whose art you like, that you like it. They gave you the gift of the art you enjoy, and you want to give them the gift of your appreciation. That's nice and good.
Did you know that bards would (sometimes? always? how much has been lost to time? a lot, so we can't really know) compose poems where they told us about themselves? Amergin White-Knee did it: "I am Amirgen White-knee/pale of substance, gray of hair,/accomplishing my incubation/in proper poetic forms/in diverse color." (translation taken from https://www.seanet.com/~inisglas/cauldronpoesy.html). A medieval Irish monk was still doing it centuries (perhaps millennia, dates on when Amergin lived vary widely) later: hear the song Cormacus Scripsit performed by Anúna here with the lyrics (in Latin), "Cormacus wrote this psalm/Pray for him you who read these [words]/Pray for yourself at any hour" - that's well into the Christian era, but Irish Christianity was an interesting mix of old ways and new for a long time (that's a different history lesson), so apparently it wasn't GASP, VANITY to jot that down in the margins of his work like it may have been in other parts of the Christian world.
And I. Love. That!
I want to know the ancient people who lived and died and composed great works and saw things I could never dream of and lived in a world very different than our own. Don't you?
A thousand years from now it's quite possible some future person is going to be deconstructing your fanfic (Dante's Inferno is a self-insert fanfic, it could happen) that was preserved in whatever future archive of internet there is and people are gonna want to know about you, the context of your story and your experience of life.
Half of you cringed just then because you're so embarrassed and THAT IS PRECISELY THE SHAME THAT THIS SHIT PERPETUATES. If Dante is celebrated as a masterful writer for his self-insert fanfic, so can you be. People like what they like. Humility includes accepting the judgement of the people who like your work, not just the critics.
History is full of stories about kings and queens, but only occasionally peppered with anyone not born into privilege and power, leading the masses. I want to learn about everyone else. Not every artist is going to be Michelangelo famous, but I want to know who drew that awesome picture I saw of one of my Gods, or who made that hilarious comic. I want to buy that t-shirt from the artist I love, and that sticker for my laptop from another. Hard to do that if it's just being copied in pop up copy shops, and that great artist has to spend 50 hours a week mixing up coffees to pay their bills.
And frankly, it isn't very anarchist to tell other people what they should do with their artwork, is it? If you don't want anyone to know it was you, you do you, BooBoo. But it isn't up to you to decide for everyone else that they must also not take any credit or demand respect on their name. Screw that. If you want respect on your name for your art, go for it. Plaster your watermark all over that shit. You made it. It's your decision, not anybody else's. Do as you see fit with your work, and let other people do as they will. If you want to make it creative commons, bless you. If you want to sell t-shirts, bless you. If you want to do both, bless you. But don't holier-than-thou other artists if they decide differently than you.
Discussions about copyright law are a whole different ball of wax than shaming artists for demanding credit for their work. We're not talking about Disney owning copyrights to God for nine million years +1 here, we're talking about one cool maker with a webcomic or whatever.
If we're going to have an Anarchist Utopia someday, that means you're going to have to get along with people who have different ideas than you (and no, I don't mean "live and let live with people who want you dead," we're talking about artist credit, here). Because. Anti-authoritarianism. You know. That thing we like. ; ) Tl;dr it's not your decision, quit shaming people.
(or the kitties some wet food, more likely)
