There are rumors of recurring issues affecting the arts community, including representational artists. Rumors such as:
    –jurors who judge and award cash prizes to friends
    –teachers who show up too impaired or unprepared to teach
    –artists who use others’ photographs to create new works without credit
If rumors such as these are true, and issues such as these exist, are they moral or are they political issues? Should they be discussed or judged by the community? In the larger picture, does the community have any responsibility in issues such as these or are they solely issues for the individuals involved?

Some organizations created around representational art resemble an inverted pyramid: friends get together for self-promotion, and go wide to the public to announce opportunities for themselves, that others have paid for, or worse, are asked to help subsidize. In the process of inviting abstracts for submission, TRAC represents the better model: going wide to offer opportunities and winnowing from there.

“Aesthetic experiences are tied to a community or a context, and if socially constructed, moral properties, such as truth and goodness, must be a component of the aesthetic,” philosopher Marcia Muelder Eaton argues in Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (2001). In our own community, we can create the shining city on the hill. We have an opportunity by our own actions to strike a blow against cynicism, to create a renaissance in ethics at a time when the Gallup Organization and the Pew Research Center record the declining trust Americans hold in our society’s institutions. We can treat each other with the benevolence described by Mencius, and build the trust upon which systems of belief depend.

The confusion over copyright and fair use seems to be driving some visual artists, art historians, editors and publishers to abandon work in their fields, reports the College Art Association in “Copyright, Permissions and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Communities,” a PDF of which is available at the CAA website. I call for you to be an advocate for policy and laws that allow the moral and ethical use of images. As the report explains, “Fair use is a reliable right of free expression, and one that courts including the Supreme Court have celebrated as a tool to generate new culture.”