Who owns ideas? What makes the cultural artifacts of our time unique?

While issues of fair use, appropriation, and copyright are relatively recent preoccupations within the design professions, they have arguably always been an aspect of artistic work, and only increasingly so following the advent of mechanical and digital modes of reproduction.

How are the disciplinary and legal boundaries that describe creative innovation articulated today? Is it necessary to assume that originality and appropriation are opposed?

Part of the Daniels Fora series, The Status of the New will explore the relationship between originality and invention in creative work. Our featured speakers — Amy Adler, Emily Kempin Professor of Law at New York University's School of Law; and Winnie Wong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade — will discuss the status of novelty in an era when appropriation is the norm.

Their discussion will be co-moderated by Sarah Hirschman, Lecturer at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, whose work has explored issues of copying and copyright in architecture, and Richard Sommer, Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

The Status of the New
Thursday, February 11, 2016
6:30 - 8:00pm
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Registration is required - get your ticket today!

Featured speakers:

Amy Adler is the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, where she received the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015. A leading expert on the intersection of art and law, Adler’s scholarship addresses a range of contemporary issues such as the First Amendment treatment of visual images, the misfit between copyright law and artistic creativity, and artists’ moral rights. Adler has lectured about these topics to a variety of audiences, including the attorneys general, museum curators, and the FBI. She also acts as a consultant or expert witness in high-profile art cases.

Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (U Chicago Press 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. Her articles have appeared in positions: asia critiques, the Journal of Visual Culture, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and she has written for Omagiu, Third Text Asia, and Artforum. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Romanian, and Japanese. Her research has been supported with grants from the ACLS, SSRC, CLIR, Harvard Milton Fund, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Winnie was a Senior Fellow at Dartmouth College, and holds an SMArchS and a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism from MIT. She was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is currently assistant professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sarah M. Hirschman is a designer and Lecturer at UC Berkeley. She was founding director of the Keller Gallery at MIT's Department of Architecture and a 2014 recipient of the Lawrence B. Anderson Award, which supported her research in architectural copyright. With Ana Miljacki, she curated and designed Un/Fair Use, an exhibition about copying and the law at the Center for Architecture in New York in 2015. 

About the Daniels Fora
The Fora series feature popular discussions that aim to bring together different perspectives in order to create debate, build relationships, and stimulate discourse among practitioners, scholars, and the general public on topics related to architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, and design.

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