According to Thomas Shanks, S.J., executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics: “Ethics is intimately bound up with art because, at its heart, are human relationships.”
Tom Rockmore, leading professor of philosophy at Duquesne University and widely published author on ethics, agrees, adding that art is ‘not ethically irrelevant, since it can serve to call attention to existential problems and stimulate kinds of reflection.’ This is a popular contention, that art – its creation, display and distribution – are by their very nature at service to the common good of mankind, therefore ethically ‘correct’.
But even if one ascribes art and culture an intrinsically noble motive, the reality of that creation, display and distribution yields many complex ethical conundrums.
Plagiarism
Copying words, images or concepts and passing them off as your own without attribution is an age-old dilemma for the art world, facing ever new interpretation and debate with burgeoning of the Internet, technology at large, and evolving copyright-fair use legislation.
Few would argue that an outright recreation of someone else’s work is unethical, particularly for profit or exploitation. To this end, cultural institutions usually have in-house codes of ethics that incorporate the standard position on plagiarism (it’s wrong and it won’t be tolerated), and artists tend to accept a ‘best practice’ model that steers well clear of anything that could be construed as excessively derivative. But what about influence? Is an artist’s work in breach of basic ethics if it ‘cites’ the style or even specific work of other artists or designers (famously exemplified by Andy Warhol and his 1960s fusion of iconic commercial images with fine art)?
Should the law dictate artist output, or does the ethical ‘high-ground’ of their art-making outweigh more localised ethical questions? Echoes prominent artist attorney Tad Crawford: ‘…are aesthetic standards too vague and subjective, so that policing must be left to the heavier hand of the law?’ French writer and poet Comte de Lautréamont famously argued that the art of copying was a critical component of culture. “Plagiarism is necessary,” he said. “Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.” And what of Marcel Duchamp, whose art of placing everyday objects in a high-culture context had a profound impact on 20th century visual culture? Is Duchamp’s work inviolate or unethical because it ‘reappropriates’ something ‘other’?
Hot potato
Aiding and abetting (consciously or unconsciously) art or cultural crime is primarily the palaver of museums, auction houses and galleries, who may find themselves in possession of dubiously acquired cultural property or works of disputable provenance that they are asked to exhibit or sell.
Most officially adopt the line of Christie’s: “It is Christie’s policy and practice not to sell any item that we know or have reason to believe is stolen or has been imported or exported improperly”. But behind the scenes, there is evidence of unethical behaviour, such as the infamous Sotheby’s smuggling scandal of the late 1990s. When British journalist Peter Watson went public with evidence the renowned auction house had been smuggling old masters out of Italy since the early 1980s, as well as trading in illegally excavated and smuggled antiquities from India, Cambodia, Iran, and the Mediterranean, he sent tremors through the art world. Was this going on everywhere? Clearly, the law, and cultural stakeholders needed to probe beyond the ‘official line’ to uncover the ethics – or lack thereof – truly at work.
As trade barriers crumble, cross-cultural art and antiquity dealing amongst museums and auction houses will necessitate ongoing ethical review.
The Frankenstein factor
Don’t work with animals or children. Or in this case, animals, cadavers or hazardous material.
When in 2000, Chilean born-Danish artist Marco Evaristti unveiled an installation that invited viewers to blend a live goldfish, he ignited a media storm about the ethics of artists, curators and museums. Evaristti’s work (which also includes paintings using HIV contaminated blood and heroin) represents the challenge facing ethicists when navigating contemporary art. If an artist uses the skeleton of a fish in an artwork, it might not be to everyone’s tastes, but it isn’t particularly unethical (no crime, such as animal cruelty, was committed). But what if the art is the killing, like Evaristti’s fish, or Australian artist James Dodd, who that same year killed, skinned and prepared a rabbit for cooking in a performance piece entitled Butcher. Dodd’s ‘art’ would be considered non-criminal if survival or consumption is the motive. Is it unethical otherwise?
Facing similar criticism and challenge are cadaver artists. Most famous among these is German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, whose Body Worlds exhibitions (shown around the world), have drawn numerous ethical complaints from those who feel the work is gruesome, exploitative, even sacrilegious. But if the now departed participants were complicit in the work through their signing of consent documentation, is it still a question of legislative ethics? Shouldn’t von Hagens have the right to practise, just as audiences have the right to stay away, and museums the right to abstain from showing his exhibits?
There is yet another ethical question here. This oft-dubbed ‘Frankenstein factor’ generates undeniable (and unbeatable) press through controversy, which in turn may yield financial reward for the artists, or institutions involved. If morally ambiguous art can help an artist sustain his or her craft, or keep a museum afloat, is it unequivocally ‘unethical’?
Censorship vs. National Security
Most cultural practitioners, policy-makers and institutions would tell you that censorship is inherently unethical. But debate over the ethics of restriction won’t go away. With tough new laws being passed in many countries to combat terrorism, the power of art to provoke and persuade is under intense scrutiny, raising a new wave of ethical dilemmas. Is it an artist’s moral duty to depict dramatic social and political issues of their time? Or the opposite, if their depiction demonstrably leads to deep offense, or worse still, injury or bodily harm.
Fifty odd artists at the Columbia College in Chicago experienced these ‘ethics of fighting terrorism’ first hand when their exhibit, Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin was investigated by the FBI. The problem: designer stamps depicting everything from Roman Catholic sex-abuse, to the war in Iraq, to President George W. Bush with a gun pointed at his head. Citing the ‘ethics of national security’, agents photographed the work and demanded personal information (including contact details) for the artists concerned.
And of course there’s the case of American biotech-artist Steve Kurtz, arrested by federal authorities for his practice of “tactical media” protest and performance art. Taken into custody last year, Kurtz’s case is widely discussed and studied as evidence of an emerging ‘new ethics’ of censorship where the needs of the ‘many’ outweigh those of the ‘few’ – irrespective of civil rights casulties.
But there is a flip side to the introduction of tougher national security laws. Enhanced security measures at exit and entry points within countries should improve authorities chance of intercepting smuggled or stolen cultural materials.
If ethics is indeed ‘intimately bound up with art’, these issues are likely to remain clear as mud for quite some time.
