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This chapter focuses on the interrelation between art ontology, artistic practice, and the law—three domains, I argue, that can truly only be separated in the abstract. While copying is an artistic practice and an ontological topic, copyright is both a legal and moral one; and though the role of copying in artistic practice has evolved, many argue, copyright has failed to keep step, producing an imbalance that puts the law at odds with the domain it is meant to protect. Case studies include the copyright on Rodin’s bronzes, Biz Markie’s sampling in his song, “Alone Again,” and Cory Arcangel’s Clouds.

Drawing occupies a central place in the European artistic tradition, especially exploratory drawing, of the sort that modern artists might call sketches or studies. This chapter argues that the rise of this mode of drawing in Renaissance Italy represented more than a shift in artistic or workshop practice. It also marked a metamorphosis in the relationship between cognition and the act of drawing itself. Drawing, for Italian Renaissance artists, was both a way of thinking with the hand, and a way of thinking between hands.

Chapter 3 addresses an issue directly related to the institutional transformation of the art world explored in Chapter 2, namely how globalisation and migration have also changed the role and work of artists by providing many artists with new conditions of possibility for developing cross-cultural artistic practices. The chapter unpacks the issue of artists on the move today and seeks to answer the questions that the title implies: Have artists in demand on the global exhibition circuit become a kind of migrant workers in the international labour market of the global art world? If so, what kind of migrants are they? And what kind of artists? The careers and positions of selected artists from India – Bharti Kher, Rina Banerjee, Ravinder Reddy and Anish Kapoor – are used as examples to substantiate the chapter’s proposition that internationally renowned artists have in fact become a kind of migrant workers. Moreover, this change of conditions delivers a further blow to the myth of the artist as a detached creator, because it invites a more profound exploration of how the artist’s role has been reconfigured as that of a translator, mediator and bridge-builder between people and cultures.

The traditional focus on early Islamic art has often obscured the specific contexts of the production of particular artworks. The famous wall paintings at the bath and audience hall of Qusayr ʿAmra and the floor mosaics at Khirbat al-Mafjar provide an opportunity for reconsidering how early Islam responded to encounters with visual and intellectual cultures of Late Antiquity. This essay attempts to explain the making of Umayyad iconography from the craftsmen’s perspectives. By placing the emphasis on the craftsmen and their practices as a repository of techniques, traditions, and cultural memory, we will explore issues of transmission, continuity, and discontinuity in art, through the lens of this segment of society. Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond the interpretation of early Islamic image as a closed symbol, thereby shifting the focus from iconography and style to a practice-centered discourse developed according to the makers’ visual economy.

This chapter suggests that discussion of new media should be considered in its relation to aesthetics. This would bring digital art into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a contemporary landscape of imaginative and creative work and would put the fate of aesthetics in an era of new media under consideration. This chapter also criticizes the notion of the so-called hybrid aesthetics and generative aesthetics as problematic and proposes a speculative aesthetics that is grounded in the language of computational method.

This chapter points out that creolization is derived from an artful layering of meanings and styles from various cultures. It explains that creolizing does not contain just any cultural combination of existential states. It adds that concepts made from creolizations develop their own stability, which can be recognized, learned, imitated, and elaborated. Creole creations carry the traces of artistic practices of people who have learned to draw on them in any possible combination that worked.

This chapter focuses on one of the fundamental notions central to copyright—authorship—which has been the subject of prolonged skepticism in a number of arenas. In this chapter, I outline my theory of authorship, that the author of a work is one who has and exercises the power of selecting and arranging elements as constitutive of that work—what we might broadly call the creative or authorial act. Along the way, I work to dispel arguments suggesting that there are no authors, or, alternatively, that effectively anyone having anything to do with a work is thereby an author of that work (two positions with surprisingly robust pedigrees). Case studies include Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sherrie Levine’s appropriation art, and the films Left Behind and Superman II.

One of the major consequences of the Cold War and the commingling of scientific and military interests by world powers was the increasingly secretive nature of scientific research. From the Manhattan Project onwards, the free exchange implicit in the collective enterprise of scientific knowledge production became regulated and increasingly clandestine. Neal White's artistic research is explicitly engaged in interrogating both the investigative procedures of science as method and the ways in which these procedures can be turned toward an investigation of secrecy itself. In their discussion, Beck and White explore the ideas and practices that inform White's conception of art as a mode of experimental research. Central to this project is what White calls 'overt research,' whereby the spaces of techno-scientific and military-industrial enterprise are explored through the documentation of physical sites and material evidence. In the exhibition Dark Places (Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2009), White and others explored the ways in which such places are both embedded and imaginatively narrated as part of a contemporary UK landscape. White’s projects are discussed in relation to issues shaped by Cold War research: secrecy, surveillance, accountability, participation, and the power relations implicit in knowledge production.

Drawing on Mackenzie & Spinardi’s research into the potential un-invention of nuclear weapons through the loss of tacit knowledge, this chapter explores a range of artistic responses to the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Mackenzie & Spinardi’s work on nuclear weapons design, testing and computing, allows us to think about a new mode of nuclear aesthetics, providing conceptual frameworks relevant to contemporary art practice and discourse such as: the contested nature of sameness in the repetition of objects; the importance of the slowness of tacit knowledge; of the human eye, making and learning with others; the limits of code; and the erosion of nuclear belief systems. Recent artistic practices in Japan and internationally, explore counterfactual possibilities across time; where aspects of nuclear culture are made visible or possible in a world where apocalyptic scenarios are streamed live. The responsibility for nuclear materials is shifting from state weapons production to the privatized nuclear energy industry, and into the public realm of nuclear accidents and public consultation on long-term waste disposal. Artists are concerned with how the networks are interrupted, looped, mapped, slowed down for reflection on how things are made, how stories are told, and how knowledge is consolidated.