The latest issue of Elephant Magazine is out and is focused on brands and copyright:
Are brands out to get us? Could our food, sartorial, satirical and political choices now all be considered as brand alliances? Most importantly, do we secretly really love the idea of being defined in this way?
In Issue 27 Elephant investigates the paradoxical relationship that a host of the art world’s new generation of makers have with brands. We meet Chloe Wise, Antonio Roberts, Jemma Egan, Holly White and Rachel Maclean to discuss the changing face of branding and the rise of subliminal messaging.
Elephant Magazine published a a review of the Common Property exhibition by Robert Shore on their blog on 10th February.
Roberts mentions the ‘Amen Break’, a six-second drum loop taken from a 1960s recording by the funk and soul group The Winstons which, according to whosampled.com, has been sampled 1,862 times since—without a single royalty or clearance payment being made to the original musicians for its use. ‘It’s basically been in every hip-hop song since the Eighties,’ says Roberts, who is pleased that a recent crowdfunding campaign raised £24,000 for the Winstons’ frontman Richard Spencer. At the same time he’s clear that artists and musicians should be allowed to work more freely with copyright-protected sources where the uses are, to repeat the term mentioned above and employed in the courts (just in case you find yourself summoned), ’transformative’. ‘It’s not plagiarism,’ he says. ‘It’s cutting and pasting. Culture is made in that way. People take it and morph it into something new. If you had to pay for everything, it would be impossible.’