Style as (Intellectual) Property

The importance of style and style discourses for the creation of identity and the marking of social distinction is particularly noticeable where such boundaries are contested and style is invoked as a kind of property to support claims of identity and distinction. Starting from this observation, the conference aims to trace the relationship between intellectual property and style as two models developed in different disciplinary contexts. Both intellectual property and style were systematically defined only in the 19th century. Their interaction has only just begun to shift into the view of the disciplines that declare the respective concepts to be part of their field of study.

On the one hand, ethical concerns and aesthetic categories that should have preceded and guided efforts to legally protect intellectual property fell from view where such initiatives were related to the emergence of new storage and reproduction media. On the other hand, those who also understood the optionality of styles as a way to profile social identity often overlooked the fact that the practical, theoretical and historiographical appropriation of a style was shaped by the respective current model of property rights. Not least, style has – no matter how much it evoked the desire to possess it and the extent to which legislative powers managed to criminalize the copying of individual pieces of art – remained the element of art works and groups of works that was able to elude the grip of law makers most stubbornly. The “ownership” of styles is regulated not by laws, but through ideologies, incantation, taboos or commandments. As a consequence, the concept of style acquired its greatest social relevance invariably in those moments in which it was used to designate its object as property.

The conference wants to focus on the reciprocity of the concepts style and intellectual property as well as processes of institutionalization through alternative forms of “legislation” that claim authority in this legal vacuum of style. Comparing across different artistic epochs, the conference aims to study the theoretical and historiographical appropriation of old and new styles, processes of aesthetic inclusion and exclusion, mechanisms of regulation and sanctions as well as repercussions on the artistic practice.

The organizers particularly welcome paper proposals that engage with the following questions:

Appropriation, inheritance, inheritance law

  • Who qualifies as a possessing subject, who possesses the style (an epoch,group, individual, art work)?
  • Which ways to collectively acquire a style can be identified and described?
  • Which narratives of the individual search for and possession of a particular personal style do artist biographies establish?
  • Which political maxim, which cultural and historical models, which concepts of private and public ownership organize and regulate the “inheritance law” of style?
  • Which obligations or potentials are implied by the possession of a style?
  • What is there to fear from its loss?

Institutions, interpretations, judicial authority

  • With which mandates, intentions and arguments, on the basis of which circumstances, categories and expertise is styleclaimed as property?
  • How are ethics of style ownership established? How do extra-judicial processes of legitimating style ownership function?
  • How are the models of opinion-formation, regulation and sanctioning organized?
  • What are the patterns and regularities that underlie the punishment of alleged fraudulent claims of style?

Artistic Practice

  • What repercussions of debates around the protection of intellectual property on the development of artistic styles can be observed?
  • Which convergences and coincidences of legal and artistic histories suggest a causal relationship?
  • How far must a style be defined, distinguished, reduced or made concrete in theory, historiography and practice so that it can be successfully communicated as property?
  • Where are the (moral) boundaries between the copy of style and the copy of work, between homage and plagiarism?

Please submit your abstract for a maximum 30 minute presentation (up to 3000 characters including spaces) as well as a brief CV with the subject “Style as Property” to Prof. Dr. Tanja Michalsky (michalsky[at]biblhertz.it).