Sharable Ready Mades Response

The evolution of ready made art is a very interesting subject. While the very idea of taking ordinary, sometimes mundane non-art objects and making them art is not extremely new by any means (as that can be traced back to the early 20^th century with Duchamp and like), but the concept of creative borrowing still seems fresh and innovative even in the modern age of technology.

            The article by “self-defined artist, writer and hacker” Rob Myers explores the idea of Shareable ready made artwork made via 3d printers. Personally, I had not yet made the connection between 3d printing and ready made art until reading the article. A whole new universe has been unlocked with 3d printing’s advancements which Myers argues has complicated the already complex idea of copyright and who actually owns art or images.

I think the legality of this subject is very intriguing. I mean, who exactly owns the art if a sharable ready made artist takes an already established piece, digitalizes it and then make that scan available so that anyone can have a 3d print of the original piece? And also, when an image is given such free range with multiple users, who has ownership and sole possessive rights to that image? And CAN anyone have those possessive rights? The author of this article gives us more questions than answers, leaving us with merely the facts and a left over desire for enquiry on the subject of images.

Another intriguing line of thought is at the end of Myers’s article. In his final paragraph, he suggests that shareable ready made pieces are not merely just simple images but rather are quite complex in both history and conceptuality. This line of thought harkens back to the likes of the surrealists such as Rene Magritte who gave us a pipe (which was later made into a smaller 3d printed shareable ready made piece) and prompted us to think by saying it was not, in fact, a pipe. After all, it was merely a depiction of a pipe. Shareable ready made pieces take Magritte’s idea a step further to make the viewer wonder not just what the single depiction of piece is, but what the very image of the piece is if it is not alone in its originality. Is the digital image of Magritte’s pipe any more a pipe than Magritte’s depiction? And what of any 3d prints of said digital image? Are they also not a pipe? And if they are not pipes (or whatever they depict), what then do they depict? What are they?

Shareable ready made art pieces are incredibly complex images. Not only is the legality of the images extremely convoluted, they are also tremendously indeterminate in nature just by themselves. It is a very short article, but what it lacks in length it makes up for leaving us in some very complicated inquisitive waters. If anything else, Rob Myers introduces us to some art pieces which are both fun physically and conceptually.