Artist Kader Attia on why we must work together to protect artists’ rights
Kader Attia, artist and President of the International Council of Creators of Graphic, Plastic and Photographic Arts (CIAGP), recently opened the annual CIAGP conference, hosted by DACS in London. The event brought together global creators to address key challenges facing artists, including generative AI. In his speech, Attia stressed the need for collective action to protect artists' livelihoods, and here he reflects on how collaboration between artists and organisations like DACS is vital to securing a sustainable creative future.
As an artist, I think every day that the magic of art is to bring all beings together, with their differences of gender, age, social class, and collective history - united through the same desire to relive the initial experience of what Freud called the pleasure principle, that of the emotion and beauty of the artistic moment. And by Art, I mean “Arts” at large, all kinds of creations, from music to visual art, from text to sculpture, etc. But how, then, can we safeguard the rights of artists, nurture their freedom to create, and protect the works that resonate so deeply with us?
The voice of artists carries significant weight alongside that of the collective management organisations (CMOs) who represent them. Creators therefore need to get involved with their organisations in order to give greater resonance to the messages conveyed.
If I insist on the need for close collaboration to advance the cause of artists, it is because the effectiveness of this approach no longer needs to be proven. In this respect, I would like to highlight some notable advances that have been made this past year: Recognition of the “droit de suite” (or “resale right”) is continuing internationally: countries such as Morocco, New Zealand and South Korea have incorporated this right into their national legislation. In addition, after almost 20 years of struggle by artists and authors' societies, “droit de suite” has finally become effective in Mexico, followed by Australia earlier this year. All this is encouraging, and artists can of course count on the support of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composer (CISAC), European Visual Artists (EVA) and the European Authors' Societies (GESAC), who will continue to fight for universal resale rights.
The challenges facing our sector are numerous and multiply with changes in society and technology. The massive distribution of works on the internet requires CMOs to negotiate with platforms to assert creators' rights. The signing of such contracts aimed at remunerating creators for the use of their works online is essential to guarantee the effectiveness of the rights granted to artists, and I welcome the steps taken by CMOs to achieve this. In particular, I would like to mention the agreement reached between Meta and ADAGP, which represents a major step forward for artists, who can now be sure of receiving appropriate remuneration for the use of their works on Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram in France.
Furthermore, we must continue to mobilise to ensure that the voice of artists is heard in the face of the development of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). A survey carried out by ADAGP and the “Société des Gens de Lettres” (SGDL) in 2024 highlights the concern of authors in the visual arts about the future of their professional activity in the face of the emergence of generative AI. Indeed, 60% of the authors questioned consider this boom to be a threat to their professional activity (and this apprehension even reaches 78% among artists in illustration and comics).
On the strength of this initial assessment, it is more important than ever that collective management organisations and creators continue to mobilise to ensure that the rights and economic interests of artists and authors are respected. Insofar as algorithmic governance stimulates the impulses of the producers that we have become – immersed in computational reticular writing governed by 24/7 capitalism, where time never stops, - it serves to collect behavioural data. This behavioural surplus, (as Data Scientist Shoshana Zuboff beautifully explained in her essay “Surveillance Capitalism”), is re-exploited by learning algorithms. How, then, can we perceive the space/time of extraction that falls under the creator's Intellectual Property (IP) rights, when the law has not yet been written? How can an inequitable situation, not yet perceptible as such, be transformed from a state of fact into a state of law?
Perhaps by reversing the operating principle of this system, which is based on information. Data circulates at the speed of light, through optical fibres. Turning the principle of our information society on its head means increasingly informing creators of their rights in advance. It also means encouraging them to join collective management organisations, so that together we can create new tools for protecting their' work and anticipate the illegal exploitation of copyright.
Our alienation from technological governance, which increasingly impacts our daily lives, forms the basis of a passive attitude to copyright. This poses an invisible threat both to creators and to those who defend their rights. The more we take it for granted that a protected right will last forever, the more vulnerable it will become. Digital technologies evolve much faster than legislation. Defending creators' rights requires constant reflection. It demands ever-new ideas to anticipate unfair exploitation before such practices become normalised.
ADAGP’s agreement with Meta represents a significant step forward in closing the legal loophole that previously existed. Artists are now assured of receiving appropriate remuneration in return for the exploitation of their works on Meta’s platforms.
The use of the traces that artists' works leave across many forms of attention - and which algorithmic governance collects, and redirects towards attention markets by monetising them through endless and almost invisible variations – is an important issue for the copyright of the future. For example, when AI generates creations, they are always based on a statistical range: in other words, the result of a sum of appropriations of other people's works behind the smokescreen of a pseudo ‘digital authorship’. What is at risk here - and unfortunately, this is undoubtedly already the case - is that the giants of technology will raise the legal argument that Artificial Intelligence is also an author and an artist. This loophole could sweep aside the foundation on which this ‘statistical’ intelligence generates works, which are based on an incalculable amount of data, originally created by humans.
It is therefore fundamental to define and defend the status of the artist in society, not just their works. The work of a living subject is central to this, capable of inventing a new language from nothing, through sweat, pain, and autonomy, against the current of the system they live in while connecting with the collective. But the artist is first and foremost a researcher. And like all researchers, they must follow their intuition and imagination, not simply copy and ‘statistically’ synthesise the relationships between the data they have accumulated over time to create new ranges based on those they repeat. They transcend this grammar to invent a new artistic language.
This is why mistakes in art are just as important as precision. Artists are not alone in their own practice; sometimes they encounter an unexpected mistake (produced by their own double) from which they sometimes - and I stress sometimes - create a great work of art. Artificial intelligence, which we are attempting to assign the role of creating art today, also makes mistakes. However, these mistakes are programmed to be corrected, avoiding imperfection in pursuit of perfection, that is its objective. Yet what truly makes a work of art is the process through which the objective is achieved
Art is the invention of a language that inevitably hegemonises space until it is replaced by another language – whether visual, musical, sculptural, literary, or otherwise. Art is not the language produced by automatic intelligence, but rather a permanent proto-language, constantly evolving in the realm of trial and error, intuition, and the unpredictable.
About Kader Attia
Kader Attia is a multidisciplinary artist who draws upon the lived experiences of two disparate cultural identities: Algerian and French. From this place of cultural intermediacy, Attia’s practice interrogates sociopolitical complexities rooted in histories of colonialism and cultural obfuscation. In his practice, Attia employs poetic installations and sculptural assemblages to investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair.
Read more
- International art leaders gather in London to discuss artists' rights at the CIAGP conference
- How DACS advocates for your rights
