Dennis Hollingsworth

Bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art.

A friend just emailed this in and in the interest of pulling the viral fire alarm, this seems to be an issue with enough relevance to our lives as artists to treat it with some care and urgency.

I'm just digesting it at the moment. Somehow under the guise of finding a way to access work where the owner (artist) cannot be found, there is a possibility that we will lose the right to automatically own the copyright of artwork unless we steer each creation through a complex and costly legal process to certify every creative act as our right to the property we create.

Here's where I get to quote myself (12):

"Bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art."

Like a tiger, the best you can do is to get it to jump through the flaming hoops. Governments and tigers have this unfortunate tendency to want to eat you. The former tends to think it's doing you a favor.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on it. The external links at the bottom seems to have routes to other sites with more information.

(Oh yea, I should credit Thomas Nast with the image of the devouring tiger above.)