ARTH3101 - CRITICAL ISSUES (Fall 24)

  The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: The Art Law Podcast       The British Museum is known as a world-renowned collection of artifacts of human history, culture, and art that has been adored for years. This is due to its accessibility and it being the first public museum in the world. To have such an extensive chronicle be displayed openly for anyone to see is to this day, both revolutionary and a demonstration of extreme respect and compassion for history. However, there has been an ongoing question of whether the British Museum has the right to house one particular exhibit: the Parthenon Marbles. The Art Law Podcast, hosted by Steve Schnider and Katie Wilson-Milne, take a deep look into the topic and history with Alexander Herman. He is the director of the Institute of Art and Law and mostly known for his publications in The Art Newspaper and his book: The Parthenon Marbles Dispute – Heritage , Law Politic published in 2023. Herman first makes it very clear that when r...

A Review of the case article, “AI and Artists’ IP: Exploring Copyright Infringement Allegations in Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd.” by Sophia Williams https://itsartlaw.org/2024/02/26/artificial-intelligence-and-artists-intellectual-property-unp acking-copyright-infringement-allegations-in-andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/ Review and Summary by Ella Marshall This article was quite interesting and brought up a lot of questions for me. The author presented it in a way that gave the reader an explanation of what both sides of the argument presented. In the case, artists complained that three AI companies were infringing on their rights by using some of their artwork when setting up their programs. The author of the article did some of her own research and put specific search terms into the different AI programs in order to see whether or not they were able to get results that were similar to copyrighted work. One example of her search was that she asked the program to give her a picture of...

Environmental Architecture The environmental impacts of architecture is a growing issue. All of the material that go into building a home can have lasting effects on the amount of resources available as well as the environment around the home. I have chosen to dive deeper into learning about how to use natural resources and produce environmentally friendly architecture. I chose to watch a video on environmental architecture that gave four different examples of houses that are using natural resources in a modern way. Each of these homes were private, so I was not able to find further information about them, but the video provided a lot of information about each of these houses. The first house is located in Spain. It is made of all natural materials. The builder called it “bioecological” architecture. The “bio” part being that it is made all of local, natural materials, such as wood, glass, stones, and bricks, so that when the building can no longer stand, it will return to the so...

Look down at what you have on. Do you know where it was made? Do you even know what brand it is? Clothing is an important part of our day-to-day lives, yet it's not often at the forefront of our concerns. Currently, most of the world’s clothing industry is run by fast fashion brands. This is a billion-dollar industry with high amounts of waste, violations, and lawsuits. “Textiles are the second most polluting industry in the world” . So what even is fast fashion? In research for this blog post, I watched the documentary Fast Fashion: The Real Price of Low-Cost Fashion in an effort to better understand this industry. Fast fashion is defined as “very inexpensive clothing that you are expected to replace very rapidly” . The idea is that you get addicted to shopping at the low prices and rate of new clothing to buy, and you end up buying clothes that you don’t even need. In the documentary they describe how “there is such a turnover and such a multiplication of designs that it encour...

Rethinking Sustainable Solutions to the Fashion Industry By: Makayla Davis Screencap from ReFashioned of landfill footage in Hong Kong There is growing concern for how the fashion industry is contributing to the consumption of raw materials in order to create new products. Fast fashion has increased the demand for raw materials such as fuel for transportation, water for the dyeing process, and the production of cotton. The creation process of fast fashion is draining environmental resources. These products are made fast and cheap in order for department stores to have a rotating collection each month. With this notion consumers tend to over-purchase clothes that they may only wear a handful of times, instead of donating clothes they no longer want, these garments end up in landfills(Bowers). However, nonprofits and science engineers have created startups to combat the growing clothing waste that are being dumped in Hong Kong landfills. In a film documentaryReFashioned released...

WAS THE VIETNAMESE PROPAGANDA ART INDOCTRINATING COMMUNISM IDEOLOGY OR WAS IT FOR REUNITING THE COUNTRY INTO ONE? If you have ever been to Vietnam, when you go through streets in any city of the country from North to South, you will catch a glimpse of the propaganda artwork on walls, billboards, or just any banner on a light pole. You might not even know they are for propaganda, but what propaganda are we talking about? Propaganda billboard on Saigon Street Propaganda poster commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Vietnamese victory at the battle of Dien Bien Phu contributed by Ian Simpson to Alamy Stock Photo on August 3rd 2014. To understand the meaning behind the artwork, we need to go back to the past when Vietnam just barely got out of colonialism, winning the battle that lasted almost 9 years with France from 1946 to 1954. The country immediately split, North and South. Our current-day beloved father, Ho Chi Minh who had gone to Russia (back then known as Soviet Union,) du...

For this post, I watched “Sex In The Comix: The History of Erotic Content in Sequential Art.” This documentary discussed early underground erotic comics, interviewed some important names in the scene, and talked to a range of artists all the way from the USA to Japan. It talked about how sex can be found in almost every genre, from purely erotica, to auto-bio, to horror, especially in the present. As for the history of these comics, I’ll admit, it was a little disappointing how little the documentary seemed to cover, and it seemed more focused on interviews from creators. As for what it did do, though, it covered how erotic comics have been around for longer than you might think, and that some of the first erotic comics from the USA were made in the 1930’s, entertainment for a depression-era country. Then, of course, it covers the Comics Code Authority, as anyone would have to when talking about the history of any kind of comic. The CCA was a code made to censor comics and what was fou...

     WAS THE VIETNAMESE PROPAGANDA ART INDOCTRINATING COMMUNISM IDEOLOGY OR WAS IT FOR REUNITING THE COUNTRY INTO ONE? By Giao Huynh      If you have ever been to Vietnam, when you go through streets in any city of the country from North to South, you will catch a glimpse of the propaganda artwork on walls, billboards, or just any banner on a light pole. You might not even know they are for propaganda, but what propaganda are we talking about? Propaganda billboard on Saigon Street Propaganda poster commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Vietnamese victory at the battle of Dien Bien Phu contributed by Ian Simpson to Alamy Stock Photo on August 3rd 2014.      To understand the meaning behind the artwork, we need to go back to the past when Vietnam just barely got out of colonialism, winning the battle that lasted almost 9 years with France from 1946 to 1954. The country immediately split, North and South. Our current-day beloved father, Ho C...