Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image, by Elena Cooper

Abstract

Reviewed by: Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image by Elena Cooper Monica F. Cohen (bio) Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image, by Elena Cooper; pp. vii + 282. Cambridge and New York: 2018, £85.00, $110.00. Anthony Trollope's representation of the Tenway Junction in chapter 60 of The Prime Minister (1876) provides an apt metaphor for Victorian copyright as an object of study: an apparently unintelligible riot of lines stretching here, there, and everywhere; bustling throngs moving across urban, regional, national, imperial, and international spaces; and a convergence of technologies, individual interests, trade markets, social theories, professional ambitions, and public goods. While Trollope's Tenway Junction may have no obvious presiding genius, Victorian copyright—at least, when it comes to the circulation of images—has Elena Cooper's dazzling research in Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image as an indispensable guide to the philosophical, legal, financial, professional, and technological networks that conditioned the creation and circulation of art from 1850 to 1911. Cooper documents not simply the passage of a statutory act or the establishment of a legal precedent, but also all of the relevant debates, giving a robust and granular sense of the stakes, the orientation, and the at times counterintuitive contradictions involved in artistic copyright as it evolved among jurists, politicians, magistrates, journalists, art collectors, and dealers, not to mention painters, engravers, portrait and press photographers, photographic pirates, print sellers, museums, and galleries. Compared to the amount of excellent scholarship on literary copyright, studies of nineteenth-century art copyright (and I would add music copyright) are surprisingly sparse, popping up in anthologies almost as an afterthought despite so much recent attention to visual intelligence in Victorian studies generally. Cooper suggests that this relative neglect derives from a view of the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act that imagined legislation doing for art what had already been done for literature, as if a painting or a sculpture were somehow equivalent to a book insofar as both expressed a creator's immaterial ideas. Art, however, was not and never could be theorized exclusively along those lines, for at least three reasons: first, art is an object valuable in its material singularity in ways that an edition of a book is not; second, there are stakeholders besides the artist; [End Page 273] and third, manual and mechanical labor matter. Thus alongside the idea of a painting, for example, is the value of the painting as a thing, owned often by a collector or a museum whose interests might conflict with those of the painter. Moreover, the inclusion of photography as a fine art in the 1862 Act sustained what Cooper names, borrowing from Steve Edwards, an "allegory of labour" that is "allotropic" in the sense of elements that "share the same molecular composition yet take divergent forms," like coal and diamonds: even as art journals recognized photography as a fine art expressing the ideas of a creator, statutory thinking about photography remained predicated on the mechanical as late as the Copyright Act of 1911 (qtd. in Cooper 20). There is simply no set of equivalent challenges confronting literary copyright reform efforts. Billed as a longitudinal study, Art and Modern Copyright features an ingenious structural organization for conveying a story that resists straightforward linear telling. While the chapters have a thematic focus, each one also works as a stand-alone piece, not only acknowledging the way we read now but also conveying the complexity of a subject that involved legislative policy, case law, and legal statute. The book examines the whole cast of players animating an evolving art culture: artists, sitters, commissioners, engravers, and photographers, not to mention the journalists who wrote about them and the public that appreciated them. Thus each topic demands revisiting from another point of view. Cooper pulls off this feat by providing signposts that allow informative and paradigm-shifting navigation of such a rich forest: explicit cross-references in the text and footnotes, rather than inconvenient endnotes, allow for an integration of the whole picture—not unlike the painting reproduced on the book's cover, William Firth's The Railway Station (1862), a giant canvas depicting the myriad small scenarios that convey the multiplex...