"Look What We Did"

As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to pour into play dough molds, but most of the time, I keep it simple.

For instance, I'll roll out a sheet of butcher paper on a table and provide something with which to apply pigment -- crayons, tempera, pastels, water color, makers, pencils, bingo dotters, powdered paint, and so on. And, when appropriate, tools for applying and manipulating the pigment -- brushes of various types and sizes, kitchen tools, stampers, sponges, pipettes, stencils, brayers, cutlery, and so on. 

These are group projects, something to gather around and discuss as you work in creative collaboration. When the paper is full, we take a moment to admire it, then shift it out of the way to make room for another sheet of butcher paper, or cardboard, or a bed sheet, or other communal canvas. These finished products are not signed by any individual. They are not taken home to display on the refrigerator door. No one says, "I made that," but they often say, "Look what we did."

I've recently been revisiting the theories and predictions of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, he of "The medium is the message" fame. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan points out that the idea of copyright, the idea that an individual could "own" the work they had produced, emerged alongside the transformative technology of the printing press. Looking at the arc of history from the perspective of 1962, the year of my birth, he felt that our emerging electronic media (radio and television specifically) marked the beginning of the end of the reign of print media. 

Print media had made ours into a predominately visual culture, one that both read, and therefore tended to think, in a linear manner. Electronic media was to return us to a kind of "global village" in which oral storytelling came to dominate once more, freeing us of the linearity and shaping us into a people with more in common with pre-printing press cultures and their oral tradition.

And with the death of print culture would come the death of the concept of copyright, which is to say individual ownership of a creative work. 

Up through medieval times, great works of "literature" were certainly created. The Odyssey is showing in theaters right now. Someone named Homer is credited with it, but it's far more likely that "Homer" is a name given to a collective effort over generations. Perhaps it originated with an individual bard who was particularly gifted in retelling these evergreen tales, but the stories themselves are the product of an oral tradition going back over centuries, making it a collective work. 

"Look what we did."

Our concept of copyright, or individual ownership of stories, has extended well into our electronic age. Until the internet arrived, this concept continued to be tenable, but now in the era of AI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the age of copyright, along with the age of print, is coming to an end. It won't happen all at once, there will be plenty of death throes, but pride of authorship is already dissolving. Much of the music we listen to is cobbled together from samples of other people's music. Social media is fueled by re-mixes of memes and clips and reimaginings. And our movies and programs are increasingly erasing the lines between what it proprietary and what is available for common usage. 

I have no doubt that we'll create a leaky dyke of laws to protect copyright for a time, but the writing is on the wall, pun intended. Anonymous graffiti, I believe, has more of a future -- in the long run -- than, say, the collected works of Marshall McLuhan.

And what will we be left with? Something like these children crowding around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating collective works of culture, rather than proprietary works of individual genius.

As Albert Einstein, one of the most iconic individual geniuses of modern times, once complained, "(T)he cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate."

As historian Darrin McMahon wonders in his book on the history of genius, The Divine Fury, in a world in which Supermen are not needed, in which genius is becoming a group activity, "are we returning to the era in which we are closer to god?"

As I watch these young children crowd around, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating together, I see a through-line hearkening back to pre-printing press times when community meant creating together and remembering together; when a rambling troubadour might come through to sing songs and spin yarns, leaving them behind, not as works of proprietary genius, but as commonly held material to be used by the people, just as the children use crayons and paper to make their own stories.

"Look what we did." Our culture may be generations away from McLuhans' predicted transformation, but preschool classrooms, a pre-literate cultures, are already there. Just look at that crowd around the art table practicing the literacy of the future.

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