Infection: A General Idea of the Virus
# Context – “The key to contemporary consumer culture is the copyright: without the copyright and the sanctity of (individual and/or corporate) authorship, today’s mega-economics would collapse – Imagine Microsoft, for example, without copyright. Museums act as symbolic keepers of the virtue of copyright, and an art expert’s opinion on the authenticity of a work can send values soaring or crashing by vast amounts of money.” (Bronson, Copyright, Cash, and Crowd Control: Art and Economy in the Work of General Idea 2003) – “William Burroughs once told me that Kodak’s copyrighted yellow is an example of image virus: the colour carries the meaning of the product, no matter where one sees it; all objects of this particular yellow are infected with this corporate message. Similarly, when TIME-LIFE sued FILE for simulation of LIFE , we discovered they held copyright on ‘white block lettering on a red parallelogram’.” (Bronson, Myth as Parasite/Image as Virus: General Idea's Bookshel...
