I said it is immoral as a knee-jerk reaction, and still feel it is. I appreciate the material has taken many years of development and is not simple to use, but you could say the same about oil paint, or plastics, or rapid-prototype imaging. How short sighted would it be to have limited their application and use?
Why choose one artist only? One who has a reputation for making wonderful black holes with raw pigments? Profile, profile and profile. Exclusivity.
The majority of amazing things that have been created in the world by humans are made by manipulating materials. If we had known what we do now about plastics, we probably would have thought twice about making them, due to environmental concerns – but without plastics, could computer technology have grown the way it has? Robotic labs have to rapid-prototype the parts they need to test, because they don’t exist in the shops, they aren’t made commercially. The creatives who use rapid-prototype machines to design innovative new things would not be able to do so if the inventor of the machines banned others from using them.
I thought commerce was built on free markets? This flies in the face of open source computing, sharing culture and community. Of course it’s about intellectual property rights, but it also appears to be short sighted and just a little bit mean-natured.
Todays lapis lazuli, except this isn’t even for sale to others?
Carolyn Black 