Could you elaborate?

Read the discussion, or just the particular comment, that the word “control,” there, links to.

Fifteen, twenty years ago I think I would have agreed wholeheartedly with the idea that, say, a film director has the right to demand that his works only be shown in their entirety. That not only is there no right, say, for a right-wing group to cut a film for a particular audience and resell the cut version, but that to do so was some sort of crime against Art.

Now I try to overlay that viewpoint on the views I currently hold and I’m finding I can’t make it match up at any point.

Ah, okay! I just wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic. I know exactly what you mean. I have pretty radical copyright opinions, and I do find it hard to reconcile them with my attempts to be a creator of "art." Similar issue, I think.

Well, twenty years ago we were still used to the idea that if someone made a film, there was only one way for it to be shown: on a big screen. It's a huge change to the concept of a movie as static "finished" product, when it has a continued life beyond its big-screen debut. And the audience isn't in a theater seat letting the projection booth bring us the experience; we pause and mute and fast-forward and choose subtitles and rent the director's cut. Or we catch it on TV, where it's edited for content or to fit a time slot, and broken up with commercials. Not to mention all the little bits and pieces of it that we take for granted will show up elsewhere (downloadable trailers, stills on websites, etc). We have this romantic notion of the original presentation as its purest form, but the reality of how we handle media is that it gets messed with all over the place. Also, a modern audience has different expectations around that process.

The state of the art, and of the individual's ability to pick and choose (and alter and even produce) media for ourselves, has changed really fast. I think most people are still struggling to understand the implications of just how much this changes the relationship between producers and consumers, across the board.

David: could it be that you're getting more libertarian in your old age? *duck*

I don't really have a problem with this as long as the resellers are up front about what they're doing. Eg, if they're labeling it in some way so that I know it's the expurgated version before I decide whether or not to buy it, i'm content. If, on the other hand, they aren't, then it's a moral outrage - but there the issue is that they're passing something off as something other than what it is.

I’m a tax-and-spend libertarian.

I think Karen’s on to something. But I think it’s also, in my case, intertwined with the way I’ve lost patience with the if I couldn’t write I would just die meme and the I would never let a mere editor interfere with my Unique Artistic Vision (if I had one) meme.

How much actual "art" had you been involved with producing fifteen years ago? I suspect that art, like legislation and sausage and probably just about everything else, is something that startles the consumer with details about its actual production. Afterwards, perhaps the idea that a particular artwork was ever pristine enough that we should experience it in that pristine fashion is on the face of it risible. Not that there is no merit in control at all, of course, just that the more you live, the more counterarguments become clear. Would it have been better had the Marx Brothers stuck to the writers' scripts? Would it have been better if Leave it to Psmith or Red Harvest (or Foundation or Shadrach in the Furnace) had never been crassly shoved into novel form to satisfy commercial interest in resale? Would it have been better if Walt Disney had never made a movie of the Winnie the Pooh stories? Well, that last is a tough one.
Thanks,
-V.