Opinion Aamir Aziz-Anita Dube controversy is not about legality or copyright

Now to the crux: A solo exhibition of recent artworks by 66-year-old Delhi-based artist Anita Dube, titled Three Storey House (a reference to the national flag), at the elite Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. Dube is primarily known for her fetishes — fragmented objects clad in sensuous materials like fur and velvet. In this exhibition, Dube drew on Aziz’s poem as inspiration, citation, and homage. A series of flag-like wall-hangings in the tradition of feminist textile art renders the poem’s masculine voice and iconic words hollow by making the printed text thoroughly illegible. Though the poet and poem were occasionally cited in surrounding texts (as in the artwork titled After Aamir Aziz), whether the gesture was homage or homicide remained unclear.

The more ambiguous the art is and the more it revels in the anarchy of interpretation, the more “radical” it is considered by the art world. But that isn’t true for everyone, especially not for the young poet whose work leaves nothing abstruse. On April 20, Aziz wrote a powerful Facebook post accusing Dube of “theft” and “erasure,” as he, despite being a “living poet,” was neither consulted during the making of the artworks nor given satisfactory responses to his legal notices. To quote him: “Dube turned [the poem] into a luxury commodity, proof not only that injustice is alive, but that it now wears silk gloves and sells itself as art. That a poem written in defiance was gutted, defanged, and stitched into velvet for profit.” The post went immediately viral, and Dube’s timanjla ghar quickly collapsed. Losing their nuance, her fetishes were swiftly perceived as mere commodity fetishes — a wasteful indulgence for the super-rich. Yes, artists thrive on controversy. But when no debate follows and everyone takes the other side, it’s better to retreat and apologise. In an online post, Dube admitted her “ethical lapse” in not consulting Aziz, though she also expressed surprise at “the social media trial initiated by Aamir Aziz,” prompting further backlash.

As I read it, the merit of Aziz’s legal action rests on three questions: (i) How the court defines the limits of inspiration; (ii) whether the illegibility — or, in some cases, erasure — of quoted text in Dube’s works constitutes reproduction; and (iii) to what extent Aziz’s poem, rooted in the inexhaustible linguistic commons, is damaged by its appropriation for private ends. But the disputes in courtrooms are of secondary importance in the tribunal of history. As an art historian, I find the following developments more concerning than the said legal dispute.

First is the issue of blatant disregard for the commons and a deep misunderstanding of the culture of piracy in the global South. While some argue that invoking Intellectual Property Rights here holds elite artists and institutions accountable, even if the petitioner loses, the discourse he has sparked will persist. Yet in the historical dialectic of commons and theft —amid pervasive robbery and worsening class hierarchy — the theft always seems to flow top-down, while bottom-up movement of goods and resources remains a legalised theft. Reducing the controversy merely to “Dube vs. Aziz” — a polemic between two individuals — quietly removes Dube’s facilitator and custodian of artworks, Vadehra Art Gallery, from scrutiny (for those unfamiliar, private galleries typically take a significant share of sales, anywhere from 30 to 50 per cent).

Moreover, despite Aziz’s insistence that he is fine with his poem being used at public sites even without his permission, the very allegation of stealing made against Dube is a double-edged sword that can turn against him at any time; for the true author of the poem was not the individual poet, but the collective moment he was part of. The very claim of authorship and intellectual property itself is a theft of the cultural commons. In principle, both Aziz and Dube are privatising what should ideally remain unclaimed.

Secondly, we must note the pervasive philistinism — a symptom of the populist present — that now grips civil society and, ironically, even certain quarters of the art world. Dube’s velvet fetishes may well be mediocre or even trash, but that’s for art critics and historians to decide. They may be disproportionately priced, but the practice has a long and complex history, developing from the paradoxical status of the art object (as it lacks use value). The dominant social media complaint is that the artist, lacking creativity, has “appropriated” the work of a young mind to produce luxury goods for elite consumption and profiteering. This philistine and populist view ignores a recent history of artists, especially women, who have challenged masculine ideals of creativity through readymades and appropriation. It also overlooks the present cultural moment, where acts of creation leaning toward the future are being replaced by archival practices oriented toward the past. In that sense, Dube’s art of citation and Aziz’s poem of remembrance share more than they differ (especially when the latter’s title is contrasted with Faiz’s).

Thirdly, an alarming consequence arises from the developments mentioned above: Aziz and his supporters have conjured a genie that can’t easily be put back in the bottle. The weaponisation of copyright laws will not only make cultural practitioners vulnerable, but also a large section of artists who work outside or against populist notions of creativity or originality, where citation, appropriation, and readymades are crucial components of artmaking.

It is often forgotten that Aziz is a “living” poet, not due to the simple fact of his biological existence in the present, but because he belongs to a collective life, that too as an activist. Just as the poet’s vitality vanishes the moment he disconnects from this source of energy, artists lose their reason to exist when they cease to be part of a collective, activist culture. This isn’t about balancing art with activism in a double life, but about turning art into activism, starting with the very politics of art itself.

The writer is an Art historian and critic, teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia