DESIGNS FOR POTTERY

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 11

DESIGNS FOR POTTERY

Firm Replies To Correspondent

“We are sorry that there are objections to the Crown Lynn design contest,” writes the general manager of Crown Lynn Potteries, Ltd. (Mr T. E. Clark), in reply to a letter from a correspondent. The correspondent, Mr John Wood, writes: “I see that Crown Lynn Potteries, Ltd., proposes to repeat the design competition which was apparently so successful from their point of view last year, I hope they do not intend to repeat a practice generally regarded among artists, designers and photographers as disreputable. To make it a condition of entry that copyright in all prized winning designs becomes the property of the sponsors of the competition and that any other entry designs required tor use by the sponsors will be paid for at trade rates with normal copyrigjit arrangements at such time, is fair business practice. But to stipulate, as Crown Lynn did last year, that the copyright of all entries passes to the sponsors, is quite another matter. This is a device employed by less reputable firms elsewhere to obtain copyright in a large number of designs for the majority of which no payment is made to the original creator. No self-res-pecting designer would dream of entering for such a competition.” Mr Clark says no artist’s work will be used for pottery production without payment of a fee. “In practice, only nine of the 25 prize-winning designs and one non-prize winning design in last year’s contest were suitable for actual pottery production; the others were either mechanically impractical or of too limited a public appeal. We are quite happy about this, because our object was to foster pottery design—not, as Mr Wood suggests, to get designs ‘on the cheap.’ “On" the other hand—and solely because we retained the entries to show to buyers—two artists (one of whom was not a prizewinner) have received substantial commissions for extra designs. “We could save ourselves a great deal of trouble by using only the work of specialist Dutch, English and German pottery artists, whose designs need no adaptation for production purposes and are always available on our files. But we are trying to break clear of this and use instead the work of our own New Zealand artists.

“If the better designers refrain from entering the contest because of mistrust of our intentions, then they, we and all New Zealanders are the likely losers in the long run.”