Sunday, November 30, 2008

SOUND OFF: IS COMPUTER ART CHEATING?

An overwhelming number of readers -- 83 percent of those who responded to an unscientific poll on my column's blog -- see no harm in sculptors using computers to help them with the design of their art. It's not cheating, they feel.

"Oh, please," Shmuel Ross of Brooklyn writes. "Of course, it's legitimate."

"As long as the final product of this artist is his own work," another reader agrees, "it is `straining at a gnat' to worry more than one minute over the computer-assisted work."

"Artists need to plan their works somehow," Chase March of Hamilton, Ontario, writes. "In the end, art is art. We are left with the final piece, and a computer can't ever produce that."

Or, as Chris Rand of Boston puts it, "Da Vinci had notebooks."

Check out other opinions here, or post your own by clicking on "Comments" or "Post a comment" below.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, where he teaches writing and ethics. He is also the administrator of The Right Thing, a Web log focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@nytimes.com or to "The Right Thing," The New York Times Syndicate, 500 Seventh Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10018. Please remember to tell me who you are, where you're from, as well as where you read the column.

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

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