Ilanah Simon reports at the IPKat blog about an art exhibition at the London Institut of Contemporary Arts that uses Creative Commons licenses. The art works are also available on the Internet at copy-art.net.
There is some confusion about copyright here. The artists call their project a "copyright-free zone" but say that all works are "registered" with a Creative Commons non-commercial license.
Creative Commons licenses are, just as the GPL, built on top of copyright. They are not a dedication to the public domain. And Creative Commons is not in the business of registering copyrights, but is only providing license drafts. A "non-commercial license" is only available as one of the version 1.0 alternatives. The current six possible choices for 2.0 version licenses don't include a "non-commercial" option.
So maybe the copy-art.net project uses a version 1.0 noncommercial license.
Anyway, Ilanah Simon wonders "how in practice such a scheme can incentivise all but the most altruistic artists to produce art."
This seems to mean "how in practice artists can get paid for their work."
The answer is easy. If some artist finds someone willing to pay him for whatever work he is producing, then the Creative Commons license certainly doesn't stop him from selling it. And with art, unlike books, much of the market value comes from owning an original, signed by the artist.
That value has just about nothing to do with the artistic quality of the work in question but is largely a function of how famous the artist is. Therefore, permitting lots of other people to copy the work and spreading the artist's name wide and far actually should work to increase that market value.
And maybe the artist model for getting paid (selling original signed works at a relatively high price) might be transferable to e-books. As I have written in one of my first entries here, an author might sell personalized versions with a serial number. Someone could own an "original" Doctorow book with a serial number of one.
Update: Jeremy Philips of IPKat reports from a talk by Irina-Mirena Papamitrou, the curator of the copy-art.net website and ensuing discussion about copyright and Creative Commons.