Appropriation in the arts - the adventure continues

From here: Damien Hirst's work has been being 'ripped off' by a group of artists who want to make a point about the multimillionaire's stringent use of copyright law. Their action follows Hirst's decision to threaten to sue a 16-year-old designer who used an image of the skull in a collage to sell on the internet.

'For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.2'. An exact copy of Cartrain's collage, painstakingly recreated and improved by James Cauty from random pixels found on the interweb. 30.5cm x 42cm giclee (inkjet) print on enhanced matt art paper. Numbered Edition of 13. Signed with a very poor imitation of Cartrain's signature in silver ink on the front and by the real artist on the back. To see all of the works offered for sale go here.

Also of note is the recent news of Shepard Fairey, a street artist famous for his red, white and blue "Hope" posters of President Obama being arrested last week on warrants accusing him of tagging property with graffiti.

A lot of my works involve appropriation from existing photographs to create paintings. It is interesting to see how the case against Shepard Fairey and the action taken by the artists against Damien Hirst will unravel.

The essay "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem is a classic in this realm as are works by Joy Garnett.

More on appropriation in the arts in this blog can be found here and here.

Appropriation in art: Redux

In my quest to find answers to appropriation in the arts, here is a quiz: Is the image below by the Austin based artist Baxter Orr a twisted parody, an example of creative appropriation or just blatant plagiarism of the original artwork by Shepard Fairey (on the right)? Full article here. You decide.

Baxter was ordered by the court to stop making this class of art (a class that involves deriving from existing artwork made by the famous graffiti artist Fairey). Appropriation is a funny thing – the legalese in the court order that orders Baxter to cease and desist states that ‘as you have neither asked for nor received permission to use the work as a basis for the artwork, I believe you have willfully infringed our rights – blah, blah…”.

I cringe when I hear that people cannot ‘use other works as a basis’ (at least as idea founts with an aim to creating works of their own). Of course, ‘as a basis’ should not mean an outright copy with minor cosmetic modifications, but should accomodate for developing ‘appropriate derivatives’ that merits enough meaning to stand on its own – now defining that will take time and effort and will need to be assigned to that austere circle of artists and lawyers working out common ground together (something like the GNU GPL), but using blanket threats of ‘cannot even use the work as a basis’, will not do good for either of the parties involved…

Left: Baxter's 'Dope'; Right: Shepard's 'Hope' (Image ripped from here)Disclaimer: I read about this first on Fecalface