If you belong to any art site such as deviantArt or if you put your photographic work online, a common complaint of members is that of 'art theft'. On deviantArt there are even people who seem to spend all their time policing and reporting - bless them, they obviously don't have to engage in other work.
I perfectly understand the concerns of those who feel their Art has been taken away and their remonstrances when learning that someone is actually making a few bucks out of it .
However, I would like to open this up for discussion.
I would say that most art has been made by people stealing ideas from someone else. There are blatant examples of art being stolen and then copyrighted. Musical genius Benjamin Britten went to Bali and transcribed note by note well known traditional melodies for his score of The Prince of the Pagodas and then copyrighted the material. Traditional music is up for grabs. Also, as someone commented, "Balinese people are not real people to a European". Plenty of truth in that. It was Europe that invented colonialism 'for the benefit of those who are still developing' but we all know that it was for profit.
All right, all right, colonialism is a thing of the past. What has this to do with art theft?
You tell me, dear reader.
I would like to consider this notion of 'theft' or appropriation. Culturally the negativity of appropriation and the notion of intellectual property are Euro-American, modernist formulations. In a number of non-western cultures imitating and appropriating someone's work is regarded as an act of homage, expected and encouraged in order to inscribe one's authorship within a tradition; this was the case in pre-modern Europe and in classical antiquity.
Appropriation has been seen as a threat to the authenticity of the ‘original,’ emphasising the superiority of the former over any derivative ‘copy’. However, Walter Benjamin reformulated the role of the copy as a reactivation of the reproduced object through the act of reproduction, thus questioning entrenched notions of originality and authenticity. Benjamin’s essay, akin to the ‘ready-mades’ of Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp, had a profound influence on the development in New York during the 1980s of Appropriation Art, whose aim was to interrogate authenticity and originality and the purpose of contemporary art.
Post-modern critiques have dispelled the aura of negativity surrounding appropriation by making us recognise that appropriation is potentially a two-way process of ‘exchange and creative response'. Bakhtin formulates utterance as response to another utterance as the basis of his notion of dialogue; Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality is that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’; while the hypertext of contemporary internet usage relies on appropriation as a praxis.
A caveat is however necessary. Appropriation should not be equated with plagiarism, the act of passing off as one’s own what done by another, without any acknowledgement. There is arguably a fine line between the two. It is not the endeavour as such, but the lack of acknowledgment, that is problematic.
(All photos modelled by Alex B and taken by Korrigan)
There's a difference, though, between lifting ideas and doing your own take on them, with full credit given and the original artists' blessing, and presenting someone else's unaltered work as your own. The latter is both theft and falsehood.
ReplyDeleteBy and large. But do you think Leonardo would have approved of Duchamps?
ReplyDelete