For our first brief we have been given the topic of ‘Appropriation’. Appropriation in art “is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them” according to Google’s Wikipedia definition. Essentially you our taking someone else’s work and changing it in some way to create a new piece of art with a new meaning. Although this can be quite controversial and appropriated artwork has been subject to numerous high-profile lawsuits over copyrighted images. Some of the most famous cases involve Richard Prince and the ‘Cowboy’, in which Prince took a series of Marlboro cigarette ad’s, cropped them and re-sold them as his own. This work was sold for $1.2 million at auction and its not the only time Prince has appropriate images to sell on.
In 2015 Prince sold random Instagram users photos for tens of thousands of dollars simply by blowing them up. To get around U.S copyright law he simply added a comment to them before printing and therefore transform the meaning of the image. Although no user has yet sued Prince for this, but one did try sell a photo of his photo of their photo but didn’t get very far in making any profit. Instagram did comment saying “People in the Instagram community own their photos, period. On the platform, if someone feel that their copyright has been violated, they can report it to us and we will take appropriate action. Off the platform, content owners can enforce their legal rights.”
Another artist who uses appropriations is Shepard Fairey, known for using existing art in his work but this was challenged in 2008 when the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against him for the use of their image of Obama in his ‘Hope’ poster.
And yet when Baxter Orr used one of Fairey’s work in his art, Fairey threaten to sue. There’s an economic term for this called ‘Loss Aversion’, which is where people strongly avoid losses than acquiring gains. In other words, people are happy to appropriate from others but when its their work being appropriate they feel wronged.
There’s a theory by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson where he mentions that we learn as a sociality by copying the works of the people before us, that nothing is original but a mixture of other peoples works and our own ideas and experiences added together. This is easy to see in musical artist who will perform more cover songs when they first start out before moving more into their own works.
I believe appropriation is a good thing as long as people don’t try push it too far and if you appropriate then you should expect your work to be appropriated as well.
Sources
https://culturalhacking.wordpress.com/tag/appropriation/
https://cyakelart101.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/appropriation-of-art/
https://jcote970visrhetoric.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/appropriation-of-obamas-hope/
http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/appropriation
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
http://priceonomics.com/the-richest-photographer-in-the-world/
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