Cranky Media Guy sent me
an interesting link to an article published last December in the New York Times about the artist
Richard Prince. He's described as a pioneer of
"appropriation art." What this means is that Prince takes photographs of other photographer's photographs, and then displays them as his own. For instance, he had an exhibit at the Guggenheim about cowboys, which basically consisted of photographs of Marlboro ads. The guy who actually took the images for the Marlboro ads, the photographer Jim Krantz, visited the exhibit and was like, "Hang on, those are my photographs!"
In the thumbnail, you can see Krantz's original photograph on top, and Prince's rephotograph of it on the bottom.
Prince doesn't try to hide what he does. And art critics love his work. According to the NY Times: "one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million." That's good money for a photograph of someone else's photograph.
It raises the question, is this really art, or is it just mindless copying? To which the answer, as always, is that art is whatever art critics say is art (and whatever the courts allow artists to get away with).
Generally I take a very liberal attitude about copyright. I think it's necessary that people are allowed to copy works of art in order to be able to comment upon them, criticize them, or develop them into something new and different. But what Prince is doing looks more to me like glorified scrapbooking than creating original art.
It also reminds me of the scam that art museums try to use to establish perpetual copyright to the works in their collection. They take photographs of all the paintings they own that have passed into public domain. Then they claim that, while the original might be in the public domain, their picture of it is copyrighted -- and then they demand exorbitant fees from anyone who wants to reproduce it.
Comments
Maya Gallo: I like this landscape. It has a nice Ansel Adams quality to it.
Elliot DiMauro: That's because it's a picture of an Ansel Adams. That's his thing, he takes pictures of pictures.
Maya Gallo: Maybe he's making a statement.
Elliot DiMauro: Yeah, he's saying, "I'm out of medication."
Hmm ... I wonder if the same argument would work with the RIAA?
Really what I don't like about the whole thing is that critics like it and say it's a different and unique work of art. I'd have no problem if they said those old Marlboro posters are art, but taking pictures of another picture isn't the same as Andy Warhol hand-painting his own Brillo boxes (and even that was pushing it.) But what Andy did was trying to celebrate overlooked beauty in our contemporary lives, this guy is just stealing someone else's work.
Appropriation Authorship!
Interestingly, one of my paiting teachers used to argue that photography is not properly considered art, because it's just reproducing images that already exist. Therefore it's more of a manufacturing technology than an art. He didn't hate photography; he just didn't think it was art.
But really folks, the problem is not with the fact that people copy other peoples work, but with the fact that they don't give credit to the person they copied it from ala "Prince after Krantz".
"This guy is adding nothing to the previous work. If he modified it in some way, emphasizing some aspect of the previous work or otherwise adding his own value to it, then an argument could be made that it is art."
Yup, I agree. Warhol and Lichtenstein were making a comment about overlooked things like Brillo boxes and comic books being worthy of attention. This guy is just stealing someone else's work and "making bank" (as the kids say) off it.
This only goes to say what I say about art critics is still true - they've got their heads jammed so far up their own backside they wouldn't recognise true art if it sat on them.
It may be that a Brillo box has a great design, but if so, more credit should go to the original designer than to Warhol for silkscreening that same design onto canvas a few hundred times.
If it were a new idea to present photographs of photographs as original art, Prince could be credited with raising interesting critical issues, but, as in the examples already cited here and many others, it's been done (and done and done) before.
In a way, though, that's irrelevant to the discussion here - I still think that what Prince is doing would be morally and artistically defensible (even if unoriginal to the point of worthlessness) if he went no further than exhibiting his 'appropriations' in a gallery space (ie if he was not selling 'his' work). It's that aspect of it - the large-scale profiteering - which sticks crossways in my craw.
Allowing people to copyright reproductions would render all copyright meaningless, since copyright violations are, by definitions, reproducing someone's copyrighted work. If this scam was legal, no publishing house or record label would ever pay royalties, since all printed copies of a manuscript or copies of a song would be copyrighted by whoever created the reproduction.
I suppose it's entirely possible that some art museum has tried to convince an artist that a photo of their work is copyrighted by the museum, but no court could support that interpretation.
I was working as a security guard at a Rolling Stones concert in Madison Square Garden. I was standing immediately to the right of the front of the stage when I realized that Andy Warhol was next to me.
I said, "Hey, you're Andy Warhol," (totally justifying that reputation for conversational genius that I have) and he said, "Yes, I am."
Then, some idiot audience member jumped onto the stage and I had to break off my witty repartee to attempt to physically remove the guy.
Warhol was as pale-skinned and creepy-looking as he seemed in ever photograph you've ever seen of him, by the way.