I went to the conference Ursinus College had Tuesday on "Artistic Appropriation in the Age of Litigation"
Before I got there, I had onsidered a few places where I had witnessed appropriation in what I think are good and bad ways. There is always so much debate about how much, and in what use is this acceptable. The conversations there opened my eyes to how much appropriating goes on. Fair use lawyers there demanded that appropraiting is fine if the intent of the artist is to comment directly on the appropriated image, but if it used simply as a device to simplify one's own artistic efforts, it is fraudulent. Any thoughts on this one?
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It's funny that appropriation - which started as a kind of cultural response to the appalling ubiquity of images - has become a legal issue at all. Many of the original appropriation artists regard the landscape as polluted with imagery, all of it available for recycling. But that "pollution" has turned out to be..well, potentially profitable. It's as if the owners of the junk yard have decided to charge people for hauling off trash because there was the potential for it to become valuable.
To me, the most interesting thinking on appropriation is coming from those who see images and ideas as raw material for new work (in line with the way appropriation originated). People like Lawrence Lessig argue that the nature of creativity has changed, and we're entering an era where the synthesis of things is more important than their outright invention. The whole idea is consistant with the feeling many of us have that "it's all been done before" and offers a way to keep on doing.
But, lately, this has gotten troubling - I'm deep into planning this research class (see my post today) and I'm doubting the construction of the world as a field of data awaiting synthesis. I still don't believe in the Romantic mythology of things coming from no place (the only reasonable paraphrase of a theory of inspiration I can imagaine...), but I'm not quite ready to throw the creativity baby out with the bathwater. Something about originality and authorship remains almost narcotically attractive...
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