sábado, 15 de dezembro de 2007

e mais / and this

also from newsgrist, via kultureflash

Stretchslide2

Randy Kennedy's interesting Times article on Richard Prince and his commercial sources; but first, some thoughts from Christian Patterson via Speak, See, Remember:

Christian Patterson: ...in the article, Jim Krantz, one of the photographers whose work Prince has appropriated, shares his feelings:

Jim Krantz: My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It's an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn't create his own work, and I don't understand the frenzy around it.

If I italicized Moby-Dick, then would it be my book? I don't know. But I don't think so."

Christian Patterson: I personally enjoy looking at a lot of this type of work.

There is often a complex relationship between the original and appropriated images. There is often a difference in artistic intent. And the appropriated image usage often relies on the viewer's familiarity with the original image to achieve a certain effect.

If you'd like to learn more, and read a couple of interesting case studies:

U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use
Wikipedia - Fair Use

Wikipedia - Appropriation (Art) (This page includes many good links to appropriation artists, and examples of legal decisions dealing with the subject.)

NEWSgrist: Krantz's naive remarks about "artists who don't create their own work" and appropriation in visual art being tantamount to italicizing Moby Dick, illustrates commonly-held misconceptions about originality (not just appropriation), and about how all art is sourced. People do get caught up in appearances; of course there is more to it than meets the eye, as Mr Patterson points out above.... anyway, I find it hard to sympathize with commercial photographers for what should be obvious reasons.

NYTimes article: ...Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. "People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images," he said.

NEWSgrist: Corporations pay Krantz to make their product more desirable. As far as the public is concerned, he IS anonymous (does Marlborough let him sign his name to the ads?)

via NYTimes:

If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What's the Original?
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: December 6, 2007

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum's spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy's hat and outstretched arm.

Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. "Like anyone who knows his work," Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, "it's like seeing yourself in a mirror." He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, "When I left, I didn't know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot."

When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that "certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves."

But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: "No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you're going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank."

People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince's most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, "I never associated advertisements with having an author.")

cont