Appropriation

Appropriation refers to the act of borrowing or reusing existing elements within a new work.

Brief History of Appropriation

Appropriation is not a new phenomenon. Appropriation has been going on for centuries, and many of the
world’s most celebrated art movements and objects are the result of it. Greek sculptures, and particularly
their freestanding, life-size nudes, clearly show the influence of Egyptian art. The Romans appropriated
large amounts of Greek culture, and so on.

In the 20th century, appropriation can be tracked back to the cubist collages and constructions of Picasso
and Georges Braque made from 1912, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to
represent themselves. The practice was developed much further in the readymades created by the French
artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men’s urinal signed, titled, and
presented on a pedestal. Later, surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and
objects such as Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s, appropriated images and objects
appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in pop art.

The term appropriation seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in
the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons. Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other
works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Her aim was to create a new
situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image. (Samples provided
during the lecture via ppt)

Cultural Appropriation

Definitions: Cultural appropriation refers to the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or
practices by one cultural group from another.

Cultural appropriation refers to the usage of items pertaining to a certain culture (insiders)
by non-members of that culture (outsiders).

Cultural appropriation may also refer to a cultural exchange in which a society adopts (or
adapts) cultural elements from another culture.

Types of Cultural Appropriation

1. Object Appropriation (tangible appropriation) – occurs when the possession of a tangible work of art
is transferred from members of one culture to members of another culture
2. Content Appropriation (intangible appropriation) – occurs when an artist makes significant reuse of
an idea first expressed in the work of an artist from another culture
- happens to musical compositions, poems, stories and similar works of art
- examples are borrowed plots of narratives

Style appropriation /Design appropriation – occurs when a member of another culture takes the
style or a distinctive manner from a culture
- An example of this is a foreigner composing an original song in a kundiman style

Motif Appropriation – occurs when artists are influenced by the art of a culture other than their
own without creating work in the same style
- Example of this is an American appropriating an Picasso’s cubism painting using his own style

Voice Appropriation – occurs when representations made in one culture portray thoughts and
behaviors (the voice) of members of a different culture
Issues on Appropriation

On originality and Ownership

One consideration in the discourse on appropriation is the issue of originality. The primary
question we must address is – what is originality? It is the quality that refers to the circumstances of
creation – i.e. something that is invented, something that is new.
Julie Van Camp states: “We value originality because it demonstrates the ability of the artist to
advance the potential of an art form.”
Post-modern appropriation artists, including Barbara Kruger, are keen to deny the notion of
‘originality’. They believe that in borrowing existing imagery or elements of imagery, they are re-
contextualizing or appropriating the original imagery, allowing the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of
the original in a different, more relevant, or more current context.
Some of the questions that need confrontation are the following: (What is your stand on these
issues?
 Have artists lost the sense of originality that they cannot create something novel?
 Is culture owned? Are styles owned? Are ideas owned?

On matters of ownership, each country has its own copyright laws.

 Proof of ownership
 Purpose of appropriation etc.

On Culture Offense and Loss

A nation’s or people’s cultural identity forms one of the most important and most vulnerable parts of who
they are. People define themselves by what they believe, and the way they express their beliefs is
through certain symbols that are generally representative of their culture. With culture comes a sense of
identity, a sense of self, and when that culture is stolen from them, there is this deep sense of loss. This is
the very reason why cultural appropriation is grossly discriminatory and grossly wrong.

It is no surprise that most of the time the culture of minorities is the culture that is being appropriated by
others. This is because, at the very crux of it all, appropriation mirrors a colonial culture. During
colonization, the colonized countries lost a lot, because not only where they forcibly being indoctrinated
into a culture that was not their own, but with that indoctrination, they lost pieces of their culture as well. In
this present day, there is a phenomenon not simply of political and economic neo-colonization, but of
cultural neo-colonization as well.

References
Young, J. (2008). Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 9781405176569.
Rowe, H. Appropriation in contemporary art. Retrieved from
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1661/appropriation-in-contemporary-art
https://www.quora.com/Contemporary-Art-Why-do-some-artists-use-appropriation-as-part-of-or-as-
their-work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art)
http://www.howtotalkaboutarthistory.com/uncategorized/art-history-101-primitivism-cultural-
appropriation/
Borrowing, appropriating
and stealing as old as art
itself
Blurred lines indeed. The recent verdict by a federal jury in Los Angeles may
have settled one case, but it has ignited a larger debate about creativity and
ownership and how to sort out the co-opted from the copied. ¶ After a jury
determined Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams copied parts of Marvin
Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” in their hit “Blurred Lines” — and awarded
Gaye’s family $7.4 million — the music industry erupted criticism, praise
and predictions of the death of the Pop Music or the resurrection of
Originality. ¶ The over-excited reaction may have been the result of the
superstar adversaries, or the multimillion-dollar award, but more likely, it is
because the jury’s decision goes against the grain. While artists borrow,
sample and appropriate frequently, the answer to the question “Did they
steal?” is usually no. | style@washpost.com
Appropriation in art
There’s no history of art without borrowing, appropriation and in some
cases theft. Certainly the past century is inconceivable without found
objects — a urinal signed by Duchamp, a bicycle seat and handlebars turned
into an animal head by Picasso, almost everything Jeff Koons has ever done.
The 20th century began with collages made with images torn from
newspapers and was dominated by Pop art, which meticulously reproduced
the products of advertising and commercial design. Long eons of art have
been devoted to small variations on familiar and beloved formulas, so
familiar we have named them: the annunciation, deposition, sacred
conversation, assumption. The Romans copied the Greeks, and thank
goodness they did; much of what happened in the age of Socrates, Plato and
Menander is known to us only through Roman facsimiles.

But there’s also been a history of forgery, especially as art became a valuable
commodity in the 19th century. Forgers have even laid claim to legitimate
status for their work, and appealed to the same arguments circling in
conceptual art circles for justification. If Elaine Sturtevant, who was
recently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, can
make near perfect copies of Pop art, and call it new, why should forgery be
seen as illegitimate?
There are no perfect, lawyerly answers to this. But general rules apply: The
artist must add something — an idea, a nuance, a criticism — to the work he
or she appropriates; it mustn’t be done simply to deceive; and no one
should prosper by borrowing if it comes at the expense of another artist.
Shepherd Fairey based his famous Obama “Hope” poster on an image by an
Associated Press photographer and then claimed he didn’t and destroyed
evidence; the law got involved and Fairey ended up with two years of
probation, community service and a $25,000 fine.

That case comes close to some of the complexities of plagiarism in the pop
music biz: Fairey’s poster was clearly a superficial repackaging of an
existing image, and he tried to hide his debt to the original. But this was on
the margins of the more laissez-faire art world, where it’s in bad taste to get
too worked up about appropriation. Because without it, there’s almost no
art to talk about.

— Philip Kennicott
Transformative
in fiction
Authors have been writing stories involving other authors’ characters for
centuries. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare, for instance, borrowed from
earlier tales to create their own masterpieces. But the Internet supercharged
such borrowing and reworking like never before. “Star Trek” fans who had
once traded their own photocopied stories about Spock and Captain Kirk
were suddenly joined by thousands of people posting “fan fiction” or
“fanfict” about all kinds of well-known characters, from Harry Potter to
Sherlock Holmes.

A notable segment of this material is sexually explicit in ways the original

authors never were. (In a subset called slash fiction, Kirk and Spock boldly
go where no one had seen them go on TV.) In fact — holy cow! — one of the
most successful novels of our age, E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,”
began as fanfict based on Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” characters Bella and
Edward. James later changed their names to Anastasia and Christian and
made other revisions as her series evolved.

Legally, fanfict hovers in at least 50 shades of gray. When challenged, some

authors say, “Laters, baby,” and simply take their stories down. But others
have successfully claimed that their works are sufficiently transformative to
be allowable under the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. Those
complex legal arguments involve more knots than you’ll find in Christian’s
Red Room of Pain.

— Ron Charles
Unenforceable
in comedy
“We live in a world where John Lennon was murdered, yet Barry Manilow
continues to put out f---ing albums” — Bill Hicks
“We live in a country where John Lennon takes six bullets in the
chest. . . . Bring me the head of Barry Manilow, alright? I wanna drink
beer out of his empty head!” — Denis Leary.
What do Robin Williams, Milton Berle, and Denis Leary have in common?
They’ve all been accused of the highest crime of comedy: Joke theft. So why
aren’t punch lines being delivered in front of a jury? Two reasons.

Technically, copyright law protects exact wording, not an idea. So Seinfeld’s

airplane routine might have come first. But unless the next comic to rant
about the bag of peanuts delivers the bit exactly as Jerry did, he’s probably
okay. Beyond that, comic kleptos are protected by a more important reality.
Lawyers are expensive. Jokes don’t pay much. And the angry comic always
has a better option. Go public and shame the joke thief.

— Geoff Edgers
The art of homage
in classical music
“Good artists borrow,” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have said, “great ones
steal.” (Or did he crib that line from someone else?) Call it borrowing or
lifting, direct quotation has been a staple of the composer’s arsenal since the
dawn of Western music. Verdi obviously had heard Rossini’s “Otello” a time
or two before writing the Willow Song in his own; Leoncavallo meant it as
an homage to Verdi when he quoted a line of “Rigoletto” at the end of the
prologue in “Pagliacci.”

Sometimes such “borrowings” are to make a point, as when Shostakovich

took a line from Lehar’s “The Merry Widow” (Hitler’s favorite operetta) and
included it in the banal, repeated, obsessive, earworm tune that he repeated
over and over and over to denote the incoming German forces in his
Seventh Symphony. Bartok heard this on the radio, found it trite, and cited
the passage mockingly in his own “Concerto for Orchestra.” Or was he
mocking Lehar, rather than Shostakovich? Certainly classical composers
expected such citations to be recognized. The story goes that when someone
asked Brahms about the obvious parallels between the final movement of
his First Symphony and the “Ode to Joy” theme in Beethoven’s Ninth,
Brahms responded, “Any ass can hear that!” And he never had to pay
damages.

— Anne Midgette
Adaptation in theater
Aaron Posner’s “Stupid F---ing Bird,” which has already enjoyed two runs at
Woolly Mammoth and is currently being produced around the country —
that’s just Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” right? And isn’t Posner’s “Life
Sucks” Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”? Yes: The characters, the plot, the angst
and humor are mainly the same. And no: the language is slangy and now,
and license is freely claimed to recast Chekhov’s questions in a modern
terms.

Posner doesn’t hide what he’s doing, but the key is that Chekhov has been
dead for a century and his plays are in the public domain. Different angle:
Bruce Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer-winning “Clybourne Park” didn’t steal from
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 “A Raisin in the Sun” (which is still copyrighted)
because “Clybourne” merely started with that drama’s situation then
created a whole new play moving years into the future and grappling with a
new plot and circumstances; so did Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2013 “Raisin”
sequel and “Clybourne” reply “Beneatha’s Place.”

A quick check with the Dramatists Guild in New York confirms that the
magpie culture of borrowing and re-appropriation that drives current pop
music is largely alien to playwrights, even when one work is in creative
conversation with another. Unlike Hollywood screenwriters who get paid
but lose copyright control to the studios, playwrights — usually poorly paid
— at least retain copyright. If a playwright were to try a freewheeling,
blurry-lined adaptation of, say, Tony Kushner’s early 1990s “Angels in
America” or Ntzoke Shange’s 1975 “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered
Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” without first licensing the rights, odds
are pretty good that would be stealing.

— Nelson Pressley

Contemporary Art: Why do some artists use

appropriation as part of, or as their work?
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4 Answers

Marius Watz, Artist, curator, educator

Updated Oct 19 2012
Appropriation in art is rarely about stealing or not respecting authorship, nor is it a symptom of
laziness. Most artists who appropriate (or "sample" or "remix", as it is also called) do so because
they are interested in how existing images or sounds can be used to create new works that refer
back to the original work while producing a new cultural artifact.

Typically, such practices include a commentary or critique of the original's role in a given cultural
context, even if it is not always explicit. Some appropriation takes the form of hommage, but satire
or creative vandalism are equally common.

One argument for appropriation is that society is increasingly based on an overwhelming overload
of cultural signifiers (think semiotics), which become material for artistic investigation through
appropriating and re-contextualizing. Some artists have complex explanations for their work in this
vein, others simply take it as a given that mass media is a shared text to be edited and remixed.
Post-modernism got some things right, after all.

In general appropriation tends to be more problematic when the source is the work of another
artist or when little is done to expand on the original. Richard Prince has done a lot of interesting
work with appropriation, but his brazen use of Patrick Cariou's photographs as source material
seems unethical at the very least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric.... In my view Shephard
Fairey's use of an AP image of Obama was justifiable, but faking legal documents is as dumb as it
gets.

If you go beyond contemporary art and look at music from the last 20 years you will find that most
popular music relies heavily on appropriation and sampling, often with great effect. Hip hop
culture arose from the practice of sampling existing music to painstakingly assemble new
compositions without the use of live musicians. Not everyone is a fan, but it'd be hard to argue that
this practice is not culturally significant.

Rowe, H. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1661/appropriation-in-contemporary-art

https://www.quora.com/Contemporary-Art-Why-do-some-artists-use-appropriation-as-part-of-or-as-their-work