appropriation

A quick post for the morning; just thoughts. I watched all 4 hrs of Martin Scorsese's "My Voyage to Italy," a primer in Italian cinema. Such luscious, enduring images! All of them brought to life by a man impassioned and profoundly influenced by a childhood spent at the movies. It made me think about the creative process, and about the nature and perhaps illusion of originality.

The recent court ruling against Richard Prince has sparked controversy and no small amount of hand-wringing in the upper echelons of the art world. For an interesting point of view, visit here.

I've mixed emotions about appropriation as art. Emotions aside, I tend to feel that re-contextualizing a single (or even multiple) iconic image(s) is one thing, while simply re-using a body of work to "create" a body of work begins to erode several important lines. Of the nearly 100 photographs in Cariou's book, Richard Prince used 80; it doesn't seem unreasonable to question such large-scale use of a single body of work for one's own. The Prince case, much as some would like to make it about censorship and artistic freedom, is about power and money. Some don't believe that someone like Gagosian should have ethical or broader social responsibilities in his gallery program; that, as an entrepreneur, he is free from all fetters of such concerns and should only pursue what he feels is in his best interest as a businessman. Yet we can no longer afford to deny that, once a certain economic level is attained and once a single person has such far-reaching cultural power, there must be some level of social and cultural accountability. The rub is how those levels are to be responsibly determined.

The art bubble, as well as the Wall Street bubble, were largely created from the self-rationalization of excessive wealth and power. These things are seductive, addictive really. Should government say how much is too much for any one person to have? No. Should society, and by this I mean our culture and its collective ethos, impose limits on personal wealth and power? Probably so.

Some will see this as an attack on free market capitalism, and by extension an attack on our version of democracy (and it is, after all, but one version). This is not so. We are revisionist by nature in this country with our history, because our history is so brief. We are told, as of late, that the "American Dream" is about unlimited prosperity and autonomous markets. Yet we forget other essential elements of said dream: a relationship between worker and employer; a level playing field on which anyone can advance and raise their socio-economic status; access to basic human needs, which then free human beings to concentrate on self-betterment and personal investment in the larger society; the ability to care and be cared for in old age. We forget the lessons of the 1930's all too easily it seems.

I am not entirely sure I agree with Judge Batts' ruling against Prince; but I think the premise of the case is a bit of a distortion. I see nothing wrong with Fairey's "Hope" poster, for example. And I'm certainly not intellectually opposed with appropriation as art.

The issue is one of might attempting to make right, and in this case we have a blue chip artist and arguably one of the most powerful art dealers in the world against a moderately successful photographer. It is not hard to cast this as both a conflict of class and power. How hard would it have been for Prince to approach Cariou about the use of his photos? If he had said yes, there would have been a relatively small amount of money involved and the matter settled. Everybody wins. If he had said no, Prince could have found other images. Unfortunately, Batts language does little to address these concerns and instead wanders into the murky waters of art theory, which I doubt she knows enough about to rule responsibly.

Then there is the as yet un-discussed point that, as a body of work "The Canal Series" is certainly not Prince's strongest effort. The series can almost be seen as an artist in decline, a near miss from a world-class hitter. It is ludicrous to suggest that the work has value because people were willing to pay high dollar for it. The more appropriate discussion is what determines value right now in the art marketplace, and are marketing and pedigree in fact much more important to the contemporary high-end collector than content, artistic merit and personal connection? I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't read the minds of the folks who collectively plopped down $10 million for some of these works. I'm merely saying that I wonder if their affinity for Prince is authentic or based on his role in their portfolios.