The question of appropriating images and using copyrighted materials is an always-relevant issue in the field of art and, by extent, the art classroom. For young artists just getting started, it’s important to become familiar with the law. Many young artists begin honing their skills by copying cartoon characters and making fan art using photos of celebrities. There’s nothing wrong with this. They are essentially making a “forgery” of the photograph in order to hone their skills, not to sell the work for money. Making copies of master drawings to learn how to draw has been an exercise practiced by student-artists for centuries. These drawings won’t be considered a market replacement for the original drawings. And of course drawings by the likes of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Degas are over 75 years old; they are most definitely in the public domain.However, when students are starting to become more advanced and come up with concepts for original artistic pieces, they need to be made aware that they can’t pass off someone else’s artwork for their own.
Remember the HOPE poster from Obama's 2008 campaign? The artist Shepard Fairey was sued by the Associate Press for using the photo as a source. Art teachers can use real-world instances like these to explain the concept of fair use with students. It's a vital concept for young artists to grasp. If a student-artist has an idea for a painting, say, where they depict the president and their cabinet as the Avengers (I don’t know…It’s the first thing I could think of…), we need to be able to identify potential legal pitfalls of doing this. Or say, instead of the Avengers painting, a student needs a picture of a specific type of dog as a reference and they take one from Google Images. We have to ask the student the question: Why MUST you use that image instead of another one? And if you must use this image, how will you be transforming it in a way that makes it somehow your own? It’s often a good idea for art teachers to encourage artists to take their own reference pictures whenever possible. In these days, almost every student carries a camera with them, so this isn’t so much to ask.
Copyright and ownership are fascinating to talk about in the context of art. There’s a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” There are countless instances in art history where artists are deriving ideas and “stealing” from other artists. It’s exciting to think that everyone’s artwork is part of a long chain of artists feeding off of other people’s novel ideas. However, there is a clear difference between being influenced by another artist and claiming someone else’s work as one’s. This is a slippery slope with post-modernism in the second half of the twentieth century (and who-knows-what-movement-this-is-now in the twenty-first century). A couple years ago, the established New York artist Richard Prince had a show a Gagosian Gallery featuring screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos with his comments Photoshopped underneath. Because of his addition of text, his pieces that use the photography of (compared to him) unknown artists qualify as fair use. The gallery was selling these pieces for around $100,000 each. This caused an enormous uproar, rightfully so. Another infamous piece is Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans,a photograph (or re-photograph) of one of Depression-era photographer Walker Evans’ images.
Top: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936
Bottom: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981
Levine’s piece explained by the art history textbook Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being by Jonathan Fineberg:
“ …Levine photographed a work by Walker Evans in a manner scarcely distinguishable from the original and presented it as her own work…[Her] art explores the possibility of expressing oneself using the ready-made expressions of someone else, asking: can this method express authentic feeling? Is it original?” [And Fineberg on Richard Prince (since it’s in the same paragraph)] “Similarly, Richard Prince introduced the concept of ‘rephotogrphy’ in 1977, making photographs of pictures in magazine advertisements and then blowing them up, cropping, or rearranging them to take on new meanings by new juxtapositions [fancy big word]. His work underscores the postmodern emphasis on the surface of events, ‘scanning’ experience as in the media and computers rather than penetrating its depth.” (p. 390)
Anyhow, I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent, but these issues are fascinating to talk about. Issues of ethics get people riled up!
I really like the website Photos for Class, which filters images that don’t fall into the public domain. When you download the picture, the file comes with a watermark with the proper accreditation already written out.
Creative people of all sorts have suffered due to illegal sharing and exploitation of their original work. We need to explain that we may not think anything of downloading a song, movie, or picture illegally. But if we are allowed to steal from others, then shouldn’t other people be allowed to steal from us? We need to show students how to respect others’ creative works by obtaining them legally.
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards on Copyright and Plagiarism
Austin Kleon's TED talk "Steal Like and Artist"
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