I've experienced a fair amount of vitriol over the past few hours upon learning that an alleged artist named Richard Prince has chosen as "his" latest work what are basically nothing more than blown-up screen grabs of Instagram posts. Apparently his addition to each consists merely of adding a comment at the bottom, and that seems to be enough to legally allow this, which infuriates me. It seems that this is nothing new, he's appropriated others' work in the past, but his minor changes have mostly let him get away with it.
What bothers me about this; someone using somebody else's work and creativity and making money on it, with very little effort on their part. I'm sorry but I can't see that as anything else but thievery. Use all the ironic and post-modern tags that you want, but the bottom line is that somebody else did the hard work and he's possibly getting rich off of it. People that actually defend him say that putting your work online means that it's up for grabs, which I say is bullshit. But it's is also a big reason why I'm wary of putting too much of my work on Facebook or setting up an artist page, and part of what is holding me back in my website redesign. You can do all sorts of things to try and prevent theft, but I know even just from my own research for images online for inspiration or reference that all you need to do is a simple screen grab. More evidence that people want their art for free, never mind who created it.
I was amused by the response of one of the victims, the Suicide Girls, of offering for sale the same images that were stolen at a much more reasonable price, and the proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit focused on technology.
Well, getting back to my own artwork, which to my knowledge has not been stolen yet. I was asked by my favorite model to do a drawing based on a photo from our last shoot together. I got as far as the pencils, but we both agreed I had already done this one better already, so another shot was selected.
Again it's a challenge, one that I'm hoping to overcome, to not make the drawing too complicated and of course learn to draw quicker as well. The new one took only an hour, though there's some lace patterns in the outfit that will take considerably longer.
There's quite a few other concepts that I have started years ago that I'd like to get to this summer, one depicting Medusa, the other Kali. The latter has proven most elusive to pin down, as I'm basing it on a dream, or vision, that I had of her once, and I'd like to do it justice.
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