Two things coming up recently regarding powerful rich “artists” making kudos and money from the hard work of whom they can only consider to be lesser mortals.

First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince aft..er he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.”

– A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000

..and then Dan Clowes on that Shia Lebeouf thing:

“Speaking of grudges: Have you forgiven Shia LaBeouf?”
“I don’t know. No, not really. I mean, I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t think about it that much. But I don’t think what he did was really forgivable. I don’t know that it matters that much if he’s apologizing or whatever. I just hate the idea of anybody doing that to some young artist who couldn’t hire legal representation. I’m sort of the one guy who could deal with something like that, and it would be really possible for somebody with his amount of money and power to just crush some poor young artist if that happened to them, and I would hate to see that. So I don’t think it’s something that needs to be forgiven; I think it’s something that always needs to be thought of as just a horrible thing to do.”

– Comics Legend Daniel Clowes on Hate Mail, Jim Belushi, and Not Forgiving Shia LaBeouf

Difficult for me to comment on this without falling into ranting, which is how I am supposed to react.

Let’s cleanse ourselves by reading about the true artists who Lichenstein “homaged”, in Deconstructing Lichtenstein.

Finally an article addressing a parallel issue of the popular misconceptions around the creation of CGI for big budget features:

As the debate surrounding what visual effects are worth rages on, it is clear that the studios themselves have an interest in perpetuating the myth that VFX are the product of clinical assembly lines and the results are equally lifeless and mechanical. Blaming computers for the dumbing down of movies has become a journalistic trope that is bandied about to squeeze the one part of the Hollywood machine that has no union or organizational skill to push back.

– Why VFX is being vilified