Comments on: Highlighter Pen

By: artdiva

artdiva — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:07:43 +0000

We’ll all be dead someday anyways, so taking credit won’t really matter. I mean, is, like, Pollock haunting AbEx hobbyists selling canvas board paintings on craigslist, shaking his fist at them? No. At least, there hasn’t been a Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State episode about something like that yet…

By: Alex Von Bergen

Alex Von Bergen — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:22:44 +0000

I’d be flattered if an artist used something of mine in his or her work to say something else. Whenever I put something online or in some other type of public space I’m fully aware that it can be copied-and-pasted or (re)photographed. Artists have been using images from mass culture in collage for almost one hundred years, Eppridge has to realize that and get over it. His photographs were in LIFE magazine, the millions of people that read the magazine were just supposed to consume its contents without question? There really is no end to this conversation, that’s what makes it fun.

By: artdiva

artdiva — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:57:45 +0000

Probably much of that crankiness stems from just taking the unauthorized usage personally, it was his photograph after all, and although when I read it he seems to make an effort to critique, or at least control his rhetoric, but this does little to conceal his underlying rant. Not to defend either one of them, but how would you feel if your work was incorporated without credit? I wonder if the art was any good though if he would still care. I don’t think art debates ever really end, they just die down and bubble up every once in awhile. Because who decides when something is resolved? Technology seems to have busted the appropriation issue wide open again, at least for those of us born pre-Internet. Does anyone born after 1995 really care about this stuff?

By: Alex Von Bergen

Alex Von Bergen — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:51:34 +0000

Eppridge just sounds like a cranky old photographer to me. Wasn’t authorship and originality already battled out in 70′s and 80′s by the Pictures Generation (and even earlier than that by Duchamp)? I don’t mean to defend Lawrence’s work, but Eppridge’s post seems like a reactionary complaint rather than a critique of appropriation.