Calling Artists…
Calling All Artists for “Cheat Codes”
Artists from around the world are invited to attend a discussion about behavioral economics, dishonesty and cheating at the Center for Advanced Hindsight on October 25 at 7:30 PM EST. (Artists who do not live within driving distance of Durham, NC can watch the forum streaming live online.)
Interested artists should RSVP to Catherine Howard (irrationalcreativity@gmail.com) by October 24 by 9 PM for driving directions and/or the online streaming link.
After the forum, applications will be circulated to artists interested in creating artwork to depict their reflection on cheating and dishonesty. Applications will include a brief explanation of the artist’s creative process and 2-3 digital images of past work.
Please submit applications to Catherine Howard at irrationalcreativity@gmail.com by October 28.
Artists will be notified if they are selected to participate by October 29 and will receive a $100 stipend to complete their piece. There is no limitation to the style or media of pieces created for “Cheat Codes,” but all work must be completed by November 26.
Artwork created for “Cheat Codes” will be on display the Center for Advanced Hindsight from December 3, 2011 to January 31, 2012. An exhibit catalogue / book, including responses and reflections by the artists and the researchers at The Center For Advanced Hindsight, will be published. Each artist will receive a copy.
Artists will retain all rights to their piece. Works will be returned to artists after the exhibit by February 15, 2012. If the piece is purchased, the $100 stipend will be deducted from the purchase price.
Important Deadlines
Oct 25, 7:30 PM: Dishonesty forum at the Center for Advanced Hindsight
Oct 28, 9 PM: Deadline to apply for participation in “Dishonesty”
Oct 29, 9 PM: Selected artists will be notified
Nov 26, 9 PM: Drop-off deadline
Dec 16, 6 – 10 PM: Opening reception at the Center for Advanced Hindsight
For more information about the Creative Dishonesty project, contact curator Catherine Howard at irrationalcreativity@gmail.com.
The Upside of Irrationality, explores some positive and some negative ways that irrationality plays out in our lives.
Do artists cheat? How do you define cheating? When you copy another artist’s work without “paying for it” in one form or another is that cheating? Are influences considered cheating? I had a work of mine used without my permission not as I originally made it as a painted wood sculpture, but as model for a photograph. I felt I had been cheated.
I wouldn’t consider influences to be cheating. Nor would I consider inspiration from the great masters to be cheating. That is how we learn and grow. Art is a process that builds on itself. My own avatar is an homage to one of my great influences, Alfonse Mucha. Perhaps some would consider that cheating, but I consider it respect or reverence given. The example you’ve given of what happened to you is inconsiderate at best, and dishonest, so yes, I would say in this instance, you were cheated. I guess the best way to have a positive attitude about such a negative incident is to smile and tell yourself that imitation is the highest form of flattery. But you were definately wronged. Your permission should have been asked, and your feelings considered.
I am pretty sure that influence remains a gray area. However, there are many instances where cheating is obvious. But you do bring up a good point. if a person changes artistic mediums is it really cheating?
Re-miix culture is happening all around us. Being influenced by music, art, performance is going to happen when anyone starts a creative project. That is how it works. Now, blatantly taking someones work, copying and saying it was your original work, that is wrong. Derivative works based on others work with a clear attempt to make it your own should be ok. Of course impression is everything.
A good example of a dispute like this, between Beyonce and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker can be seen here: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38829/avant-garde-belgian-dancer-ridicules-beyonce-for-stealing-her-moves/http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38829/avant-garde-belgian-dancer-ridicules-beyonce-for-stealing-her-moves/
After watching this I thought Beyonce’s work was sufficiently different, what do you think?
Hello, I am Newman, a tee shirt designer, and I see this issue come up quite frequently. I’ll even admit to cheating myself, if you want to hear it from the horses mouth as it were. If it’s not to late, I would like to help by giving my insights. An article you might like involves an artist who used a photograph to design a tee shirt of a panda. He made a considerable amount of changes to the original photo including using his own self constructed splatter brushes and other trade tricks. The tee shirt design was then used by another artist for the basis of a painting. There was quite an uproar over the tee shirt design being used, but not a peep about the original photograph being used in the same manor. The gray area I believe is how much work is required for an artist to do before there can be a mental transfer of ownership. The perception is that a photographer need only need push a button, and the work is complete. A designer has to take several more hours to come up with a creation. Or that a photograph and an illustration are two different animals, and there is no harm in using a photo to make something that does not compete with the usage rights of photographs. Or that an illustrator wanting to draw a panda, needs to know what a panda looks like inorder to get the job done because they most likely don’t have a panda in there studio, so anything is fair game. There is an unspoken rule, that photos are ok to steal from, but other artwork is not, illustrations, paintings, drawings ect. In my own work I use a graphite transfer technique that is technically cheating because I am relaying heavily if not entirely on someone else’s work to make my own. It is a very tedious process. 1.print photo. 2 trace with pencil on one side. 2. turn over and retrace a second time. (this is because the image from the first tracing is reversed and needs to be corrected to match the photo.) So now I have a sheet of tracing paper with pencil drawings on both sides. I then place the paper with the correct facing pencil side down on a blank sheet of paper, and trace the back of it with a pen. The pressure of the pen pushes the pencil markings into the blank sheet, leaving me with a rough pencil sketch. I then use brush and ink to go over my sketch, and add detailing as necessary. You might ask why bother with all this, and I don’t have a good answer for that to be honest. I’m not terribly good at drawing the traditional way. Look at something and make the appropriate markings to have it look right. By using this technique, the difficult problem of proportion and perspective (key components in making something look right) are taken care of for me, and I can concentrate on the “fun” part, adding my own markings and style choices. One some occasions if you were to place my finished work next to the original photo, you would not know abou the tracing procedure if I didn’t tell you. In other cases I have gotten lazy and it’s quite obvious even to the untrained eye. I hope this is helpful to you, and I would like to be contacted at any time to explain my feelings on the subject further. I have read both books, and your research has really changed my life.
Hola Daniel, I understand what you are saying. For many years I created custom architectural stained glass windows. The process took more time, skill, and patience than most people realize. Yes, tedious is the word! I also had to trace both sides of large rolls of paper in order to transfer it to my template for the glass and to glue on the glass as a guide for cutting it. I studied the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany. I taught myself his method, particularly of back-plating which is soldering one image behind another. For example, sea life beneath water. So did I steal from Tiffany or did I learn from him? I used his technique, but the images were dictated by the client’s request. The important thing that you have done is added your own touch and interpretation. I did the same by soldering coiled wire into pieces, etc. We all begin at the beginning, then as we are more practiced, the process builds on itself, and evolves the work into a personal expression, thus the mental transfer. What you do involves mastering technique and that is to be admired. It’s easy to get lazy at such a laborious process. I’m glad you’re concentrating on the fun part! Many artistic mediums require precision, therefore tracing, measuring, etc. I love working on the potter’s wheel which requires years of learning precise technique before the fun part kicks in. The exciting thing to me is knowing no one person has ever mastered every aspect of pottery in one lifetime, so it stays challenging. So let’s look at Dale Chihuly. He’ll probably go down in history as today’s Tiffany. But he brings in Venetian glass blowers to add their touches to his work, particularly cherubs. Is he cheating? I’d call it collaborating, but he catches a lot of flack in the art world for doing it. As long as the photo you’re using is stock free and not under royalty rights, I don’t see a problem with it. You’re not stealing from anyone’s income. I hope this helps!
Nice Information Given Like it.
tech updates
I would assume that to cheat as an artist would mean to steal other artists work. That would make an unhappy artist who is not following his/her bliss (Joseph Campbell). I was born an artist, I cannot not create art. As a pre-schooler, I’d run out the door upon waking to go stare at the sky. Mom asked my why. I replied, to see how it’s painted today. I took a piece of wood from the garage, unwrapped all my crayons, broke them up, placed them on the wood under direct sunlight. They melted beautifully (my first abstract). I told my parents the sun and I had made a painting. My High School Art Teacher enrolled a piece of work in a state competion which won, then won a National competiton, and hung in the High Museum of art. I went on to study Art at Univ. Texas. Grades were based on public exhibits. I entitled my first one “Shards.” I built a large plexiglass box, filled it with dirt, created images on on my kiln fired clay and fused glass vessels in influenced by my love of cave painting (is that cheating or inspiration?), threw the pieces on the floor creating shards, and anchored them in the dirt plexiglass box. I wanted the observer to feel as if he/she had happened upon an ancient archeological treasure. I received an A. Recently my family had a genealogy DNA test performed and this is a short excerpt of the results: “You belong the the ancient ancestry group the haplogroup R1b, The Artisans, who first arrived in Europe from west Asia about 35,000- 40,000 years ago at the dawning of the Aurignacian culture. This cultural was remarkable for its subtle yet significant technological progress, like the shift from random flint collection to the use of a single stone core to shape flint tools as needed. Aurignacian decorative beads and jewelry could also be the first sign we have of the uniquely human quality of self-awareness and adornment. Additionally, some anthropologists believe that the Aurignacian culture was the first to paint. Either way, the people of this time period left behind fascinating cave paintings in France, Spain and Portugal.” I was stunned! This brought up more questions than answers for me. Is our bliss genetically wired into us? What was my first exhibit, a DNA memory? My questions continued for days. In my opinion, to cheat as an Artist is cheating yourself more than another person, and that is really sad because it means you’ve not found your core or inner compass. Have I had other artist copy my work? I moved from a group studio to a private one for this exact reason. Did it make me angry? No, I simply got tired of feeling sorry for the ones copying me. It became a downer to enter the studio. I felt a certain void and emptiness in the others around me, so I opted for a more positive space in which to work. So I guess I’d say to anyone in any occupation, “to thine own self be true,” there is where you will find happiness and fulfillment.
You might find this interesting.
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3
http://fuckyouripper.tumblr.com
My apologies for the colorful language but artist are passionate people. These sites provide examples of un acceptable forms of copying, from an insider perspective. It’s a very thin gray area between what’s ok and what might land someone on the bad end of one of these blogs.
Why steal ideas.
Generally speaking in copyright terms, If I (the artist) make it, I own it. Unless I sign something that says otherwise, (Work for hire agreement) Then the person doing the hiring owns what is produced. or if the materials used (stock images, in the case of digital art) are owned by someone else. Unless it’s “fan art”
For every don’t do, there is a clever work around that makes it ok.
It’s not ok to steal music, it is ok to sample it. Most every industry has a gray area where it’s not technically ok, but you can get away with it if you are clever enough. Determining who owns an idea, and what they can do with it is a very tricky thing indeed.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as legalities go. It’s so incredibly complicated that I just toss that law stuff out the window and grab from any source I can ignoring who legally owns the copyrights to the original material, and justifying it by making something substantially different from the ruble. The un rational part is that if someone were to do the same to me, I would be throwing F-bombs at them with no hesitation. This not only makes me a cheater, it makes me a criminal, with very serious consequences.
Daniel, The websites are excellent examples of this discussion. Also why I no longer have a website! LOL This happens all the time. I’m not so sure that intellectual property rights is a gray area. I designed a logo for my husband’s company, and it’s been ripped-off many times with legal consequences. I think what you have to think about is if you are happy with what you call “the unrational” double standard of upset if someone did to you what you are doing to others. Also, would you be happy if you were caught, and found a legal notice in your mail box or a phone call from an attorney one day? It would seriously consume your time and energy. Is this in any way a crisis of conscience for you? If so, you can easily change the behavior.
On the other end of the spectrum, here is a quote from Picasso for you to consider: “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” LOL
I think what Dr. Ariely is getting at is in academia sources must be listed, but not so in art.
For me, the crime, so to speak, is taking from a professional artist in which art is his/her sole income. To survive as an artist is difficult enough already.
Let your conscience be your guide. I think a clear conscience leads to a happier life. Who wants bad karma? Eventually, what goes around comes around.
If I were you, I wouldn’t let short term gratification place me in danger of long term consequences. Just a thought!
God side, og artikel, jeg vil prøve om jeg ikke kan følge lidt mere med på din side, du har mange gode artikler.
That was a great article! I like it very much. Keep posting like this.
Wow! Such amazing article! So good to find someone with some unique thoughts on this subject. I liked it and I would like to appreciate the effort that you have put in making such an informative blog.
Sounds like a great idea.. This is an incredibly touchy subject for some artists, as many are very sensitive and with touchy ego concepts. I think if you craft/create/make something it’s fair game to re-interpret, and if it’s basically ‘plagiarism’ so be it. After all, what do we -REALLY- own in this world?