From "Richard Pettibone, Master of the Artistic Miniature, Dies at 86/He painted tiny reproductions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Duchamp and many others, raising questions about originality and creativity" (NYT).
You can see reproductions of Pettibone's works at the Castelli website, here. Sample:
I'm using the "plagiarism" tag, because it's my established tag on the subject of copying someone else's work, not out of any desire to accuse Pettibone of doing anything wrong. As with Pettibone and Andy's soup cans, when it comes to tags, I prefer another one of the same thing. Creating something new is to be avoided.
Posts
11 comments:
The Christies and Sothebys catalogs that come to the office always have some unknown riffing on Warhols schtick. sarc on/ Fortunately they sell for fractions of the original…
May favorite rip off was that kid towing in a little outboard behind Christo’s thing…
If it's not shown in a New York gallery, or some rich guy won't pay good money for it, then it's not art.
I would call it artistic schtick. He's not creating anything. He's duplicating and shrinking everything. AI will be able to Pettibone Pettibone better than he could have. Down to the nano-level.
Who is the plagiarist here, Ann? And who are they plagiarizing?
Seems to me that Warhol is the plagiarist, plagiarizing the work of the artist who did the original soup can for Campbell. So is Pettibone plagiarizing Warhol or the original artist?
What do you call the plagiarized work of a plagiarized work? Plagiarism^2? Or because it is a 2nd level plagiarism is it plagiarism^.5?
A few years ago a commenter here coined the word "Phart" for "phoney art" Warhole seems like a prime example. Pettibone seems like a derivitave example.
John Henry
And who did Warhole plagiarize? Was it the artist who designed the soup can? Or Campbell Corp who presumably owned the copyright?
I wondered about the legal issues and whether Campbell sued. Apparently not though they apparently could have. Warhole did get sued, and settled, by other artists over appropriation of other works, though.
John Henry
Are you talking about Warhole or Pettibone? Wasn't the original plagiarized copy of the soup can "schtick"? Did Warhole create anything? Or did he just duplicate and enlarge the original soup can?
Why is one a great artist and the other not? (And which is which?)
John Henry
Creating something new is to be avoided
This seems to be the preferred strategy of Hollywood too, where so much of it is just rebooting, rehashing, or reimagining recognizable IP.
I, for one, will be looking backward from now on, at the next new thing.
Lovely in its way. Your commentary made me think back to Arthur Danto's comment that his first view of Andy Warhol's work caused him to grapple with the 'what is art' question (which in declarative form became the title of one of his many books on the subject (What Art Is, featuring a picture of the Brillo box works on the cover). Danto was a philosophy professor at Columbia and also became the art critic for the Nation. After that seminal interaction with Warhol's Brillo boxes, Danto's kept publishing about the topic, from his 1964 article ('The Artworld') to his 1981 ('The Transfiguration of the Commonplace'), to What Art is (2013) , he kept coming back to the same puzzle. Where he ended up (more or less) was that art was a conversation among artists about itself, its history and conventions. He's been dead for about 10 years, but the controversies he stirred up are still going strong. or those inclined to dismiss Warhol, Pettibone and the like as complete BS, it's worth spending a little time with Danto to get the contrary view.
Warhol intuited the items of our consumerist society were less expensive to paint than live models while Pettibone determined Warhol's reproductions could be made smaller.
Post a Comment