Mash-ups, Mocks of, and Appropriation
When is it appropriate to use appropriation?
The truth is it surrounds almost every facet of our culture - even if we don’t recognize it. It’s in the media, advertisements, television & music, and has been relevant throughout art history. Essentially, appropriation is when an artist recycles a pre-existing image or even sound to create something unique and often times equipped with a new central meaning or theme. It is a technique that has been used for hundreds of years.
Maybe the most recognizable example of appropriation in our modern times is the “Hope” posters that were in circulation during Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. A street-artist named Shepard Fairey was responsible for the redesign, that he created from a photograph from the Associated Press.
In his new image, he attached meaning to the photograph with Obama's campaign slogan of Hope, and it became a promotional tool that helped propel the election of the 44th President of the United States of America. It also made a lot of money.
Fairey profited over $400,000 from his visual design, and the news of this profit didn't bode well with the rightful owners of the photograph in question. Ironically, Fairey was the one who pursued declaratory judgement to rule if his appropriation of the photo fell into the confines of fair use. The two parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. But the case failed to set a precedent for what is and what is not considered fair game when rehashing an image already in existence.
In another very well-known example of cultural appropriation, American painter Andy Warhol made a statement about the tactics being used by advertisers in 1962 when he aligned thirty-two hand-painted canvases of Cambell's Soup, one for each flavor the company had. Just as big food brands were doing - and even still are 55 years later - Warhol lined the walls in a repetitious and overpowering manner to depict the isles of a grocery store.
That was just the beginning for him. The appropriate use of the Campbell’s Soup image sparked his career as he went onto being the highest-paid American artist of the time. Warhol in reflection of his work was quoted as saying, "I should have just done the Campbell’s Soups and kept on doing them.” Instead, he strayed away from the concept to focus on other ventures, but returned to it later in his career when he took on a more colorful and eccentric approach to the series that put him on the map.
Interestingly enough no court case was needed in this instance of borrowing. Campbell’s Soup celebrated the artist on the 50th anniversary of his most famous painting by selling limited edition soup cans and running Warhol-inspired advertisements. Even after his death in 1987, his appropriation of Campbell's Soup will go on as a high-point of the American art culture.
Even in the music biz, appropriation has been a staple in the evolution of music and can be found in most genres. In hip-hop, sampling is a common technique used by producers where a snippet from another song is integrated into a new musical environment in order to create a unique sound.
Beat sampling is something of a controversial topic in music because the audio is almost always owned by an entity outside of the current user. In order to avoid lawsuits, producers and audio engineers will normally get permission from the label or artist and compensate them for the use of the music.
On the rock scene in the 1970’s, Frank Zappa began to use a technique called xenochrony that recorded his guitar solos. He could then extract them into other songs, and he even created a whole album that had a common guitar solo playing in every song. This discovery might have set a path for the next creation of technology in music production programs, evolving into a new genre in the 1990's called mash-ups.
Mash-ups are made up of two or more songs and often times matched in the tempos - it is music's closest version to appropriation. Instead of asking for permission or compensating the owners of the music, mash-ups artists tend to test the limits of Copyright Law, distorting the music to a point where the new audio falls under fair use.
One of the biggest names in the genre goes by the alias of Girl Talk. He is signed under the label Illegal Art and has released five albums since 2001. In those albums, he has taken music from hundreds of musicians from a spectrum of genres. The New York Times Magazine called his music, “a lawsuit waiting to happen.” Girl Talk has stood firm on his stances of not compensating musicians, claiming that he is under the terms of fair use.
Some critics have gone as far as suggest that he might be boosting the awareness of songs to a wider-audience and potentially boosting the sales.
The idea of blending aspects of an art form together to create a new image or meaning is something Shelley Reed is extremely familiar with. Most of the images she uses are taken from the 18th century, so a visit to her exhibitions is not just a lesson in magnificent scale and attention to detail, but its the most awe-inspiring art history class you've ever taken.
What her selective choose of who to borrow from means is that she is completely free of any legal risks because it is apart of the public domain - absolutely free to use.
“I take images that already exist and I reformat them. It’s so much fun. When I went to school the 20th century was based around originals-that was the big push. I kind of reacted against that I wanted to do things with stuff that already existed,” Shelley said in a recent Q/A with Rob Carr's document design class.
Shelley may have found herself a niche in the art world. One that allows her to focus on the narrative and give the audience a story to piece together. The approach is both interesting and knowledgable, and one that the Curious Nature artist has become the master of.
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