When my mother would go to the diner, very often she would take Sweet and lo’ packets from the sugar bowl for at home consumption. I would accuse her of stealing and she would get annoyed with me. She felt that because there were so many packets in the sugar bowl and the diner never told her how many she could or could not take, and since she always needed some at home, she was not committing a crime. She would say that the owners of the diner expected her to take them or else they wouldn’t have offered them to her in the first place. If she was stealing at all it was "white stealing."
Kara is a double major in college: art history and business management. She keeps abreast of important art news. She sent me an article about a month ago about an art exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan—they were showing some of Bob Dylan’s work. It was titled “The Asia Series.” Dylan purportedly painted works from his travels throughout Asia—the artwork chronicled his personal journey. But an internet fan website in concert with the NY Times uncovered that Dylan’s paintings were copied from photographs he had not taken. Many of the photographs came from online—a single source. But since online photographs fall into the realm of public domain—Dylan technically did not commit a crime---he did not break any laws.
This whole thing raises many questions for me—the first of which is why would Dylan lie when the truth was so easy to uncover--how many brains cells did he still have left? But the more troubling question for me was what made Dylan think it was okay (as an artist himself) to copy someone else’s creative work and claim it as his own? How did he not think (at least morally) that he was committing forgery? Copying someone else’s work and claiming it as your own is something everyone learns NOT to do as early as kindergarten—it’s just wrong.
And taking more Sweet and lo’ packets other than the amount you need for the cup of coffee or tea sitting in front of you at the diner is still stealing. No matter how my mother tries to justify it to me. And so is taking shampoo and conditioner bottles off of the housekeeper’s cart at the hotel. The only time it is not stealing is if you ask the waitress if you may take some packets home or if you ask the housekeeper at the hotel for some extra shampoo or conditioner. If there is full disclosure, there is no crime in my world.
And so too with Dylan. If Dylan would have said these paintings are inspired by the photographs of so-in-so everyone would have complimented his creative skills—people would have applauded his ability to translate a photograph into a creative expression on canvas. But he didn’t do that---which is why people like me are so annoyed.
In my ethics class in college I was taught that there is no such thing as a white lie. Lying, even with the most altruistic of justifications, is still lying. So when you tell your child that Santa is coming—you are lying. So too is lying by omission—intentionally forgetting to disclose a detail or two automatically disqualifies truth. Just like copying someone else’s homework is cheating—even if you were too sick or busy to do it yourself---it is cheating even if you knew the answer anyway.
They say that the average person only remembers about 20% of what they were ever taught in school. And much of that 20% constitutes meaningless information which has no bearing on your life. Steve Martin, the comedian, who was a philosophy major in college, once said that if you have studied philosophy in any form, the 20% you remember is enough to f--- you up for the rest of your life.
He has a point.
To view the copied work by Bob Dylan go to: http://www.artinfo.com/node/746745
No comments:
Post a Comment