What Is Appropriation in Art? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Appropriation in Art?

thecollector.com

29 pointsatg_abhishek25 comments

Most of this is recontextualisation, not appropriation. Even the Lichtenstein is covertly ironic. The creativity isn't just in the imagery and the technique, it's in making a statement about the surrounding culture.

AI doesn't recontextualise, it reproduces cliches. You could argue that AI itself is an original artwork. But its output is backward- and inward-looking, not forward-looking. It tries to reproduce work from the past in a very literal way, mostly for users who are culturally naive and think art is about pictures, not about cultural, emotional, perceptual, and psychological insights.

I would say only pop art is appropriation. Because it literally copies a different piece of art to exist. But it also adds a layer on top of it, changes its purpose, which means it starts with appropriation but then becomes interpretation.

AI also doesn't put any meaning into its "art". People argue that an artist's intent is not the main factor in art, but when there is no intent, is it really art? I don't need to know what Warhol meant, but knowing that he did mean something makes it valuable.

> when there is no intent, is it really art?

I take the nihilist view: art is entirely in the eye of the beholder. The intent of its creator or the properties of the object have nothing to do with it.

I agree in a sense but that negative space is obscured in cases where your beholder has also knows the context of the created works.

I feel like the most legitimate use for AI art is illustration rather than strictly art: worldbuilders and other fiction writers who want to show you what a thing they made looks like in their head, but don't have the skillset to draw it, just to describe it. AI is a really useful tool for that.

Unfortunately there's not a lot of profit in "this is what my OC looks like."

“Appropriation” has been a technical term in art criticism distinct from “cultural appropriation”. “Cultural appropriation” which is what “appropriation” typically refers to in today’s mainstream discourse.

The art term is neutral. The cultural term is negative. Modern and contemporary art is plausibly rife with cultural appropriation, often coinciding with typical artistic “appropriation”, and this essay doesn’t engage with that issue, and its lack of acknowledgement of the imminent confusion is puzzling.

"Cultural appropriation" is not part of the mainstream discourse. It is only used by extremist groups and nothing more than thinly-veiled racism against mostly white/European people.

It is indeed sad that the term had to be mentioned here.

Now, copying others and foreign cultures has been a thing since as long has human beings have had a culture. It is a positive thing when others like what you do and want to copy it.

It's part of the mainstream discourse the approximately same way as “fuck” is part of the mainstream discourse.

Yeah, I was a bit confused, they sort of addressed it in the opening sub paragraph but then called it a trope.

Not addressing the increasing common usage of the term IN THE ART WORLD to refer to cultural appropriation is just odd.

I’d like to see this argument in the context of music.

Not just samples, in their contemporary usage, which has been thoroughly discussed.

I think of the best and most memorable melodies that I sing from church hymnals, or in pop music - which often come from classical compositions.

Like “Thaxted”, which comes from Gustav’s Planets.

Or Celine Dion’s “All By Myself”, which comes from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor.

Or the theme from the movie Babe, which comes from a reggae song that reused the melody from Saint-Saen’s Symphony 3

As a songwriter and musician who has often played in support of other song writers, I believe (generally) everything we enjoy has been reworked from some prior existing work.

One issue I've seen, especially in younger songwriters, poets, and musicians is that they are less aware about where they have sourced the material which they are reworking.

This lack of awareness is generally a-okay: you can get a lot of mileage reworking quotes that you are not aware are from the christian bible.

Compelling work is compelling, after all.

However, what I personally find artistically satisfying is when people take multiple sources which resonate with one another and which, in their harmony, create rather complex symbolic patterns.

At the micro level, that's just rhyming words; at the macro level that would be thematic development.

Younger, less-well-versed writers miss a lot of opportunities to tie what they are creating to other texts because they are simply not familiar with other ideas or existing works. This doesn't mean that they are creating bad art, in my understanding; rather, they they could do a better job of their task of stitching words into some meaning.

In the context of LLMs, we have tools for stumbling around and creating those connections for us. I am sympathetic to the idea that there could be emergent connections that only a machine, via modeling language, could discover.

I don't know so much about the machines' understanding. What I do see has been folks who don't care enough about whatever art form with which they are engaging to learn the source material from which they are drawing.

If that makes compelling work, then good on them.

At the same time, I am not sure how easy it is to create compelling work without that larger understanding of the context from which the work is dranw and into which that work is placed.

Or, if you prefer, there are a number of folks who have already summarized all my above thoughts as something like "great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil."

Sone examples shown are better described as Détournement, but maybe Appropriation is more neutral and generalist. In any case copying is the most basic tool in the creation process. Some artists show they copy, others artists lie about the source of their "inspiration".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement

Copying is also a basic tool of practice, there's a ton of ancient art we only know through copies, such as Leonardo's "The Battle of Anghiari"[0] which only survived through a copy of a copy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Anghiari_(Leon...

Just speaking from a hip-hop perspective;

Appropriation is stealing well.

Good stealing is obvious, fair, resonant, clever, unexpected and pointed.

Since the appropriation is part of the art it needs to be up front. Don't be obscure, or try too hard to hide the grab. Even better if it's audacious.

There is a sense of fairness amongst artists. Stealing a well known icon is okay, but to take the riff of rival, little known artist is plagiarism.

There must be a cultural or semantic resonance. Even if, as in Dada/Surrealism it's an incongruous juxtaposition. Something needs to link or amplify. Otherwise you've got a collage or mish-mash of "found" stuff that doesn't hang together, and that is considered immature.

A clever steal makes the thing you take feel like it always belonged more in your piece than the original context. That's hard, but it happens and its wonderful. Maybe you take a grab that forms the perfect cadence to an entire song you wrote, or just a sound whose harmonics make the perfect missing parts to another chord.

A completely leftfield steal borrows from a genre that is totally unexpected. There's a balance to be struck with obscurity here.

Finally, all of these combine such that an appropriation has a point. It communicates an idea, through juxtaposition, association or whatever. It references. It's a homage.

I know that the hidden question behind this post is "Does AI appropriate?"

I don't think it does, because it lacks the intentionality of the above points. But humans are great pattern matchers, including seeing patterns that are accidental, so we mat read into AI and see "appropriation" - but only in its most mechanical sense.

> Since the appropriation is part of the art it needs to be up front. Don't be obscure, or try too hard to hide the grab. Even better if it's audacious.

Then how does one analyze The Orb and other similar acts that rely on tons of obscure samples? They make no pretense of not using loads of samples, but they can be quite obscured to those not in the know. Then again, they are an entirely separate genre from hip-hop.

> Then how does one analyze The Orb and other similar acts that rely on tons of obscure samples? They make no pretense of not using loads of samples, but they can be quite obscured to those not in the know. Then again, they are an entirely separate genre from hip-hop.

Good question, maybe it's not "appropriation" in the same way - by not making a strong feature of the appropriated part. Perhaps we'd simply say composition. Or as Orb would say "Layering different sounds on top of each other". Come to think of that track, indeed , Steve Reich (different trains was it?)was actually something I knew but didn't recognise until someone pointed it out.

Edit: Sorry to come back to this in case its getting old, but I just popped up the Wikipedia to check myself (it wasn't different trains), but check this out:

   Asked about the sample in an interview years later, Jones referred
   to the Orb as "those fuckers."

   Reich was "genuinely flattered"^[10] by the Orb's use of his work
   and instructed his record company not to sue.^[11] Despite this,
   the Orb did receive a letter from Reich's lawyers several years
   later, but Paterson described Reich as "a proper gentleman: he
   wanted 20% from then on and asked us to do a remix of one of his
   tunes, which we did"

What a world of difference. And yet for me that's the only context I have for Rickie Lee Jones and still think of it as one of the most beautiful vocals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fluffy_Clouds

Do you have some examples of hip-hop tracks that steal well?

Entirely personal opinion and controversial but for example:

I think for "Can I kick it?" Tribe Called Quest were pretty tasteful with such a very audacious lift of Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side bassline [0] and the Ian Dury lick, whereas, as a bad example, M.A.R.R.S really kludged everything from Eric B And Rakim into "Pump Up The Volume" that really didn't work for me.

It's really just the slide and stop of course - besides there's quite a story behind the original bassline by Herbie Flowers the session musician who played on Transformer anyway!

It's controversial today, due to the artist but Power by Kanye West.

Is it considered controversial to say he made great art? I don't know what he is seen as in USA, but many of my circle still play his old albums because they are modern classics. He's not liked as a person but it's hard to deny Kanye's influence and quality.

appropriation also includes a resonance and admiration of the original - you cannot admire if you don't know where you're appropriating from

Brilliant!

Mind sharing more of your writings? :-)

Hey Jiriro, if you're serious please come and enjoy/support some of our cybershow.uk shenanigans, its all hacker related.

It’s when the meaning of the original art is perverted or replaced entirely by the appropriated work.

It seems most common in music and film.

It’s nothing. Cultural appropriation isn’t real, and to the extent that it is, it’s a good thing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com