How a plagiarized portrait of Obama ended up hanging in the white house | Hacker News Reader

How a plagiarized portrait of Obama ended up hanging in the white house

hedcuts.blogspot.com

16 pointsSujan16 comments

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I wonder who took the photo her stipple portrait is a copy of?

Presumably someone paid by the Wall Street Journal for his work, and thus falling in the Work for Hire category.

Probably a realistic assumption. Though you do not have to have a photograph to make a portrait.

How do you know that it's a copy of a photo?

That's not something you draw from memory. She should feel honored.

Regardless of whatever motive or manipulation the artist has done to the WSJ image, it remains a derivative work and is still covered by copyright:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

"A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. This previously published material makes the work a derivative work under the copyright law. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. Titles, short phrases, and format, for example, are not copyrightable."

I think it's an abomination that the original creator of the image is not credited. That said the printer, Cano, probably just bought reproduction rights from the journal? Maybe not, perhaps the journal won't sue as they don't want to restrict their ability to display photos of others work (even though they are reporting news, ie it is fair use, and he is not).

I don't think she's fishing for credit. She's offended that someone gets to make money, even passing himself of as an artist, for simply cranking the zoom-level on a photocopier way up. In all fairness, President Obama should be a bit offended to. This "piece of art" is nothing, if not blatantly tapping into the off-the-charts hype around his person. He'd be wise to try to calm the hype rather than encouraging it.

I don't think she's fishing for credit. Nor do I. My point is not that she wants credit but that Cano should acknowledge that his input into the piece he produced was limited to a small alteration. In the quote in the original artists post:

"José-María Cano generously offered this painting to Vaclav Havel as a gift for Barack Obama", said Leos Valka, director of DOX, Centre for Contemporary art in Holesovice, Prague.

The Director should have said "Cano offered this painting which he duplicated from an original work by Ms Novak in the WSJ ...". It's not that she demands the credit, it should be given.

Since when has art been reduced to the image on canvas? What matters is the artist's motive, the reason behind the work. That's what separates art from commercial design -- after all, in both places you see original images, but only the first qualifies as art.

I don't think this qualifies as plagiarism. After all, didn't Andy Warhol take a soup can and repeat it over and over again. I don't remember the soup company crying plagiarism. Or the designer who first came up with the soup can cover.

I've wondered about that soup-can artist... Campbells wouldn't have complained about it, because it was free publicity (and much clearer than Hormel's spam dilemma). The original designer would no longer have copyright in the design (Campbells, his/her hirer, would own it), and would have no say.

But how would he/she feel? Privileged to have their obviously commercial work elevated to Art? Shamed, because of same? Or simple bemusement, like so many others?

Regardless, I don't think a portrait is in the same category as a can of soup.

Electronic spam is gets its name from the Monty Python sketch (Python is named for Monty Python also)

Actually, it's the use of of the word "Spam" in the sketch of the same name.

Warhol was a commercial illustrator - he reproduced a commercial image in facsimile, that is plagiarism. I'm sure one can understand why Campbell's didn't object.

I'd agree that his reason for producing the images and the context in which they were displayed added an extra depth to said images. However, he claims the reason he made them was variously (paraphrasing) "because I like soup" and "because my mom used to use soup cans and there were a lot around"; hardly the basis of a great artistic statement.

The artistic impact then must be in our interpretation of why we feel the artist created the images "he's make a great statement about commercialism in art using a screen printed image mirroring the industrial design techniques of this epoch" (or whatever) rather than "hmm, he likes soup".

Is this really as clear cut as the artist is trying to say? The page she references says "The portrait is created using the encaustic technique of painting with hot wax." as far as I know there isn't a copy machine on earth that will make an enlargement in hot wax. Point being the "offending" artist must have done some amount of actual artistic work.

The encaustic paintings shown are basically just the wax equivalent of tracing the blown-up originals -- the "artist" glues the blown-up paper version to a canvas, then layers black wax over the black parts, and white wax over the white parts. You can even see the halo of the original paper version behind the white wax.

It isn't totally mechanical, but there isn't much creative work involved either.

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