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Comment by narendranag | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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