Appropriation is a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts (literary

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, visual

Visual arts

The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...

, music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

al). Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."

In the visual arts, to appropriate means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of man-made visual culture. Strategies include "re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel... pastiche, paraphrase, parody, homage, mimicry, shan-zhai

Shanzhai

Shanzhai refers to Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods, particularly electronics. Literally "mountain village" or "mountain stronghold", the term refers to the mountain stockades of regional warlords or bandits, far away from official control...

, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke." The term appropriation refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work (as in 'the artist uses appropriation') or refers to the new work itself (as in 'this is a piece of appropriation art').

Inherent in our understanding of appropriation is the concept that the new work recontextualises whatever it borrows to create the new work. In most cases the original 'thing' remains accessible as the original, without change.

History

Appropriation of visual culture, in some form or another, has always been part of human history. Art History and art historical practice has a long tradition of borrowing and using styles and forms from what came before. Students of art and established artists have always learned and progressed by copying and borrowing. The same is true in music. Cultural creation began with appropriation; borrowing images, sounds, concepts from the surrounding world and re-interpreting these elements. Appropriation can be understood as a key component of the way in which humans learn, communicate and progress.

Some might interpret Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

 as an appropriation artist. Da Vinci used recombinant methods of appropriation, borrowing from sources as diverse as biology, mathematics, engineering and art, and then synthesizing them in to inventions and works of art.

In the early twentieth century Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

 and Georges Braque

Georges Braque

Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...

 appropriated objects from a non-art context into their work. In 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the canvas. Subsequent compositions, such as Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913) in which Picasso used newspaper clippings to create forms, became categorized as synthetic cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

. The two artists incorporated aspects of the "real world" into their canvases, opening up discussion of signification and artistic representation

Representation (arts)

Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements...

.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

 is credited with introducing the concept of the readymade, in which “industrially produced utilitarian objects…achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection and presentation.”Elger, D. (2006). Dadaism. Koln: Taschen, pp. 80 Duchamp explored this notion as early as 1913 when he mounted a stool with a bicycle wheel and again in 1915 when he purchased a snow shovel and humorously inscribed it “in advance of the broken arm, Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

.”Cabanne, P., and Snowdon, P. (1997). Duchamp & Co. Paris: Terrail, pp. 105 In 1917, Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

 formally submitted a readymade into the Society of Independent Artists

Society of Independent Artists

Society of Independent Artists was an association of American artists founded in 1916 and based in New York.Based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants, the goal of the society was to hold annual exhibitions by avant-garde artists. Exhibitions were to be open to anyone who wanted to...

 exhibition under the pseudonym, R. Mutt.Cabanne, P., and Snowdon, P. (1997). Duchamp & Co. Paris: Terrail, pp. 114 Entitled Fountain

Fountain (Duchamp)

Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

, it consisted of a porcelain urinal that was propped atop a pedestal and signed "R. Mutt 1917". The work posed a direct challenge to traditional perceptions of fine art, ownership, originality and plagiarism, and was subsequently rejected by the exhibition committee. Duchamp publicly defended Fountain

Fountain (Duchamp)

Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

, claiming “whether Mr.Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-- and created a new thought for that object.”Plant, S. (1992). The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age. London and New York: Routledge, pp.44

Duchamp also went so far as to use existing art in his work, appropriating an apparent copy of the Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...

into his piece, L.H.O.O.Q. Recent speculation regarding Duchamp's appropriated urinal claimed that the urinal was "non-standard" and "non-functional", and that Duchamp "allegedly custom-designed it along with his other supposed readymades," however, this has never been substantiated.

The Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

 movement (including Duchamp as an associate) continued with the appropriation of everyday objects, but their appropriation did not attempt to elevate the "low" to "high" art status, rather it produced art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. Dada artists included Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball

Hugo Ball was a German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists.Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a middle-class Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg...

, Emmy Hennings

Emmy Hennings

Emmy Hennings was a performer and poet. She was also the wife of celebrated Dadaist Hugo Ball. Despite her own achievements, it is difficult to come by information about Hennings that is not directly related to her relationship with Hugo Ball.-Life and work:Hennings was born in Flensburg, Germany...

, Jean Arp

Jean Arp

Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper....

, Hans Richter

Hans Richter (artist)

Hans Richter was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.-Germany:...

, Richard Huelsenbeck

Richard Huelsenbeck

Richard Huelsenbeck was a poet, writer and drummer born in Frankenau, Hessen-Nassau.Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of World War I. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February 1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire...

, André Breton

André Breton

André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

, Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...

, and Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...

. A reaction to oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society, Dada works featured deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...

, who produced art at the same time as the Dadaists, shows a similar sense of the bizarre in his "merz" works. He constructed these from found objects, and they took the form of large constructions that later generations would call installation

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

s.

The Surrealists

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

, coming after the Dada movement, also incorporated the use of "found" objects

Found art

The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function...

 such as Méret Oppenheim

Méret Oppenheim

-External links:**** http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/man_ray.html...

's Object (Luncheon in Fur) (1936). These objects took on new meaning when combined with other unlikely and unsettling objects.

In 1938 Joseph Cornell produced what might be considered the first work of film appropriation in his randomly cut and reconstructed film 'Rose Hobart'. This work was to inspire later video artists.

In the 1950s Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...

 used what he dubbed "combines", literally combining readymade objects such as tires or beds, painting, silk-screens

Screen-printing

Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...

, collage, and photography. Similarly, Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...

, working at the same time as Rauschenberg, incorporated found objects into his work. Johns also appropriated symbolic images such as the American flag

Flag of the United States

The national flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton bearing fifty small, white, five-pointed stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows of six stars alternating with rows...

 or the "target" symbol into his work.

The Fluxus

Fluxus

Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

 art movement also utilised appropriation: its members blended different artistic disciplines including visual art, music, and literature. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. The group even appropriated the postal system in developing mail art

Mail art

Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...

. The performances sought to elevate the banal by appropriating it as "art" and dissembling the high culture

High culture

High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture...

 of serious music.

Along with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...

 and Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...

, Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

 appropriated images from commercial art and popular culture as well as the techniques of these industries. Often called "pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

ists", they saw mass popular culture as the main vernacular culture, shared by all irrespective of education. These artists fully engaged with the ephemera produced from this mass-produced culture, embracing expendability and distancing themselves from the evidence of an artist's hand.

In 1958 Bruce Conner produced the influential 'A Movie' in which he recombined film clips to produce this seminal work that comments on the propensity for humankind toward violence. At the same time Raphael Montanez Ortiz was involved in the 'Destructionist' movement in which objects and film were cut up, taken apart, burned and partially destroyed and then reformed to create new works. In 1958 Ortiz produced "Cowboy and Indian Film', a seminal appropriation film work.

In the late 1970s Dara Birnbaum was working with appropriation to produce feminist works of art. In 1978-79 she produced one of the first video appropriations. 'Technology, Transformation : Wonder Woman' utilised video clips from the Wonder Woman television series.

The term appropriation art was in common use in the 1980s with artists such as Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....

, who addressed the act of appropriating itself as a theme in art. Levine often quotes entire works in her own work, for example photographing photographs of Walker Evans

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...

. Challenging ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power

Power (sociology)

Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment, including the behavior of other entities. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to...

, gender

Gender

Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

 and creativity

Creativity

Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

, consumerism

Consumerism

Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...

 and commodity value, the social sources and uses of art, Levine plays with the theme of "almost same".

During the 1970s and 1980s Richard Prince

Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...

 re-photographed advertisements such as for Marlboro cigarettes or photo-journalism shots. Prince's work spoke to issues of materialism

Materialism

In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

 and the idea of spectacle over lived experience

Experience

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event....

. His work takes anonymous and ubiquitous cigarette billboard advertising campaigns, elevates the status and focusses our gaze on the images. The viewer questions the concept of masculinity portrayed in these heroic billboards and their relationship to the advertising campaign.

Appropriation artists comment on all aspects of culture and society. Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

 appropriated images to engage with philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and epistemological theory. Other artists working with appropriation during this time with included Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

, Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...

, Greg Colson

Greg Colson

Greg Colson is an American artist best known for wall sculptures constructed of salvaged materials. Colson has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Sperone Westwater , William Griffin Gallery , Galleria Cardi , Kunsthalle Lophem , Konrad Fischer , and the Lannan...

, and Malcolm Morley

Malcolm Morley

Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...

.

In the 1990s artists continued to produce appropriation art, using it as a medium to address theories and social issues, rather than focussing on the works themselves. Damian Loeb

Damian Loeb

Damian Loeb is an American painter. Self-taught, he moved to New York City in the early 1990s.Discovered by Jeffrey Deitch, founder of Deitch Projects and current director of LAMoCA, Loeb had his first solo in 1999...

 used film and cinema to comment on themes of simulacrum

Simulacrum

Simulacrum , from the Latin simulacrum which means "likeness, similarity", was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god...

 and reality. Other high-profile artists working at this time included Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...

, Deborah Kass

Deborah Kass

Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the self.-Life and work:Deborah Kass received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League of New...

 and Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

.

Artists working increasingly incorporate and quote from both art and non-art elements. For example, Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn, New York artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance,, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known...

 incorporates aspects of cultural nostalgia

Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of , meaning "returning home", a Homeric word, and , meaning "pain, ache"...

 through re-working vintage video games and computer software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

. Other contemporary appropriation artists include the Chapman brothers

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo...

, Benjamin Edwards

Benjamin Edwards (artist)

Benjamin Edwards is an American visual artist and writer. He was born in Iowa City, Iowa, graduated from UCLA, and earned a Masters from the Rhode Island School of Design...

, Joy Garnett

Joy Garnett

Joy Garnett is an artist based in New York. She is married to visual artist Bill Jones. Garnett's paintings, based variously on news photographs, scientific imagery and military documents she gathers from the Internet, examine the apocalyptic-sublime at the intersections of media, politics and...

, Nikki S. Lee

Nikki s. lee

Nikki Seung-hee Lee is a Korean American New York City-based artist and filmmaker. After earning B.F.A. at Chung-Ang University in South Korea in 1993, she moved to New York in 1994 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She earned her M.A...

, Paul Pfeiffer, Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...

.

Appropriation art and copyrights

Despite the long and important history of appropriation, this artistic practice has recently resulted in contentious copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

  issues which reflects more restrictive copyright legislation. The U.S. has been particularly litigious in this respect. A number of case-law

Case law

In law, case law is the set of reported judicial decisions of selected appellate courts and other courts of first instance which make new interpretations of the law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents in a process known as stare decisis...

 examples have emerged that investigate the division between transformative works and derivative works. Many countries are following the U.S lead toward more restrictive copyright, which risks making this art practice difficult if not illegal.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

 faced a series of law-suits from photographers whose work he appropriated and silk-screened

Screen-printing

Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...

. Patricia Caulfield, one such photographer, had taken a picture of flowers for a photography demonstration for a photography magazine. Warhol had covered the walls of Leo Castelli

Leo Castelli

Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...

's New York gallery in 1964 with the silk-screened reproductions of Caulfield's photograph. After seeing a poster of their work in a bookstore, Caulfield claimed ownership of the image and while Warhol was the author of the successful silk screens, he settled out of court, giving Caulfield a royalty for future use of the image as well as two of the paintings.

On the other hand, Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup Cans

Campbell's Soup Cans

Campbell's Soup Cans, which is sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, is a work of art produced in 1962 by Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring in height × in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup...

 are generally held to be non-infringing, despite being clearly appropriated, because "the public was unlikely to see the painting as sponsored by the soup company or representing a competing product. Paintings and soup cans are not in themselves competing products", according to expert trademark lawyer Jerome Gilson

Jerome Gilson

Jerome Gilson is an American trademark lawyer and author of a multivolume treatise on trademark law.- Life:Jerome Gilson was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 12, 1931....

.

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

 has also confronted issues of copyright due to his appropriation work (see Rogers v. Koons

Rogers v. Koons

Rogers v. Koons, , is a leading U.S. court case on copyright, dealing with the fair use defense for parody. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that an artist copying a photograph could be liable for infringement when there was no clear need to imitate the photograph...

). Photographer Art Rogers brought suit against Koons for copyright infringement in 1989. Koons' work, String of Puppies sculpturally reproduced Rogers' black and white photograph that had appeared on an airport greeting card that Koons had bought. Though he claimed fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 and parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

 in his defense, Koons lost the case, partially due to the tremendous success he had as an artist and the manner in which he was portrayed in the media. The parody argument also failed, as the appeals court drew a distinction between creating a parody of modern society in general and a parody directed at a specific work, finding parody of a specific work, especially of a very obscure one, too weak to justify the fair use of the original.

In October 2006, Koons won one for "fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

." For a seven-painting commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Koons drew on part of a photograph taken by Andrea Blanch

Andrea Blanch

Andrea Blanch , born in 1946, is a prominent portrait, commercial, and fine art photographer. Blanch was one of the first women to enter the male-dominated industry of fashion photography, shattering stereotypes by sensuously portraying her fellow females....

 titled Silk Sandals by Gucci and published in the August 2000 issue of Allure magazine to illustrate an article on metallic makeup. Koons took the image of the legs and diamond sandals from that photo (omitting other background details) and used it in his painting Niagara, which also includes three other pairs of women's legs dangling surreally over a landscape of pies and cakes.

In his court filing, Koons' lawyer, John Koegel, said that Niagara is "an entirely new artistic work... that comments on and celebrates society's appetites and indulgences, as reflected in and encouraged by a ubiquitous barrage of advertising and promotional images of food, entertainment, fashion and beauty."

In his decision, Judge Louis L. Stanton of U.S. District Court found that Niagara was indeed a "transformative use" of Blanch's photograph. "The painting's use does not 'supersede' or duplicate the objective of the original", the judge wrote, "but uses it as raw material in a novel way to create new information, new aesthetics and new insights. Such use, whether successful or not artistically, is transformative."

The detail of Blanch's photograph used by Koons is only marginally copyrightable. Blanch has no rights to the Gucci sandals, "perhaps the most striking element of the photograph", the judge wrote. And without the sandals, only a representation of a women's legs remains—and this was seen as "not sufficiently original to deserve much copyright protection."

In 2000, Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...

's sculpture Hymn (which Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...

 had bought for a reported £1m) was exhibited in Ant Noises in the Saatchi Gallery. Hirst was sued for breach of copyright over this sculpture despite the fact that he transformed the subject. The subject was a 'Young Scientist Anatomy Set' belonging to his son Connor, 10,000 of which are sold a year by Hull (Emms) Toy Manufacturer. Hirst created a 20 foot, six ton enlargement of the Science Set figure, radically changing the perception of the object. Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to two charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust in an out-of-court settlement. The charitable donation was less than Emms had hoped for. Hirst sold three more copies of his sculpture for similar amounts to the first.

Street artist Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey

Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary graphic designer, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. His...

’s iconic Hope poster of Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

 is symbolic of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The image along with words like “hope” or “progress” in some versions was produced on posters, stickers and t-shirts. In 2009, the Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

 accused Fairey of copyright infringement

Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...

 saying the poster was based on a 2006 image of one of their photographers, Mannie Garcia

Mannie Garcia

Mannie Garcia is an American freelance photojournalist currently based in Washington, D.C. His photos have been in many publications including TIME, The Washington Post and USA Today....

. Fairey denied appropriating the image and claiming fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 sued the Associated Press. The civil lawsuit was settled out of court with Fairey agreeing not to use unlicensed Associated Press images and to share the rights for his image of Obama going forward. The financial terms of the settlement were not released. The Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington acquired a collaged version of the image in January 2009.

On the other hand appropriating a familiar object to make an art work can also prevent the artist claiming copyright ownership. Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

 threatened to sue a gallery under copyright, claiming that the gallery infringed his proprietary rights by selling bookends in the shape of balloon dogs. Koons abandoned that claim after the gallery filed a complaint for declaratory relief stating, "As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain."

Artists using appropriation

• Vikky Alexander
  Vikky Alexander
  Vikky Alexander is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has exhibited internationally since 1981. Working across mediums she is a leading practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism and is well-known as an installation artist who uses photography, drawing,...
  
  
• System D-128
  System D-128
  System D-128 is a music video and film director, editor, video artist, new media artist and producer.-Early life:...
  
  
• Ghada Amer
  Ghada Amer
  Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. She emigrated from her birth country at age 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice...
  
  
• J. Tobias Anderson
  J. Tobias Anderson
  J Tobias Anderson is a Swedish artist and filmmaker, working with found footage and animation. He is best known for the short films 879 , My Name Is Grant , 879 Colour and Prairie Stop, Highway 41 - all referring to works by Alfred Hitchcock.In his video works, most frequently in the form of...
  
  
• Cory Arcangel
  Cory Arcangel
  Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn, New York artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance,, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known...
  
  
• Martin Arnold
  Martin Arnold
  Martin Arnold is an experimental filmmaker known for his obsessive reworkings of found footage. He is also a founding member of the Austrian film distributor Sixpack Film. Arnold studied psychology and art history at the University of Vienna...
  
  
• John Baldessari
  John Baldessari
  John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
  
  
• Craig Baldwin
  Craig Baldwin
  Craig Baldwin is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that...
  
  
• Banksy
  Banksy
  Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
  
  
• Luke Sullivan
  Luke Sullivan
  Luke Sullivan is an Australian visual artist most notable for his internationally controversial work, The Fourth Secret of Fatima....
  
  
• Gordon Bennett
  Gordon Bennett (artist)
  Gordon Bennett is an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Gaelic descent. Born in Monto, Queensland, and now working in Brisbane, Bennett is a significant figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art.-Biography:...
  
  
• Mike Bidlo
  Mike Bidlo
  Michael "Mike" Bidlo is an American painter, sculptor and performance artist.-Life and work:Bidlo was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied at the University of Illinois , Southern Illinois University Carbondale , and at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York,...
  
  
• Pierre Bismuth
  Pierre Bismuth
  Pierre Bismuth is a contemporary artist. Through efficient and often humorous gestures, Bismuth interrupts pre-established codes of reading the images and objects that pervade daily life, from headline stories in newspapers to magazine clippings from gentlemen's magazines, to even the color of the...
  
  
• Georges Braque
  Georges Braque
  Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
  
  
• Glenn Brown
  Glenn Brown
  Glenn Brown is an English artist. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000.-Working practice:Brown appropriates images created by living, working artists, such as Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin, as well as images by artists more established in the historical canon, such as Rembrandt or...
  
  
• Reginald Case
  Reginald Case
  Reginald Case was an artist who made American Folk Art collages and Hollywood iconographic mixed-media assemblages and sculptures.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Jake and Dinos Chapman
  Jake and Dinos Chapman
  Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman are English visual artists, often known as the Chapman Brothers, who work together as a collaborative sibling duo...
  
  
• Greg Colson
  Greg Colson
  Greg Colson is an American artist best known for wall sculptures constructed of salvaged materials. Colson has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Sperone Westwater , William Griffin Gallery , Galleria Cardi , Kunsthalle Lophem , Konrad Fischer , and the Lannan...
  
  
• Felipe Jesus Consalvos
  Felipe Jesus Consalvos
  Felipe Jesus Consalvos was a Cuban-American cigar roller and artist, known for his posthumously-discovered body of art work based on the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage.-Life:...
  
  
• Joseph Cornell
  Joseph Cornell
  Joseph Cornell was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage...
  
  
• Brian Dettmer
  Brian Dettmer
  Brian Dettmer is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his alteration of preexisting media—such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes—to create new, transformed works of visual fine art.-Life and art:...
  
  
• Mark Divo
  Mark Divo
  Mark Divo is a Luxembourgeois conceptual artist and curator who organises large scale interactive art projects incorporating the work of a number of well-known underground artists. His own work involves performance, photography, installation, often using found material.-Career:Between 1988 and...
  
  
• Eric Doeringer
  Eric Doeringer
  Eric Doeringer is an artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a B.A. and received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999...
  
  
• Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp
  Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
  
  
• Marlene Dumas
  Marlene Dumas
  Marlene Dumas is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends...
  
  
• Benjamin Edwards
  Benjamin Edwards (artist)
  Benjamin Edwards is an American visual artist and writer. He was born in Iowa City, Iowa, graduated from UCLA, and earned a Masters from the Rhode Island School of Design...
  
  
• Max Ernst
  Max Ernst
  Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
  
  
• Jodi
  Jodi
  Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans . Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web...
  
  
• Shepard Fairey
  Shepard Fairey
  Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary graphic designer, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. His...
  
  
• Hans-Peter Feldman
  Hans-Peter Feldman
  Hans-Peter Feldmann is a German visual artist. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting.-Early life and career:...
  
  
• Joy Garnett
  Joy Garnett
  Joy Garnett is an artist based in New York. She is married to visual artist Bill Jones. Garnett's paintings, based variously on news photographs, scientific imagery and military documents she gathers from the Internet, examine the apocalyptic-sublime at the intersections of media, politics and...
  
  
• General Idea
  General Idea
  General Idea was a collective of three Canadian artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, who were active from 1967 to 1994.As pioneers of early conceptual and media-based art, their collaboration became a model for artist-initiated activities and continues to be a prominent influence on...
  
  
• Kenneth Goldsmith
  Kenneth Goldsmith
  Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PennSound. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010...
  
  
• Leon Golub
  Leon Golub
  Leon Golub was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively.He was married to and collaborated with the artist Nancy Spero...
  
  
• Douglas Gordon
  Douglas Gordon
  Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist; he won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale...
  
  
• Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke
  Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...
  
  
• Marcus Harvey
  Marcus Harvey
  Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists .-Exhibitions:Harvey has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including ‘The Führer's Cakes’ at Galleria Marabini in Bologna, ‘Snaps’ at White Cube in London, ‘Sex and the British’ at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac...
  
  
• Damien Hirst
  Damien Hirst
  Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists , who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist,...
  
  
• Pierre Huyghe
  Pierre Huyghe
  Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...
  
  
• Jasper Johns
  Jasper Johns
  Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
  
  
• Bill Jones
  Bill Jones (artist)
  Bill Jones is a photographer, installation artist and performer based in New York. His work is concerned with light as both a physical phenomenon and metaphorical figure. Jones was part of the Vancouver School of conceptual photography, along with such artists as Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace and...
  
  
• Deborah Kass
  Deborah Kass
  Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the self.-Life and work:Deborah Kass received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students League of New...
  
  
• Ai Kijima
  Ai Kijima
  Ai Kijima, born in 1970 in Tokyo, Japan, is a contemporary artist currently residing in New York City. She is noted for her use of traditional quilting techniques to create colorful fabric collages from found materials such as bed sheets, vintage kimonos, t-shirts, curtains, and dishtowels.-Life...
  
  
• Karen Kilimnik
  Karen Kilimnik
  Karen Kilimnik is an American painter and installation artist.-Life and work:Karen Kilimnik trained at Temple University, Philadelphia.Her installations reflected a young viewpoint of pop culture...
  
  
• Jeff Koons
  Jeff Koons
  Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
  
  
• Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth
  Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
  
  
• Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...
  
  
• Michael Landy
  Michael Landy
  Michael Landy RA is one of the Young British Artists . He is best known for the performance piece installation Break Down , in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin project at the South London Gallery. On 29 May 2008 Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in...
  
  
• Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette
  Matthieu Laurette is a media and conceptual contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from TV and video to installation and public interventions....
  
  
• Louise Lawler
  Louise Lawler
  Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler's work has focused on the presentation and marketing of artwork. Much of this work consists of photographs of other peoples' artwork and the context in which it is viewed...
  
  
• Lennie Lee
  Lennie Lee
  Lennie Lee is a South African conceptual artist who lives and works in London.-Life and career:Lennie Lee is a British artist born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He moved to the UK in 1960. He was educated at Dulwich college in London before winning a scholarship to study philosophy at Christ...
  
  
• Nikki S. Lee
  Nikki s. lee
  Nikki Seung-hee Lee is a Korean American New York City-based artist and filmmaker. After earning B.F.A. at Chung-Ang University in South Korea in 1993, she moved to New York in 1994 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She earned her M.A...
  
  
• Sherrie Levine
  Sherrie Levine
  Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
  
  
• Roy Lichtenstein
  Roy Lichtenstein
  Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
  
  
• Damian Loeb
  Damian Loeb
  Damian Loeb is an American painter. Self-taught, he moved to New York City in the early 1990s.Discovered by Jeffrey Deitch, founder of Deitch Projects and current director of LAMoCA, Loeb had his first solo in 1999...
  
  
• Robert Longo
  Robert Longo
  Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
  
  
• Norm Magnusson
  Norm Magnusson
  Norm Magnusson is a New York-based artist and political activist.Founder, in 1991, of the art movement funism, he began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries...
  
  
• Miltos Manetas
  Miltos Manetas
  Miltos Manetas is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in HighgateManetas has created Internet Art as well as paintings of cables, computers, video games and Internet websites. His work has been collected by Charles Saatchi...
  
  
• Christian Marclay
  Christian Marclay
  Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...
  
  
• John McHale
  John McHale (artist)
  John McHale was an artist and sociologist. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies...
  
  
• Sayuri Michima
  Sayuri Michima
  Sayuri Michima is a Japanese visual artist who in the beginning of the millennium was associated with the Superflat movement....
  
  
• Aleksandra Mir
  Aleksandra Mir
  -Life and work:She studied Communications at Schillerska/Gothenburg University in Gothenburg , Media Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York , and Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York...
  
  
• Joan Miró
  Joan Miró
  Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
  
  
• Yasumasa Morimura
  Yasumasa Morimura
  Yasumasa Morimura is a Japanese appropriation artist. He was born in Osaka and graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1978...
  
  
• Malcolm Morley
  Malcolm Morley
  Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...
  
  
• Dominique Mulhem
  Dominique Mulhem
  Dominique Mulhem, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a French painter.-Childhood:He passes part of its childhood and its adolescence to Asnières-sur-Seine where Georges Seurat painted a bathe in Asnières...
  
  
• Vik Muniz
  Vik Muniz
  Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz, known as Vik Muniz , is a visual artist living in New York City.-Early career:Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s after relocating from Brazil to Chicago and later to New York. His early work grew out of a post-Fluxus aesthetic and often involved...
  
  
• Claes Oldenburg
  Claes Oldenburg
  Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
  
  
• Meret Oppenheim
  Méret Oppenheim
  -External links:**** http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/man_ray.html...
  
  
• People Like Us
  People Like Us
  People Like Us is a British comedy programme, a spoof on-location documentary written by John Morton, and starring Chris Langham as Roy Mallard, an inept interviewer...
  
  
• Tom Phillips
  Tom Phillips (artist)
  Tom Phillips CBE R.A. is an English artist. He was born in London, where he continues to work. He is a painter, printmaker and collagist.-Life:...
  
  
• Pablo Picasso
  Pablo Picasso
  Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
  
  
• Bern Porter
  Bern Porter
  Bernard Harden "Bern" Porter was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and scientist.In 2010 his work was recognized by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.- Biography :...
  
  
• Rick Prelinger
  Rick Prelinger
  Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make...
  
  
• Richard Prince
  Richard Prince
  Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...
  
  
• Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg
  Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
  
  
• Graham Rawle
  Graham Rawle
  Graham Rawle is a UK writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. His weekly Lost Consonants series appeared in the Weekend Guardian for 15 years...
  
  
• Gerhard Richter
  Gerhard Richter
  Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...
  
  
• Thomas Ruff
  Thomas Ruff
  Thomas Ruff is an internationally renowned German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf.-Life:...
  
  
• Rob Scholte
  Rob Scholte
  Rob Scholte is a Dutch contemporary artist. From 1977 to 1982 he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. His work consists of reproductions of images from the media and from art history...
  
  
• David Salle
  David Salle
  David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
  
  
• Peter Saville
• Kurt Schwitters
  Kurt Schwitters
  Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
  
  
• Cindy Sherman
  Cindy Sherman
  Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
  
  
• Cornelia Sollfrank
  Cornelia Sollfrank
  Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist who pioneered into the digital realm and Cyberfeminism in the 1990s.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Nancy Spero
  Nancy Spero
  Nancy Spero was an American visual artist.-Life and work:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She was married to, and collaborated with artist Leon Golub....
  
  
• John Stezaker
  John Stezaker
  -Overview:Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he was among the first wave of British conceptual artists to react against what was then the predominance of Pop art....
  
  
• Elaine Sturtevant
  Elaine Sturtevant
  Elaine Sturtevant, an American artist born 1930 in Lakewood, Ohio, has achieved recognition for her works that consist entirely of copies of other artists' works.Sturtevant turns the concept of originality on its head...
  
  
• Philip Taaffe
  Philip Taaffe
  Philip Taaffe is an American artistTaaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and studied at the Cooper Union in New York, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977....
  
  
• Tyler Turkle
  Tyler Turkle
  -History:Tyler Turkle was born May 29, 1947 in Alliance, Ohio. He received his B.A. in History in 1970 from Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio and studied cinematography at Kent State University. From 1975 to 1987 he taught art, photography, video and filmmaking in the School of Visual Arts at...
  
  
• Luc Tuymans
  Luc Tuymans
  Luc Tuymans is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Tuymans is considered one of the most influential painters working today. His signature figurative paintings transform mediated film, television, and print sources into examinations of history and memory.-Life:Tuymans...
  
  
• Kelley Walker
  Kelley Walker
  Kelley Walker is an American artist.Walker graduated with a BFA from the University of Tennessee in 1995.Walker’s work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo in Spain, the New Langton Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and FRAC...
  
  
• Andy Warhol
  Andy Warhol
  Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
  
  
• Vivienne Westwood
  Vivienne Westwood
  Dame Vivienne Westwood, DBE, RDI is a British fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.-Early life:...
  
  

See also

• Cultural appropriation
  Cultural appropriation
  Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...
  
  
• Appropriation (music)
  Appropriation (music)
  In music, appropriation is the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new piece, and is an example of cultural appropriation....
  
  
• Art intervention
  Art intervention
  Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience or venue/space. It has the auspice of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with the Viennese Actionists, the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists...
  
  
• Found art
  Found art
  The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function...
  
  
• Classificatory disputes about art
  Classificatory disputes about art
  Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today....
  
  
• Conceptual art
  Conceptual art
  Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
  
  
• Collage
  Collage
  A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
  
  
• Decollage
  Décollage
  Décollage, in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images, it is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image. Examples include inimage or etrécissements and excavations...
  
  
• Fair use
  Fair use
  Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
  
  
• Scratch Video
  Scratch Video
  Scratch video was a British video art movement that emerged in the early-mid 1980s. It was characterised by the use of found footage, fast-cutting and multi-layered rhythms...
  
  
• Postmodern art
  Postmodern art
  Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath...
  
  
• Assemblage
  Assemblage (composition)
  Assemblage refers to a text "built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context". The concept was first proposed by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber in the journal, Computers & Composition, in 2007...
  
  

External links

• Michalis Pichler : Statements on Appropriation
• Appropriation Art Coalition-Canada
• Blanche v. Koons Decision (August 2005)
• Koons Wins Landmark Copyright Lawsuit 1/2006

• Koons wins appeal (2006)

• Fair Use Network
• Creative Commons
• Free Culture an international student movement
• The New York Institute for the Humanities Comedies of Fair U$e conference (Archive.org)
• Open Source Culture: Intellectual Property, Technology, and the Arts, Columbia Digital Media Center lecture series
• Public Domain
• Sherri Levine Interview
• Duchamp
• Lichtenstein
• Warhol
• transordinator/edition Remixing conceptual artworks