I was listening to a knitting podcast the other day (what? Cast On rocks.) and one of the host’s big concerns is the freedom of artists. Not just being free in the sense of allowed to leave the house, but free to create whatever they want, to build on their predecessors, to continue or riff off of, or improve upon the work that has come before. That could mean anything from artists sitting in a museum and copying from the work of the masters, or a knitter finding a picture of a sweater in an old magazine and updating the look to design a new sweater for today to a musician making a rock band because they are so totally into the Rolling Stones or U2. Artistic freedom in this sense means the freedom to take inspiration from wherever it comes.
Of course, there is a flip side to this freedom: intellectual property is the easiest way to refer to it. Nobody is going to be able to realistically claim the Mona Lisa as their own original work, but what about the work of artists that aren’t protected by the vast shields of history and fame? What about your favorite webcomic? There are plenty of examples of webcomics having work taken from their website and represented as the work of someone else. I know that one of my friends had art taken from his online gallery and printed in Greece on stationary notebooks- when I heard about it, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and it wasn’t even MY work!
When I asked Mohammad ‘Hawk’ Haque about it, he was pretty clear on where he drew the line: sometimes it’s flattering when a fan is inspired by your work to create an homage to it-as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off that homage. “If the artist admits their piece was an idea from [an]other piece… admitting it I don’t have a problem. But it comes down to… are you talking about character design, exact same pose, exact same concept, etc, or someone else’s character in a different pose… which turns out to be a fanart… selling fanart… I don’t agree.”
Garth Graham agrees: “Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but sincere flattery gives credit where credit is do. Fan art is fantastic, it’s awesome, it makes us artist feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s a wonderful affirmation of “someone else likes our work.” And fan artists should be entitled to the credit of creating said works of fanart. … Artists put a lot of effort into creating characters and stories and franchises that people love and adore. And when you go take those characters who are not yours and make money off of them, you rob the artist your imitating of some of his work. We’re not even talking monetary kind of thing, but you’re leaching off of someone else’s effort. And that’s a terrible thing.”
Our very own resident graphic artist Jason points out, however, that he draws inspiration from everything that he sees, the work of other artists included. It can form a very important part of an artist’s development to imitate the work of others: “What’s fun is looking at other works and figuring out *how* they did it, and that can be inspiring — fills in the gaps to works you can’t quite execute.”
So. Where’s the line to be drawn? It’s hard to see what is legitimately an artistic inspiration and what is outright theft. Shouldn’t artists and writers be allowed to profit from their own work? Why should some stranger who finds a page on Deviant Art or a personal online gallery be allowed to print off a few posters and sets up shop selling ‘original prints’? What if they take that work and flip the colors around to negative? Would it be original art then? It’s a tough question, and as an artist and a friend to artists, even I don’t know what the answer is. All I know is that as long as there is art and creativity, there will be people who will try to profit off artistic work that isn’t theirs.
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