Appropriation in Art

The world of art is a strange one, If you have an idea, chances are, you're not the first. But artists have been "borrowing" ideas for a very long time. Think about this: the classical art and architecture of the Renaissance was inspired by the art and architecture of the Romans, which in turn was largely lifted from the Greeks, who may have drawn some inspiration from the Egyptians, who totally ripped off the original ancient Egyptians, who may have lifted some of their ideas from the Sumerians. That's a chain of idea theft going all the way back to 5000 BCE if not much earlier. But let's go back more. Let's say a hunter-gatherer smears some red berry juice on a leaf and thinks it looks spectacular, and decides to decorate his cave/hut/whatever with it. Now if you put something colorful on something else maybe a bit less colorful, are you stealing? Probably not, I mean, you at least did something unique with it, right? Oh, you painted a landscape? So have a gazillion other people. You painted something abstract? Not really that unique. A portrait? HAH!

So is it stealing? No, not really. "Borrowing" probably the better term. If you straight-up traced over The Last Supper without any intent of using it for another type of artistic expression, that would probably be stealing. But emulating a style, using a philosophy, contributing to a genre? That's not stealing.

Now, let's talk about the artist that is literally selling prints of Instagram posts for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is probably stealing. He's not really making an expression here, there's no real creativity involved, he's just taking social media posts, making prints, and selling them for money. Let's first start with the fact that some of these posts are already art, be it professional photography or pictures of art. Second, while re-purposing many of these photos falls under Fair Use, they might still be the property of Instagram. If his idea of artistic expression is to show people how loopholes in Fair Use policy can be exploited, well I suppose that's better than nothing, but it's outrageous for him to be selling these easily reproduced images of other people's work, unedited, as prints, for obscene amounts of money. What are you paying for at that point? Someone's name on the back of a public domain image? I could go to a print shop and get hundreds if not thousands of copies made for the price of one of his "originals".