I find it useful to see it this way: the issues with appropriation are issues with the people who purvey art, not the people who create it. The artist has to do what he has to do. Dealers, buyers, promoters, and critics are the people who should be having these hard thoughts about appropriation.
Go paint however you want to paint.
Heh. That was one reason I picked Guernica for the second link. I think it’s truly a great work of art, but it clearly rests on the tradition of others. The cool thing, though, is that an understanding of those traditions might give you better insight into the piece, but it’s not necessary in order to appreciate it.
Hey, if aboriginals are culturally appropriating Zorba the Greek, I think turnabout is fair play.
At the risk of drawing more of your scorn, you do know that something can be art even if it doesn’t speak to you, right? I don’t particularly care for the majority of artwork hung up on gallery walls nowadays, because the majority of stuff doesn’t evoke any feels in me. It doesn’t “speak” to me in a voice I can understand. But what is it, if it isn’t art? Junk someone else is willing to pay thousands of dollars for?
Or is it possible that art is a completely value-neutral term–one that does not only mean “Something that entertains me.”
I don’t get the difference between “ooh, that’s beautiful!” and “ooh, that’s pretty!” in the context of this discussion. You might think something is beautiful, pretty, cool, neat-o, terrific, awesome, weird, or meh. That doesn’t mean someone else can’t have a completely different interpretation of that work. There is no objective “beauty”. An artist that doesn’t create anything beautiful is still an artist. But maybe you know these things already and I’m just speaking past you again.
You have every right to ignore the source material. But someone else is perfectly entitled to examine everything, including the source material. Your way of examining art is not necessarily the best way, though it is the easiest, most simplistic way. Saying that’s how it “should be” is making art into something that only appeals to ones basic senses, rather a completely integrated mind.
I’m fine with spending a few bucks on something that’s “ooh pretty” (or beautiful…or neato). Which is why I don’t really care that much about whether something is “cultural appropriation” or not. But you’re not going to convince me that art is all about one thing, and as long as that one thing is met, then the artist is free from criticism. Everything is grounds for criticism the moment you hold something up and say “lookit.” Folks who can’t handle this kind of scrutiny shouldn’t go into the art business. They should give their stuff away for free like I do. 
You can’t draw more of something that was never there. I meant no scorn, and apologize if it came off that way.
Well, I don’t know why you would consider it to be art if it doesn’t speak to you. That doesn’t mean it can’t be art to someone else to whom it does speak. What would you call it? How about “an attempt at art”?
I’m not sure “entertain” is the right word. But if art doesn’t evoke SOMETHING, then what is to distinguish it from the orange juice I spilled on the floor this morning? And I honestly don’t know what you mean by “value neutral” in this context.
First of all, there was no 'ooh" in my post. That, alone, trivializes things. Something can be beautiful, but no pretty. In fact, the Pieta is a good example. It’s a dead guy being held by a women whose proportions would be considered grotesque if seen on a living woman. If I said “He’s a beautiful person”, would you think I meant he was “pretty to look at”, or would you think he was someone who was a value to the community?
I did start my post with “to me”, so I’d hardly say I was putting forth a universal truth. And having something “speak to you” in no way rules out taking the source material into account. That might, in fact, make it speak to you in a completely new and different way. But if the work does not speak to you, then why would you consider it art, unless you consider everything to be art.
If you want to define art as unrelated to an emotional response, then I’d be interested in hearing how that works. Can you elaborate?
I don’t put art on some vaulted pedestal. Someone can wave his dick on a street corner and call it “art”, and I’ll agree with him if I have no reason to believe he is lying. Just because I may not know what artistic statement he’s making doesn’t mean he’s not making one. Maybe he’s a poor communicator. Or maybe I’m just stupid.
Art should communicate or evoke something, I agree. I just think it is arrogant for me to assume that just because I don’t feel something, that means the artist isn’t really an artist. Just like I wouldn’t dare rob a musician the title of a “musician” just because his music sounds like noise to me. Especially if others are dancing along with it.
It means that I don’t think “art” should be reserved for objects that meet my personal approval. I don’t restrict “art” to only music I like or paintings I like or movies I like. I use “art” to describe all creative work. Something can fail to speak to me and still be art. Just calling something “art” does not give it gravitas.
I can see that and I’m sorry.
And you can see beauty where I see only pretty. You can see pretty in what I see beautiful. People laugh at me in real life when I tell them a sunset in Newark, NJ registers the same “ooh, beautiful!” reaction in me that a sunset in the Florida Everglades does. They can’t imagine how a backdrop of oil refineries and high-density housing could ever be beautiful. Are they smarter than I am or do we just have different opinions, arrived at through different experiences? “Beauty” is not some objective quality that requires understanding or special learnedness to discern. IMHO, being touched by beauty is just a more intense version of “ooh, pretty!”
No, I don’t consider everything to be art. But just because something doesn’t speak to me doesn’t mean the artist isn’t nonetheless screaming in my ear. If I see a critical mass of people responding to something as if it is art, then it only makes sense for me to accept that’s what it is. I don’t know what else it would be. I don’t know what would be gained by calling it junk, which implies it is worthless. So if it isn’t art, what is it?
Can you envision a piece of art that registers more thought than emotion? I certainly can. But at any rate, I’m not arguing that art is unrelated to emotions and I don’t understand why you’d think I’m making that argument. I’m only saying that I personally don’t have to have an emotional response to something to call it art.
Braque and Picasso didn’t just indulge in pastiche of African pieces, though.
Just using an artistic style isn’t a big deal, though it is pretty likely to end up tacky in a “tiny plaster statues of Michelangelo’s David” kind of way. If you don’t really understand an artistic tradition, all you are likely to produce is a cheap approximation of someone else’s art. And that’s fine. Plenty of people making make a living plying tacky tourist art.
The place where you run in to problems is using something with religious meaning in a way that doesn’t make sense with or clashes with the religious aspect. That is where people get sensitive.
I think one of the main arguments about the problem of cultural appropriation is that people from affluent and powerful cultures take cultural pieces of less dominant (and less economically integrated) cultures and monetize them, thus ‘stealing value’ from other cultures. Then, 15/20/30/40 years down the road, when those cultures start to integrate into the global economy, the only unique thing they have of value, their culture, is already not unique and much less valuable.
Personally, I think that “cultural appropriation” by itself is never wrong and I’ve never seen any convincing argument about why it should be.
It seems to me that it would work the other way around.
I have never heard of dot-art from Australian aborigines prior to reading this thread, but I would see it like this. Let’s say in year Y, dot-art is completely unknown outside of the original culture that produces it. Then, somebody visits Australia and decides to start producing art based on that style in New York City, marketing it as “aboriginal dot art” to hipsters and bourgeois artsy-fartsy types in Manhattan. He makes a ton of money doing so. Most people who buy it, do so because it’s pretty and don’t care about the culture that originated it. But a few of they buyers eventually decide they care enough to seek at out original versions by members of the culture that created it, and they’re willing to pay substantial amounts for it. By year Y+20, aboriginal artists are making money selling their stuff to hipsters living thousands of miles away. So in the long run, the act of cultural appropriation benefits the aboriginal culture.
Art from a primitive tribal culture is generally going to have virtually no financial value in the global economy, unless it becomes popular somewhere outside that culture. And how is it going to become popular, if the art world is trying to police “cultural appropriation” all the time?
I don’t like tomatoes, but I don’t refer to them as “an attempt at food.”
I think it is important to understand the history and cultural context of an art style before incorporating it into your own style (in other words, not directly “copying” it).
Can you really incorporate Cubism without having some understanding of where it came from and why? You could mimic it, maybe, but mere mimicry doesn’t make it your own or impart any artfulness or meaning.
The main issue with cultural appropriation is the colonial attitude that art done by “those people” is derided or considered unartful (“ghetto,” etc.) – UNTIL the exact same art style is produced by a member of the dominant group, at which time said art style is suddenly “cool” “edgy” or other positive adjectives, and the money goes not to any originators of the art form, who have perhaps been creating and struggling for decades, but to the people who appropriated it.
All art and culture builds upon what came before, but culturally we have a real attitude problem with disparaging art the comes from the “othered” groups until we take it for ourselves. I don’t have a real solution to this problem – you can’t stop the natural course of how art and culture develop and borrow from each other, and nowadays cultures meet and intersect way more than ever before thanks to technology – other than trying to insist that no one disparage art/culture that is different from their own in the first place. And good luck with that.
So could you borrow from the Aboriginal art style? Sure, if you’ve spent several years studying under and learning from an Aboriginal artist.
I like the way you think. My neighbor is kind of an ass-hole and I don’t like him. I will now refer to him as “an attempt at a human”.
That doesn’t seem like it’s a problem of the guy doing the “cultural appropriation”, though. He may very well appreciate the art for what it is. Is he therefore not suppose to “appropriate” it?
Why? Why limit freedom of expression? It’s easy to counterfeit many art styles. Why should I have to pass a “literacy test” in order to sell a t-shirt?
You can’t copyright a “style.” Lots of people have done spoofs of, say, Star Wars. George Lucas has zero basis to sue.
Who, exactly, is being harmed by an Australian-Native-style t-shirt? What reason do you have for wanting it stopped? If you don’t like my t-shirt, don’t buy it.
IF the artist understands the history and cultural meaning behind the art, she is in a unique position to not only bring her teachers and compatriots within the originating culture with her in the cultural exchange and the spotlight of fame/popularity (and money), but to provide a platform with which to educate art consumers. BUT you cannot do that if you don’t know of what you speak. This is why I said above “Yes, if you’ve studied under an Aboriginal artist…”
Cultural exchange is different from appropriation. It takes more work on the part of the artists involved in the exchange.
You know that literal counterfeiting and forgery are actual crimes, right? And there are reasons for that? And even speaking in figurative terms, I said above that mere mimicry does not impart artfulness or meaning. If you don’t understand where the art style came from or why, I daresay you’ve actually LOST quite a bit of meaning.
I said all this in my first post. Money, disparagement, etc. etc. and I honestly can’t take how much Dopers insist on arguments being endlessly repeated, reiterated, rephrased, as if that will change them; when in fact all they want is just to find some way to justify their own pre-conceived ideas instead of considering an alternate viewpoint.
I mean, seriously, your questions are addressed IN MY POST. My answers are and will be “as I said above already.” So why are you asking? It seems like a giant waste of time, one I’m not particularly interested in engaging in.
I just don’t see it.
Let’s take rap music. Black people started producing it over thirty years ago. It was successful. Some rappers made tons of money and became world famous. They developed a whole culture around it including clothing, gestures, attitudes, and so forth, as well as the music itself.
Then some white people started producing rap music and copying the dress and gestures and so forth developed. Some of them also became famous and rich doing so. And some people get upset about rich white frat boys trying to ack like gangstas. But there are still plenty of black people producing rap music, and none of them lost any money as a result of white people entering the field.
ITR Champion: How would you know? How many rappers have struggled for years but you’ve still never heard of them? How many of them rap with a solid grounding in the history of expression that rap evolved from?
And… how often has rap been disparaged as a “ghetto” art form? How often have critics derided it’s “violence” without bothering to investigate the cultural history behind it (like poverty, police brutality…) How many years of that history do we have? Did black rappers “cross over” to the mainstream first? Or were they stuck being a marginal, niche art form exclusive to African-American culture until some white guys got their hands on it and made it popular with the suburban kids?
One example: are you familiar with sissy bounce? Do you know where it came from? Its history? Its most popular artists? Names, please. And do you think that most people in America have ever heard of the names of sissy bounce artists? Do you think these artists are making lots of money on their art?
Also please remember Cultural exchange is different from appropriation. It takes more work on the part of the artists involved in the exchange.
(If y’all are going to demand I repeat myself, I think I’ll stick with underlining it every time I do…)
Another example: Beyonce performs “Formation” at the Super Bowl, and white America loses their minds, not only saying that her song sucks, but that she sucks as a person, her family sucks, and a whole lot of other extremely negative and occasionally violent / threatening things, including many many things which sounded an awful lot like “uppity”; when she was literally singing about her own personal experience and that of her community. If that’s not disparagement I don’t know what is. She’s among the most successful, well-known black artists out there, and yet she and her art are STILL derided as “too ghetto” in mainstream America.
If you ain’t seein’ it, you ain’t lookin’.
Not relevant: the discussion is about mimicking a style, not a specific work.
I never said anything regarding artfulness or meaning. I don’t know what you think you’re rebutting.
Yeah. It’s called “debate.” I have a belief, and I’m arguing for it.
Okay; you don’t want to debate. Shrug. You aren’t going to change many people’s minds that way, but it’s a free message board. Have a nice dinner.
What exactly do you mean when you say “white America loses their minds”? There are over two hundred million white people in the USA. Are you claiming that all of them said the things which you describe white America as saying?
If not, then what exactly are you saying?