Art, Advertising, Plagiarism, and Appropriation

This article has popped up this week on the NYTimes, and was posted on Design Observer as a link as well:

The Image is Familiar; the Pitch Isn't


Strange to me that I was just talking to Jack about this not long ago, and that somehow, in some twisted way, Mia Fineman seems to come to some conclusion that it's just great that advertisers steal artwork for ads because artists appropriate advertising in their artwork: "The cycle of influence goes round and round: Ad agencies borrow from artists who borrow from advertising. Isn’t it great when things just work?"

The fact is, there's a whole huge difference between making ads and making art, and it's not just some full circle thing where everyone is happy.


My question a month ago was this: Why is it okay for artists to plagiarize and copy things, but it's a legal issue for advertising creatives and designers?

And for me, it kind of came down to the fact that artists are considering design and advertising as cultural artifacts, things that ought to be taken as symbolic of a generation, a country, a societal perspective. Advertisers that take artwork, however, are exploiting an idea that was never intended to generate mass revenue. And if you're going to make that much money off of an idea, the original creator of the EXPRESSION of that idea should get credit.

The article says that, "The law governing the unauthorized use of copyrighted images and ideas, he said, is notoriously murky. “Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it only protects expression. The question is, where do you draw the line? Is the agency being inspired by the idea? Or did they copy the artist’s expression?”"

We all know what it means to come up with handfuls of ways to express an idea. We get a main concept and then go, one idea about how to visualize it after another. It seems to me that it's pretty obvious when borrowing means somebody else didn't do their homework.

And at the same time, I have to step back and eat my words inasmuch as to say that I agree that sometimes, appropriation just works. Seeing someone's idea done similarly but in a different way is interesting to us all. Taking the expression of one idea and recontextualizing it for the expression of another idea, to make another point entirely-- that really throws some confusion into the mix. And it always seems to come down to the fact that... well, everything has been done. At least some elements of it.

I think our biggest challenge as designers in this time and age and whatnot isn't that we need to figure out how to make everything work as systems, or that we need to learn to communicate most efficiently... because that has been explored and figured out to some extent already. Our biggest challenge is to see a world where so much has been done and try to figure out how to make it ours, make it unique... and how to push it farther than it has already gone.