Homework 4

For the record, I generally find myself siding with appropriation and fair use. I find the relatively recent trend of over-litigiousness from certain major corporations (Looking at you, Disney), or many record companies to be burdensome, and frankly annoying. When certain YouTubers are being forced to edit audio because a song playing in the background, or even properly licensed to play in a video game, might cause the site's auto-detector to shut it down, it's gone too far. When creators of The Simpsons mentioned that it is much harder to get the go-ahead from Fox on song parodies, which have long been established as an exception to copyright, due to concerns over legal battles from the originators, it's gone too far.

Having said that, Richard Prince absolutely sucks. To the nth degree. What he does is not only plagiarism thinly veiled as art, but he's potentially jeopardizing the future for those who have legitimate connections to the concept of Fair Use. Prince doesn't even try (Relatively speaking). Taking well-crafted photographs from a photographer and putting a silly blue guitar over it is not original art. At best, it's lazy, and at worst, it's stealing, and in neither case should it be considered art. None of the pictures shown in the various articles (The New York Times one specifically) showed any sort of legitimate effort to change Cariou's original photography, nor is there any real artistic merit to it. Neither is taking somebody else's Instagram posts that you left a creepy comment on and hanging it on a damn wall.

To me, Prince is doing nothing but hurting concept of Fair Use by selfishly profiting from others hard work. Going back to Disney, if you wanted to take the copyrighted image of Mickey Mouse, and demonstrate that you feel Disney is evil by creatively incorporating it into a poster or a background, then I am in full support of it. In fact, I encourage it. But pretending to make the same point by taking a copyrighted image of Mickey Mouse, going into Photoshop, drawing a vaudevillian mustache on him and then saying "Give me money" is a slap in the face of  anyone who considers themselves an artist (Which, for the record, I absolutely do not). I'm willing to bet that at least half of the people in this class could do what Prince did to those Cariou photos in about ten minutes. Leaving a creepy comment on a woman's Instagram page? Hell, I could do that. And it doesn't help that Prince behaves like an ass. If you're going to be a dismissive dickwad in court when asked a simple question of how you changed someone else's and subsequently banking millions of dollars by doing so, then you should absolutely lose your right to claim Fair Use. So to summarize my position on Richard Prince, in case I hadn't made it clear, he's a tool.

Also, this is why I often don't understand art. Who the hell's paying $90,000 for a blown up picture of someone's Instagram photo with a creeper in his mid-60's leaving a cringy comment? How about saving yourself that money by just leaving the comment yourself and bringing the screenshot to Kinko's for a substantially lower rate?