Appropriation Art, Fair Use, and Metalinguistic Negotiation

Appropriation art (AA) involves the use of pre-existing works of art with little to no transformation. Works of AA (often) fail to satisfy established criteria for originality, such as creative labour and transformative use. As such, appropriation artists are often subject to copyright lawsuits and defend their work under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law. In legal cases regarding AA and fair use, judges lack a general principle whereby they can determine whether or not the offending party has ‘transformed’ the original work. Further, it is not the case that there is some antecedent fact that could determine the outcome one way or another. I diagnose debates surrounding the transformative nature of works of AA as cases of ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ over what concepts we should attach to terms like ‘copy’, ‘transformative’, and ‘work of art’.

Die Aneignung von Bildern

Unter dem Begriff der Aneignung werden verschiedene Formen der Übernahme urheberrechtlich geschützter Werke untersucht. Schon in den 1970ern nutzten Künstler der Appropriation Art Kopien für ihre Kunstwerke. Mit der Digitalisierung und der Partizipationskultur im Internet sind die Techniken der Appropriation Art demokratisiert und als Memes und GiFs Mittel der Massenkommunikation geworden. Diese Formen der Bildnutzungen – in der Appropriation Art und im Digitalen – werden urheberrechtlich bewertet. Dabei liegt ein Schwerpunkt der Arbeit darin, ob das geltende Urheberrecht der gesellschaftlichen Realität digitaler Kommunikation noch angemessen Rechnung tragen und wie rechtlicher Freiraum für Aneignungshandlungen geschaffen werden kann.

The lord of the postmodernity: Plagiarism

Today's art, which is dominated by postmodernism, evolves into a completely different sense of art that reverses the system over its own weapon and changes all the known values of art. Postmodern art, which focuses on questions about what is the thing that is art, canalises itself into citations and compilations which turn into imitation, appropriation, pastiche or plagiarism. While postmodernism turns into a kind of citation and compilation aesthetics; imitation, which is at the centre of the questions related to what is the thing that is art, becomes the strategy of postmodernism. The article titled ‘The Lord of the Postmodernity: Plagiarism’ is about the transformation of an art object into an art material or the re-presentation of it in today's sense of art which extends from imitation, appropriation and pastiche to plagiarism.Keywords: Postmodernism, plagiarism, power, imitation, appropriation, art, pastiche.