For the first time in my life, I cannot bring myself to defend Bob Dylan's thievery

This is extremely blatant, even for Dylan:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/questions-raised-about-dylan-show-at-gagosian/

I don't see a resemblance (just kidding)

hmm i dunno about the paintings but i am going to defend this
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/28/arts/jp-dylan-3/jp-dylan-3-blog480.jpg
so cool!

The gallery said:

the collection of paintings and other artwork would provide “a visual journal” of Mr. Dylan’s travels “in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea,” with “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.”

But Bob said:

“I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. What I’m trying to bring out in complex scenes, landscapes, or personality clashes, I do it in a lot of different ways. I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start with something tangible.”

Commenter "Tom" OTM:

2.Tom
New York, NY
September 27th, 2011
1:12 pm
It's pretty obvious he took an overhead projector, blew up the photos onto canvas, traced them with a pencil and then painted the tracings. To say that there are similarities between the paintings and the photos is a gross understatement. Let's call a spade a spade; he traced those exact photos mentioned in the article.

However, this is a show for Dylan fans, not art cognoscenti. The merits of this debate will probably be lost on them anyway.

3.Tom
NY, NY
September 27th, 2011
1:13 pm
that dog is huge

lolll

i'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but is this that different from say warhol taking that monroe photo and making a painting out of it? he didn't take the photo, obviously.

Seriously, that dog is fucking massive. Looks like it'd be at least Bob's height, standing on its hind legs.

picture makes me think like, what if bob was your college roommate.

The difference with Warhol was that he was upfront about how he made his paintings (not that a silkscreen can be passed off as a hand painted picture anyway).

Friend of mine has a similar breed dog and an 8-month old baby:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/308406_10100304565620084_23300595_49549707_690097720_n.jpg

Using photos as a reference and blatantly copying their composition to a T are different things. I'm a longtime defender of the way Dylan's cribbed and adapted old songs, poetry, etc., for his lyrics. But this, not so much. I think it's a disaster for the gallery, art world ethics-wise (such as they are).

dylan's going to be dylan. *shrug*

I know. I love Dylan.

I can't get myself too worked up about this. the question will hinge on whether or not this plagiarism was intentionally done. and even if it was intentional, for what purpose? or if he meant to hide it, for what purpose? there have been much worse cases of intentional plagiarism in the art world, and those people made their money. could you make comparisons between this and sampling in music? I don't know. how far could you make the decontextualization/defamiliarization argument work here?

'bout all this makes me want to do is to reread that borges story about the guy who rewrote don quixote.

http://aidanmaconachyblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/famous-paintings-based-on-photographs.html

When I think of decontextualization/defamiliarization I see it as more along the lines of, say, Francis Bacon adapting Velasquez:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/Innocent-x-velazquez.jpg/220px-Innocent-x-velazquez.jpg

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bacon/innocent.jpg

@tylerw, thanks for that, very interesting, though most of them are significantly different from the photographs.

Oops, Velazquez, I mean.

that cape is huge

That Bacon painting is the bomb.

Looks like a comic panel where Dr. Insane Villain gets vaporised.

if we remove the claim that these paintings are based on 'firsthand experiences,' is this a big deal?

If any of those photographs have copyright holders, they will POUNCE, just watch. And that NYT commentor is right, Dylan just traced them, they are not even free hand.

that'll depend on if the paintings are transformative or derivative (we saw this play out recently with the jay maisel v. chip tunes story)

how did the shepard fairey/obama thing pan out?

dylan, at this point in his life, couldn't give even less of a fuck than usual. he is fuckless, all out of fucks to give. I bet if he had a fuck to give he would but he doesn't.

if we remove the claim that these paintings are based on 'firsthand experiences,' is this a big deal?

this kinda line played well in the early deconstruction days but come on. yes. he's tracing. it's lame.

how did the shepard fairey/obama thing pan out?

mccain lost iirc

xp well context absolutely matters. if he had presented these paintings as "inspired" by photographs and made that claim outright and explicit, nobody would care.

the fact that he got richard prince to do the catalog suggests that all of this was very much intentional, he probably cleared it with his lawyers beforehand, this was all very very intentional.

Looking forward to his 'Painting by Numbers' and 'Join the Dots' series.

Bob Dylan's Khristmas Karaoke

(oh wait hasn't he done this already?)

I'm going to be the one to cliche it up: "everyone steals in music". Tear into it.

I think David Hockney had a theory that a lot of old masters effectively traced some of their paintings with a camera obscura, but it was controversial

maybe bob dylan's most meaningful experiences/memories of traveling actually are picture postcards

can't tell if that sentence parses correctly or not, too bored by "cloud yells at old man"

so boreddddddd!!!! fuk u bob dylan