Street Art Forgeries & Plagiarism

Street art involves a lot of appropriation (stealing) other people’s images from the mass media, art and elsewhere. Appropriation is part of the cut and paste, Dada to hip-hop, lineage of which street art is a part. A sample, appropriated from some other work of art or design, can be used creatively to create new and original works. (I could expand on the history of sampling in music, art and literature but this is not the point.) Appropriation, sampling, homage, tribute, plagiarism, copy, whatever you want to call it, are all the various degrees of lack of authenticity and originality. And this leaves the door wide open for many kinds of abuses.

Not a real Banksy

I saw a fake Banksy gangster rat on the street of Brisbane, I’m pretty sure that Banksy never went to Brisbane but if he did this would have faded in the sun by now. It has been copied from a photograph of a Banksy gangster rat but it has left out details on the ghettoblaster. This fake Banksy is different from the forgeries on sale in auction houses or on Ebay. (In April 2007 auction house Christies withdrew two alleged Banksy paintings from sale. And The Art Newspaper reported (1/10/07) that unauthorized Banksy prints with forged signatures are for sale on Ebay.) Legally it is hard to actually be a forgery when you are free and anonymously created on the street as no claims are being made about the authenticity and nobody is suffering any financial loss as a result of the deception.

Street art is frequently not just copying or sampling but plagiarizing with copies of copies of copies. (See my review of Swifty’s show and see his reply in the comments). I do not want to see another Warhol imitation or any famous high contrast black and white image reproduced in stencil-art. Copying Warhol is just repetitive and it does not make the copyist another Warhol. On a full colour sticker by Mask is a reproduction of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of an artist and his girlfriend saying, “Oh Brad, soon all the galleries will be clamouring for your art”, only “Brad” has been replaced by “Mask”. This sucks all of irony out of Lichtenstein’s appropriation of the original comic frame. A copy of art will not alone make a work art.

Mask sticker

There are many reasons for copying: for learning and practicing, for ironic or satirical parody, for all kinds of reasons – but copying for it’s own sake is not one of them – it is just plagiarism.

Wannabe art

What is the difference between graffiti and street art? The later is art but that is just a deductive point and the actual difference may be very subtle, like the difference between a carton of Campbell’s soup cans and Warhol’s cartons of Campbell’s soup cans in an art gallery. Part of the difference is that one is in an art gallery and the other is not but that is neither a necessary nor a sufficient difference, a point that seems to have been lost on some wannabe street artists. The white walls around Sutton Gallery in Fitzroy have become covered with graffiti as if this brings the writers closer to art. And now the stairwells of Westspace and Bus artist-run-spaces are becoming covered with tags. Outside Westspace I saw two pairs of shoes hanging from a wire. There are tags on their soles: Drew & Putz. If you sign it does it make it art?

Outside West Space

But there are still more desperate acts of wannabe art on exhibition in Melbourne. When I visited No Vacancy the smell of aerosol was in the air as Swifty prepared a Susuki hatchback to do a ‘live’ piece at the opening. The Urban Dictionary  defines “Like a Swifty” as a incredibly bad or embarrassing performance at something which the person/s tried hard at. This sums up “The Swifty Show” at No Vacancy Gallery. I have never seen such a derivative exhibition, there is less original content in it than a photocopier. Swifty  is a British street-style designer who wants to be Pop artist and thinks that by re-branding Andy Warhol’s and Jasper Johns’ old images he will be one. Simply re-branding Vegemite jars or Campbell’s soup cans with his own “Swifty” logo is the work of a designer rather than be an artist. I don’t know what fool thinks that this is wit or the sophisticated work of “an unrepentant acolyte of the post hip hop sampling generation”. Swifty’s work might have pseudo-intellectual appeal if you have read a child’s guide to Pop Art.

I don’t know why so many street artists are desperate to get into art galleries when really they could earn a better living as designers than wannabe artists.