When Inspiration Becomes Plagiarism

“If you have one person that you are influenced by everyone says that you are the next whoever but if you rip off one hundred people everyone will say you are so original.” – Gary Panter

Plagiarism is a topic that, in the past few years, has been able to increasingly attract the attention of people all over the world, especially of the ones that are interested in and/or belong to the art industry. This can be due to the fact that because of digitalization, everyday it becomes easier for persons to either commit it, or to even notice it from other individual’s artworks. This is perhaps a consequence of the expansion of copyrights that make any type of action suspicious, as well as the individualism of nowadays, which allows people to think that it is okay to take other people’s concepts as if they were objects and consider them as their own. But there is a very thin line between getting inspired by the techniques and concepts of another creator, in order to put into practice new original pieces, and completely stealing their vision and claiming it as their own, without giving credits to the original artist. 

For instance, one perfect example of art style appropriation is the case of Guillaume Verda, a French artist who was forced to cancel his art exhibition in Galerie Sakura located in Paris, because of concern towards his personal safety after he received several threats on Twitter accusing him of plagiarising the style of the famous American painter and musician, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Verda’s pieces started to receive attention this past February 19th, once one Twitter user noticed various similarities between his work and the one of Basquiat. However, the numerous menaces bombarded him once he claimed he did not know who the American artist was when an Instagram user posted a comment on one of his posts that showed one of his pieces, “It reminds me of #jeanmichelbasquiat”, to which Verda replied with “who?”.  Several persons expressed their disgust towards the French artist, not only for not crediting his work to Basquiat, but for also ripping off pieces that represented from his Puerto Rican and Haitian descendance, as well as his race, identity, and culture.

Plagiarized Basquiat

Sadly, this is not the first time that a case like this has happened. Back in 2017, American artist Jeff Koons was accused of plagiarizing a 1975 postcard photograph taken by celebrated French artist Jean-François Bauret, called Enfants. The French court decided that Koons sculpture called Naked, created in 1988, was just a copy of Bauret’s work. As a consequence, Jeff Koons LLC and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, were pictures of said sculpture were exhibited, were forced to pay the French photographer’s family, $40,000 to cover for legal fees.

Even though plagiarizing is a concept that has become more popular due to digitalization, and nowadays it is a very easy crime to commit, not all copies are perverse appropriations, as occurs in plagiarism, where it is not intended to credit another artist’s vision/techniques, since getting inspiration from other creator’s pieces in art is a very complex subject. And in today’s society, where the copy is so stigmatized and frowned upon, we forget that cultures are based on the transmission of rituals and patterns of behavior that, based on copying, make our world known.

Moreover, one example of how an artist got inspired by the vision of another one, leading him to create his original work of art, is Paul McCartney, with his famous song “Friends to go”, which was released in 2005 as a single for his album “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard”. In it, the British singer pays tribute to his longtime friend and famous singer George Harrison, and his writing style, while giving him the credit for it.

In conclusion, it is important to raise awareness over what artists can and cannot do, and what is the difference between inspiration and the appropriation of the effort of others. When artists create their own pieces, they put their entire soul and emotions in them and they do not expect for other people to show up and claim their own creations as theirs. It is okay to feel inspired by a photograph, an sculpture, or any other type of artwork, but it is only acceptable as long as after that inspirations hits, one uses it to create an unique and new piece, and not just a bad copy of their main inspiration.