While I was definitely hoping that attention would be paid to the paintings of Sharon Moody—or why else would I have told you about them Saturday in “A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists“—I’m stunned by how viral my post went, with spirited conversation not just here, but over at Bleeding Cool, The Beat, Byrne Robotics, reddit, Twitter, and all across Facebook.

Most of you felt my point was valid, but I’d like to respond to some of the concerns of those who didn’t … though first, I’d like to share a couple of intriguing comments made by others.

First up, over at Byrne Robotics, John Byrne (who as you can see, I’ve known a long, long time) wrote:

Imagine if some “artist” got an old fashioned projector and a copy of some Disney movie made within the last thirty or forty years, and then set it up in a gallery, playing the movie against a blank wall, and saying it was a “comment” on how everything is going digital these days.

How long before Disney shut ’em down—hard?

This kind of thing happens with comics only because of the extreme contempt most people have for the form. Comics are not “art”, you know. When Roy Lichtenstein plagiarized Alex Toth, or Steve Ditko, or Jack Kirby, he was ELEVATING their pathetic creations.

FEH!!!

Meanwhile, over on her blog, Irene Vartanoff, who was in charge of rights and permissions at DC Comics in the 1980s (and who happens to be my wife, but don’t let that bias you), wrote:

Some comic book artists have helped support themselves in their old age by re-drawing comic book pages they were hired to originally create as works for hire for the companies in years past. Usually, the companies look the other way instead of pursuing these elderly artists for this kind of commercial use, presumably because it doesn’t involve enough money to be worth the lawsuits, and it would result in bad press. In fact, Disney did pursue the artist Carl Barks for making such copies, but backed away from the bad publicity the move generated. Bob Kane, known for his involvement in the creation of Batman, also used to sell paintings of Batman, without being sued. Thus Sharon Moody’s lawyers would have a potential rebuttal, that an artistic, single use has a pattern of being tolerated by the rights owners.

I could share plenty more interesting comments, but instead, now that 48 hours have gone by since my original post, I’d like to recap here a few additional thoughts in response to those who have come to Moody’s defense, and not just leave them scattered across the Internet.

One argument that came up repeatedly was that I and others who object to anonymizing comics artists just don’t get it, that this sort of thing happens all the time in the art world. Did I think Andy Warhol needed to credit the industrial designer who created the Campbell Soup label? Should Norman Rockwell have had to identify the comics he painted into the lower left-hand corner of “Shuffleton’s Barbershop”?

No, I don’t think so, no more than I believe Moody needs to credit whoever designed the Hershey bar wrapper which she drew in one of her paintings. Warhol painted a universal, almost generic object with which we are all familiar, and Rockwell used comics as a minor, almost unidentifiable bit of verisimilitude. But Moody’s use of complete comics pages means that the bristling energy of the individual comic book artists is an integral visual element of her pieces. Warhol and Rockwell owed us no explanation; Moody, I feel, does.

There’s also the argument that her work here is so transformative that the original object is almost meaningless, that the unique art of Kirby, Buscema and others is incidental to her trompe l’oeil craft. But more is going on in those paintings than just her talent at showing us a 3-D object with only the use of two dimensions. There is content there, and Moody did, after all, choose more than just any old boring comics page picked up at random. She chose THOSE pages by THOSE artists because there was something special about them that spoke to her, and to not share the identities of those who are being celebrated, to only speak of her intentions in terms of artistic theories—such as when she wrote in her Artist’s Statement of her intention “to divert and entrance us with their illusionism and by the questions they raise—in a playful way—about perception and reality”—is somewhat disingenuous. It’s like throwing a party while keeping the guests of honor locked away in a back room.

Context counts for so much. It would have been one thing for her to have said—I loved the feeling I got reading the great comics of X, Y, and Z as a kid, and via my paintings, I want to share the emotions those creators gave me by letting you see what it felt like flipping through those comics. It’s quite another to mask the source and not give credit where credit is due, as if the original artists had nothing to do with whatever power is running through her own pieces, as if she had taken something anonymous and given it a value it didn’t previously have.

But the creators of those pages are not anonymous. They were underpaid, they had their rights stripped away, they were undervalued by the corporations who grew rich on their talents. To not acknowledge them now in even a small way is to align oneself with those corporations. And why would any artist want to do that to another artist?

Additionally, there are those who feel that it isn’t the artist’s job to explain, that it’s up to us, the audience, to explore the history and investigate the dialogue of which any new work of art is a part. And while I agree that education is primarily the role of a curator or a gallery owner rather than the artist, I still believe that by choosing to say nothing, a sin of omission has occurred.

I believe Kirby, Buscema, Novick and the others need to be acknowledged, the same way Lichtenstein owed a tip of the hat to Kubert, Sekowsky, Romita, and all of the artists he copied. It is wrong for the original artists to be left nameless. Moody could have celebrated her unwitting collaborators in her Artist’s Statement and via listing the references and sources for each painting. She did not.

She may be celebrating the comic book in general as pop culture object, but in her efforts to do so she’s belittling the very comic book artists who created those comic books and turned pop culture objects into art in the first place.

Look, I’m not saying Moody isn’t a skillful artist, or that she’s bad person. But I do believe she hasn’t thought this out as well as she should have. As so many in the fine arts world have done before her, she is treating the unique artists of the comic book field like so many interchangeable Hershey’s wrappers.

And they are not.

It isn’t too late to make this right.

In the spirit of fairness, I’ll leave the last words, without rebuttal at this time, to NYartdealer, who identified him- or herself as a co-owner of the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery over in the Bleeding Cool comments section:

As co-owner of the Gallery that is currently presenting the exhibiton of Sharon Moody’s trompe l’oeil paintings, let me thank all the above for the lively debate about her work. Firstly, as an artist, Sharon can paint whatever she wants. That I will defend unflinchingly. As objects, her paintings in no way, shape or form resemble any comic book. They are oil paintings on planks of wood. She is not replicating comic books. She is depicting them. If anyone had taken the trouble to actually see the exhibition, including the author of the article, it would be obvious, as someone else has rightly stated, that these are paintings OF comic books. No one viewing these works thinks that Ms. Moody is the author or the illustrator of Superman or any other comic book series. Almost all still life painters are depicting other people’s work, whether it’s a table or a vase or a box of candy and yes professor, a building. Someone designed, built and/or illustrated these things. It’s because Ms. Moody is so highly skilled and that she can depict her environment so precisely, that the question of authorship arises. Hers are painstakingly hand painted, not photocopies. She is not the first artist to depict comic books in her work. She is simply the best at it. We are not selling mass produced comic books in the Gallery. Nor are we selling original comic book art. If we were, then certainly a proper royalty would be paid.

As I will be in Manhattan one day next week, I plan to visit the gallery—which, ironically, is only a block away from the 575 Madison Avenue address at which I once worked in the Marvel Comics Bullpen where the inspirations for some of Moody’s paintings were created—and hope that NYartdealer will be present that day to show me around the exhibition so I can give him (or her) a shot at persuading me to view the paintings through his (or her) eyes.

It’ll be a tough sell.