{"id":12208,"date":"2014-01-07T16:57:26","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T21:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12208"},"modified":"2014-01-07T16:57:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T21:57:26","slug":"my-despair-is-more-than-just-an-ornament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2014\/01\/07\/my-despair-is-more-than-just-an-ornament\/","title":{"rendered":"My despair is more than just an ornament"},"content":{"rendered":"

You already know how I feel about artists who ransack the imaginations of others for profit, whether it’s Roy Lichtenstein’s clumsy appropriations<\/a>, Mel Ramos’ $600,000 Green Lantern painting<\/a>, or Sharon Moody’s anonymization of Jack Kirby<\/a>. (Remember, though, that I’ve also told you I see nothing wrong<\/a> with mashups, smashups, allusions, tributes, or homages.)<\/p>\n

So it should come as no surprise that I’m horrified by the \u00a33,554,500 ($5,684,356) Glenn Brown\u2019s painting “Ornamental Despair (Painting for Ian Curtis)” sold for at auction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"GlennBrownOrnamentalDespair\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Why? Well, doesn’t it seem a bit … familiar?<\/p>\n

It should.<\/p>\n

Because, save for a few minor tweaks, it’s nearly identical to the cover Chris Foss painted for a 1984 edition of Isaac Asimov’s The Stars Like Dust<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"ChrisFossTheStarsLikeDust\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m not accusing Brown of failing to provide attribution, because when interviewed, he does credit the true source of his paintings. However, he at the same time makes the claim<\/a> that his works are oh-so-different from the originals:<\/p>\n

Lynn MacRitchie:<\/strong> And to use the word you used earlier, \u201cappropriation,\u201d I think that in your early days you kind of appropriated that theatricality, that operatic quality, from people like Chris Foss, or John Martin\u2014surely the master of operatic painting. But now that desire to create a sort of spectacle, a sort of grandeur, seems to me to be coming from inside the paintings instead of being copied from outside, if that makes sense.<\/em><\/p>\n

Glenn Brown:<\/strong> I think that does some of the early paintings a slight injustice, in that the Foss paintings never look like my versions of them. Mine are always played around with. The colors are altered, the cities were redrawn and I was always inventing things to increase their intensity right from the start. Even 16 years ago I was playing with the images to increase that sense of the Gothic. It was partially there in Chris Foss\u2019s work, but not in quite the same way. All the while I was sort of learning what you can do, learning different techniques from other people. But I never want to lose that notion of appropriation—people say to me, sooner or later you\u2019ll stop copying other artists and you\u2019ll make work of your own, but it\u2019s never been my point to try to do that, because I never thought you ever could. The work is always going to be based on something, and I wanted to make the relationship with art history as obvious as possible. Again, I think it increases the intensity of the way that people look at things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which to me translates as—since we can never be truly free from our influences when we create, why even try? Brown’s attitude seems to be a fatal shrug of surrender that allows him to abandon any effort at tapping his own imagination so he can instead embrace the far easier path of pilfering others, all the while claiming to have created something new and more important than the work which has been copied.<\/p>\n

To repeat, I have nothing against artists of all kinds referencing other works when that work ends up being transformative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Glenn Brown’s work is not<\/em> transformative.<\/p>\n

What causes me to fulminate about this now when the auction that put money belonging to Foss into Brown’s pocket occurred several months ago is a video Bob Eggleton shared yesterday over on Facebook<\/a>. In it, James Sevier of Sotheby’s attempts to explain Brown’s motivations.<\/p>\n