Which is most valuable, originality or celebrity? Being the first or being the best?
The Royal Hibernian Academy’s 185th Annual Exhibition offers plenty of moments of deja vu. Resisting the compulsion to look straight at the labels, I can usually do pretty well at Guess the Artist, but frequently there are some making very good work that, nevertheless, looks rather like that of others.
That’s no problem. Influence is nothing new, and when some artists (or artworks) smash on to the scene with a shocking vigour you know you’re going to be seeing their echoes for decades – if not centuries – to come.
This has been more openly recognised in the music industry; the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky reputedly said that “a good composer does not imitate, he steals”, cementing the idea of development as a progression through time and culture.
Recent court judgments may change this. The aptly titled Blurred Lines case, earlier this year, in which Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had to pay the Marvin Gaye estate $7.3 million for infringing its copyright on Gaye's Got to Give It Up, has indeed blurred the lines between fair use, creative transposition and outright theft.
Before we entered such a legalistic age those lines didn’t seem to matter quite so much. Go back a couple of hundred years and Shakespeare – whoever he was – was open about “borrowing” his stories. Equally, it’s difficult to imagine Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque litigating over which of them invented cubism, or the JL Mott Iron Works – maker of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal – demanding an equal credit in the original 1917 exhibition catalogue, plus subsequent royalties.
Still, it must be hard to swallow when a more famous artist takes your work and makes it so entirely theirs that your own creativity seems diminished. The Canadian artist Jana Sterbak was remarkably reticent when her 1987 piece Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic reappeared, uncredited, as Lady Gaga's meat-dress outfit at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. She later merely commented, "Any contemporary artist that has made a significant contribution will find his or her ideas used by other people," adding that the appropriation had led many people to her own work.
The celebrity American artist Richard Prince has made a career of stealing ideas and images, although his most recent series of works, New Portraits, has added to the mix intriguing questions about what we admire most in art. Prince came to prominence for a series of images of American cowboys, taken from the then iconic Marlboro cigarette advertisements in the early 1980s. This is the kind of art that Grayson Perry describes as "an asset class" to hang on your wall. Think about it: if you didn't have art-world pretensions you could just blow up your own cowboy pic. Indeed, if you did, you could still do it and call it an homage.
The New Portraits series, begun in 2014, takes this a step further. Prince has picked images of people from his trawls of Instagram, blown them up and added vague captions. These have been selling for between $40,000 and $90,000 ever since.
Just as politicians and pundits secretly dream of being sent up by satirists (from Spitting Image to Callan's Kicks), Jerry Saltz, the New York magazine art critic – and art celebrity in his own right – wrote, "In truth, I spent last year wishing unsuccessfully he'd do me."
Saltz is a fan, and his writing on the project proves that, when expertly handled, language can make anything seem deep: “Prince’s slices of immaterial digital reality uploaded into physical space and placed in art galleries stretch the membrane thinner between these realms.” Who couldn’t want a bit of that?
Those actually depicted have responded in different ways. Selena Mooney, founder of the SuicideGirls website, whose images Prince reproduced, announced that she will sell images of the Prince image, which had sold for $90,000 at the Frieze Art Fair in New York last month, for just $90.
This made the issue so much more interesting. Do you want the image for something intrinsic to itself or because the hand of fame has touched it, approved of it? And can the image be valuable to you if it “only” costs you $90?
If you’re the type who gets more excited about discovering something new than about having their taste validated by someone famous, then the place to go right now is to your local art-college degree show. Yes, some of the art may be only just working itself out, and some may be still a little too in love with its closest influences, but you’ll also see work of amazing creativity, brilliance and originality. The only difficulty is that you’ll have to judge its value for yourself. Because, here, nobody’s famous. Yet.
The 185th Annual Exhibition runs until August; rhagallery.ie. Graduate degree shows take place around Ireland this month
