Connectivity

By having a keen interest in a variety of art, literature and culture, you can have a far broader vision and so this can have a huge influence in your own artwork. Pablo Picasso, “Good artists borrow, Great artists steal”, there is often a grey area over the question of ‘who had the original idea?’ or ‘What is actually original these days?’ Copyright is very important for protecting ‘original’ ideas so that they can not be taken and classed as other people’s. The length of copyright in terms of years, changes for several factors including the type of work or whether an individual or a group has created it.

We often see classic imagery, such as Andy Warhol’s pop art of Marilyn Monroe being replicated over and over again into many different interpretations. This is due to the fact that this iconic image is known world wide and so instantly recognisable, giving a very strong immediate impact.



We can see this shown in the example below, where Matteo Bertoli has designed an editorial piece for the ‘Tank’ magazine in 2004, in which he has used all of the key feature’s of Warhol’s original print of Marilyn Monroe and so making it almost identical to the original. It can therefore become hard to distinguish between having influential ideas and purely just ‘stealing’ them. 

Tank Magazine, 2004

Andy Warhol - Marilyn Monroe

If there is no original meaning behind an image or even a piece of text it can become worthless as it has no meaning to the viewer. By having an image in which the viewer can relate to, either by the original source of its content or by the meaning in which it communicates, whether this is a personal meaning or a universal meaning, can draw us in. For example, below is a photograph of the front cover of a fashion catalogue, ‘Boden’. We can immediately relate to this image, due to the fact it is a re-creation of the iconic photograph of the beetles crossing the zebra crossing on Abby Road, which they used originally on their album cover. Not only will this image attract the customers due to this iconic photograph, but it also has a strong meaning behind it. The designers chose this particular image to re-create due to the revival of the 70’s era of fashion. 

Ideas can also be re-contextualised to the modern day, for example in the 1910’s people used to create pictures from their imagination and people would assume that it was real. For example, in the 1910’s people believed that fairies existed from the paintings they saw, as they had no reason to not believe it. However these days, we now know that fairies do not exist and if we do see any paintings or photography of fairies we know immediately that it is not real and that if it is photography or film, we know it has been produced by using technology.