Appropriation - What's Appropriation?

Studies in World Art, Book 110

By: Edward Lucie-Smith

Narrated by: Bob Barton

As a number of recent exhibitions have shown, there is a growing fashion for what is called appropriation in art. To you and me, what this means is slavish copying - no ifs and buts, apologies replaced by the paradoxical assertion that this is a thoroughly original, impeccably avant-garde thing to do.

Examples were a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, entitled "Post Pop: East Meets West"; and "Sturtevant: Double Trouble", on view till late February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Post Pop" was rife with things of this sort. For example, there were a number of versions, in different color ways, of Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal (itself an appropriation of a sort). An upside-down copy by Glenn Brown of a Fragonard in the Wallace Collection. A Double Elvis (After Warhol) by a Belorussian artist called George Pusenkoff.

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