I Don’t Know Much About Art, but I Know I’m a Right-Wing Moron
Yet another hugely significant Obama scandal! And, predictably, yet another idiotic display of right-wing ignorance and dishonesty.
A throwaway newspaper article the other day noted that the Obamas had requested to borrow a number of artworks from DC museums for display in the White House – something many Presidents do. One curator remarked on the range of art the Obamas were interested in, which seems to me a good thing, though the whole incident is utterly trivial. Naturally, the wingers fell over themselves trying to drum up some excuse for criticism, in their unending resentment of people who are not merely smarter and better-cultured than, but, most importantly, different from them. (They found one: one piece of modernist art had a theme of self-questioning, with words like “Maybe I will . . . Maybe I won’t” and such printed on it. More evidence of a lack of the pig-stupid stubborness Republicans like to see in their Presidents, and thus a deeply revealing psychological blemish on Obama.)
Today, however, the real scandal broke: one piece of art by a black female painter triggered a note of recognition in a poster at Free Republic. He looked for a similar artwork by Matisse that he remembered having seen it. He found it. And . . .
[W]hen I saw them side-by-side, the similarity clarified. I realized that the new one was EXACTLY the same composition as the Matisse, rotated 90 degrees.Is this fraud? If the new piece has been titled “Homage to Collage” or “Matisse in Blue”, I would think the artist wasn’t trying to hide the copying. But I wonder whether anyone realized that the artist copied almost every aspect of a famous work to sell her artwork. Perhaps everyone involved knew that this is a re-colored reprint. If not, it seems to be an embarrassment for the “sophisticates” who failed to spot a copy hiding in plain sight.
And here they are:
 |
 |
|
| Watusi (Hard Edge), Alma Thomas | L’Escargot, Henri Matisse |
As you can see, they’re EXACTLY the same . . . except they’re not. Beyond the obvious giveway that they’re oriented differently and the proportions are different, it’s true that the shapes are almost exactly the same, in the same places; at the same time, the colors are very different, and the borders don’t match. But clearly the Thomas work (which came later) is derivative from the Matisse. Truly a scandal, yes? How could she expect to fool everybody? And just why exactly do Obama’s chosen (black, female) artists happen to be frauds and copyists? Doesn’t that tell us something?
Well, the wingers have determined – with their characteristic insight and certainty – that it does. The Freeper’s blaring headline trumpets “Obvious Copy” and “Apparent Fraud”. Gateway Pundit declares that “it’s just too bad [the Thomas work] is a fake”. Scared Monkeys congratulates Gateway Pundit for “confirming” this; noting “there is a fraud in The White House. But we already knew that didn’t we? What a metaphor.” The always-idiotic Ann Althouse tries condescension – something she is uniquely unsuited for: “Anyway, it’s really sad to see this sentimental stretching to identify African-American artists. There are plenty of real ones, and mistakes like this make it seem as though there are not and that patronizing — which really ought to be called racism — is necessary.”
Brian Ledbetter makes a useful contribution with an animation highlighting the similarities and differences between the pieces, and, while unquestioningly taking someone else’s word that the Thomas piece is “fraudulent”, has the grace to be at least a little bit open-minded about it. But he goes further, dredging up a catalog from an Alma Thomas exhibit that devotes 4 pages to Thomas’s practice of taking inspiration from other artists and incorporating their elements into her work, about two pages of which explicitly focus on “Watusi (Hard Edge)” and “L’Escargot“, with reproductions of both works and a detailed analysis of the differences between them and their meanings.
In the years prior to her arthritic attack, and especially after an exhibition of Matiss’e gouache collages opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, she had been looking closely at the work of the French artist. . . . [Her reaction] may be demonstrated by comparing her Watusi (Hard Edge) . . . with Matisse’s collage L’Escargot.
It goes on in detail, noting that the image is rotated and analyzing the meaning of the differences in color, the reasons for the broken border in Thomas’s (but not Matisse’s) image, and even the meaning and relationship between the titles of the pieces. (Oh! So they’re not “EXACTLY the same”!) It ties this to Thomas’s feelings of racial consciousness and the social context of race relations in America at the time the work was created. Frankly, I think the catalog text was somewhat overblown, but the point is that this relationship was deliberate, acknowledged, and documented. It isn’t “plagiarism”, “fraud”, “fake”, “copying”, or an attempt to put something over on her audience. It was Thomas doing what artists do all the time.
And this information was easily available. In fact, several of the winger art-lovers link to Ledbetter’s post, which contains the link to the catalog text above, but still make libelous accusations about Thomas (and, weirdly, Obama). The repulsive Michelle Malkin even reproduces part of an Art History in America magazine article making almost the same points, while also quoting comments about “fraud”. Malkin links to Ledbetter, and Ledbetter thanks her, while amusedly quoting her mocking denunciation of “Raaaaacism!”. (Hint for Michelle: In this case, you’re just stuuuuupid!) He doesn’t bother to note that both she ahd he have explicitly cited evidence that the work is not plagiarized or fraudulent, while they both approvingly quote claims that it is. Althouse quotes Malkin with exactly the same obliviousness, while also playing an insanely stupid reverse-racism card (it’s racist for Obama to “patronize” black artists, because they’re inspired by white artists, because that means they’re not “real” artists: note again, please, the upshot of all that imbecilic nonsense is that it’s Obama who’s being racist). And there’s more.
As always, the right wing is ignorant, wrong, and stupidly oblivious to fact – even facts they themselves have looked up and quoted. There’s simply no story here. There is no fraud. No forgery. No falsehood or deception of any kind. A modern artist quoted the work of another modern artist while incorporating her own distinctive and conscious revisions. That’s a tradition running through many styles of art, throughout history. (There are other forms of appropriation as well. It was once common for masters to sign the works of students or assistants as their own, and there are artists whose attributed work is even produced by assistants, leading to questions of whether the master should be credited with the work at all – an issue that still dogs Warhol. Ironically, the Matisse piece that our Freeper expert “discovered” was not touched by Matisse himself during its creation – he directed assistants who placed large pieces of colored paper for him. His “art” was his conception of the piece, not its creation – exactly as was Thomas’s more physically involved commentary on that same conception.) And more than this, the entire made-up scandal – like all the others dating back to before the Bush administration – is the product of an utter, conscienceless indifference to truth.
Anyone with a shred of honesty and responsibility would have looked into the situation before shooting their mouth off. Anyone who was so obviously ignorant of Alma Thomas as these clowns are would have done some research – and here, clearly, very little was necessary. Anyone who was pointed to that research and discovered that the entire situation is long-known and above-board would have read that and then shut their stupid trap. But almost none of these people went to any effort to find out the truth. More than one spent more time making animations of the artworks than they did looking up anything about the person they were libeling who actually created one of them. And when some of them did find out the truth (in the most notable case, after making the animation and quoting the numerous libels), they did not retract their support for claims of fraud even when they had quoted or linked the information showing that wasn’t true. None of the barking circle of mutually-referential linkers read those links, or if they did none retracted their statements after learning the truth. (This while sneering at the “sophisticates” who did not see the obvious.) The entire thing is wrong in every respect, and dishonest both by way of culpable falsehood and by simple lack of caring whether what they say about this woman – or Obama – is true or not.
A classic right-wing fake scandal: false, ignorant, stupid, and deeply, deeply dishonest.
UPDATE: Fixed some wording and typos, and corrected a source reference. Because when I learn something that shows I’m wrong, I acknowledge it and change my position on that point. Just sayin . . .
I know: let’s defund the NEA and cut arts education from public schools!! That will solve the problem of “fraudulent” artwork – because we can finally rid ourselves of *all* art and artists.
This is the stupidest nontroversy yet.
I see you didn’t link my take on the Thomas/ Matisse artwork controversy in your diatribe against us ignorant conservatives. You’re mocking conservatives for saying it was copying when it clearly was copying. Under copyright law copying needs to be admitted or shown in order to make the case the copied work transforms the first. People, not just conservatives, frequently interchange the terms plagiarize and yes even fraud when something is clearly copied because our copyright laws are murky at best.
The works you linked as proof artists copy all the time, particularly the artist’s magazine piece are a bit different than the Thomas piece as the originals are old enough to be public domain. The Matisse is under copyright. The Artist’s Rights Society that protects the copyright of the Matisse collection would have needed to make the case Thomas’ work was an infringement, which they certainly could have done. Who knows how that would have turned out in a court of law.
Whether or not people believe Thomas’ work transforms the original Matisse is as arbitrary as what a judge might find. Even you think the text from the catalog explaining Thomas’ artistic vision is somewhat overblown:
I think the catalog text was somewhat overblown, but the point is that this relationship was deliberate, acknowledged, and documented
Because something is copied and acknowledged as deliberate and documented does not mean it transforms the original work. I think it is perfectly acceptable for Thomas to copy Matisse but I personally do not think her piece transforms the original but it is a debatable point I will concede. Under current law it would be up to the copyright holder to charge infringement and the burden would have been on Thomas to prove she transformed it. The Matisse estate, in allowing Thomas’ work, opens themselves up to 50,000 variations being claimed as transformative derivatives. That doesn’t mean the copyright holder, a court of law, or any person with an opinion has to believe it’s anything more than a copy.
Excellent post.
What fake and irrelevant scandal will the wingers gin up tomorrow to cover up for the fact that they have no answers to any of the more pressing problems that beset us all?
All I can do to sum up the conservative view is to say, “In the land of the witless, the half-wit is king”. I don’t know who coined this phrase, and I would give credit if I knew, but it certainly hits the conservative (nail) on the head.
“The Matisse estate, in allowing Thomas’ work, opens themselves up to 50,000 variations being claimed as transformative derivatives.”
So…
So you believe that the owners of the copyright to that Matisse painting do not have the right to do that if they so choose?
Wow.
So much anti-private-property sentiment…
Methinks I’m getting the vapors.
Mary Sue: Please spare us your ignorance. It’s painful to watch someone deconstruct so publicly. You remind me of an adolescent trying to use vocabulary words he or she has been learning without really understanding what it is they are saying. I don’t believe you understand art, at all.
As a photographer I often wondered if the guy I stood shoulder to shoulder with shooting the same event from a very slightly different angle was copying me. Two people are quite capable of coming up with almost exactly the same idea at different times. Hell, the repugnacans have been spewing the same old ideas for 40 years.
What really annoys me is that these dogmatic wingnuts actually think Obama had the time and desire to research all of the information about these two pieces of art, and then deliberately chose to display one of them in the White House as an affront to anyone questioning its legitimacy . . . and that one being created by a black person! OMG!
Maybe he simply liked the piece. It was, after all, already accepted by a DC Museum, was it not?
Mary Sue can place lump of coal up her rear end and create a diamond. Now that’s ART.
Having visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art this spring to see the Cezanne and Beyond exhibit, I wonder where all these people were then. Here was an entire exhibit of people “copying” Cezanne’s work and it was being celebrated. Some of those works, much to Mary Sue’s chagrin, were even from the same period as Cezanne and I’m sure would be considered by her to be copyright infringement. How we can not just stand for but actually reward such obvious fraud is beyond me. How dare the art world take such an obvious role in subverting our laws.
Nobody tell Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage about Paul Klee .
The conspiracy goes back further.
This is a tempest in a teapot from people who don’t know (or are pretending not to know) the most elementary roots and customs of modern art (“homages”, appropriations, goatee on Mona Lisa, etc.), but nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that most of the leading early modernists derived significant elements of their style from “primitive” and, especially, tribal art–especially Picasso and Modigliani, of course, but it’s hard to imagine Matisse, especially the late collage style, without his exposure to the art of Mediterranean and African cultures. This makes its way back into the art of African American artists like Romare Bearden (via, a little bit, Stuart Davis) and, very probably, Alma Thomas. Somehow, though, I doubt that any of this is going to make much of a dent in the world view of the average Glenn Beck fan.
Okay, dadanarchist made the point much better and funnier.
Holy cow, who knew an art blog would pull commenters out of the woodwork?
tgirsch´s last blog ..Middle East Mapping Game
I wonder what Mannie Garcia and Shepard Fairey might have to say on the matter of appropriating somebody else images for your artistic indulgence.
Anyway, this is ridiculous and what happens when there is an unrelenting, orchestrated movement of scrutiny decicated every singe, even mundane, thing a public figure does. At the very worst, Obama is guily of not being a student of Matisse’s work and simply seeing a piece of art and liking it. I know, one step away from molesting children and laughing about it.
Let me know if he plays fantasy baseball, I’ll be sure to deconstruct his roster to further prove his imbicilic, anarchist, and racist sensibilities.
Once again, all these “scandals” say more about those who manufacture them than about those they are trying so smear.
“007 soapbox” – Recaptcha is on a motherfucking roll!
tgirsch:
We are large; we contain multitudes.
Mary Sue:
Others have handled your nonsense better. I’ll just point out that your entire claim has to do with copyright law, not forgery or plagiarism as such. Whether or not Thomas infringed Matisse’s copyright (she didn’t), and whether or not the Matisse estate sues her estate for that (they won’t), and whether or not failing to defend copyright in one case “opens themselves up to 50,000 variations” (it doesn’t), and whether or not the Art Justice League goes all Batman on her (they won’t), all have nothing to do with the question whether the work is a deception, forgery, or fraud. The berserker ignoramuses of the right were not marshaling themselves to defend the Matisse Estate’s copyright interests; they were claiming that one of Obama’s favorite artists was “a fraud”, her work was “fake”, and she was not a “real” artist because of that.
It’s simple, really: since she openly acknowledged that she was riffing on Matisse, this can’t be a deception; since she never attempted to pass it off as Matisse’s work, it can’t be a fraud or a forgery; and since she was engaged in a longstanding and common practice of artistic borrowing for a programmatic purpose of her own that was directly reflected in the specific innovations she brought to the work, it seems obvious that she is a “real” artist making “real” art (whatever that means). The fact that all of this is easily determined and long known to people who aren’t ignorant of this subject, and the fact that after this was brought to light the winger idiots continued their false and ignorant accusations, makes it clear both that they were acting in ignorance and that they didn’t care that they were.
KTK´s last blog ..Low-Significance Sample Sizes: An Ethical Loophole?
Nice job, and nice summing up here in the comments. Conservative idiocy on the arts annoys me than some of their other idiocy. Plus, they’ve made hostility toward the arts, arts funding and education a central tenet. It’s sad, but also annoying and destructive.
Seems to me that this latest wingacopia of stupid is by and large being promoted by people whose closest connection to anything having to do with art consists of painting Hitler mustaches on Obama posters.
NMichelle Malkin an art critic? Who woulda guessed?
KTK -
Hint for Michelle: In this case, you’re just stuuuuupid!
Um, “in this case?”
Mary Sue -
First, please get the story straight: The complaint is not that it was a “copy” – that is, it used elements from another painting – but that it was a “fraud.”
But even then, sorry, no, the work is not a “copy.” The claim merely shows your ignorance of modern (or I guess it could be called neo-modern by now) art. The subject of the Matisse was form and color and how they could have in impact, create a feeling, even in the absence of any representational subject. (As dadanarchist suggested above, Paul Klee did a lot of work on that theme.) By changing the border, the orientation, and the colors, Thomas did “transform” the piece, creating a very different sense with the same basic pattern.
LarryE´s last blog ..Getting hot under the collar
thx
nıce