Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before
I’ve heard it said there’s nothing new under the sun. If that’s true, us artists might as well drop the charade, lose the paint brushes and get a job selling door-to-door encyclopedias, the jig is up. Creativity was a sham at worst, a self-delusion at best.
I had clients who commissioned me to do a stained glass entryway for their high end house up at the gated North End, transom, double doors, sidelights, one unified design. I showed them past work, various styles, choices in glass and color. When they landed on a door I’d recently done propped against a back wall of the studio, I said great, I’ll work off that. A month later we installed the panels, they were pleased, I took pictures, we shook hands and hugged, all was well in my little corner of the universe.
Until … sometime around a year after they saw the door they’d originally liked, the one I’d used as inspiration for theirs, for sale in a gallery on the island. This, they told me, was outrageous. Theirs was no longer an original, it was an imitation and I had plagiarized myself. I tried to explain that their design was derived in part from the one they liked, that art was an evolution of sorts, each design a continuation of style, but this fell on deaf ears. They were, they declared, gravely disappointed.
Apparently I had been exposed as the fraud I most certainly was, an art thief who stole from himself, a Picasso whose every painting was a phony baloney copy of what came before, a con man who needed to be turned into the Culture Cops.
Since my art tutorial had failed to convince them, what was I supposed to do? No point in removing the fake artwork — the next would be a fake too. I offered them their money back and removal of the glass panels, but no, they loved their entryway. In the end I agreed to their demand to remove the original door for sale in the local gallery and had to promise never to show it again or sell it in the future. No contract was required and no attorneys were hired.
That door still sits in my shack, unsold as promised, a constant reminder that art is definitely in the eye of the beholder and a finger in my eye, to which I say: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Although … someone else said it first. At least I stole it from someone else.
Tags: Art Frauds, Art Thief, Self Plagiarizing