Grand Theft Photo
A.I. poison & Prince-ly appropriation
TL; DR: stolen shoots/‘jack the pic (The Window 47)
In the ‘80s Richard Prince rephotographed a famous cigarette ad (the iconic cowboy riding a horse), cropped out the text, and presented it as his own work. By recontextualizing it, he transformed the shot into capital-A Art.
Appropriation art was not a new idea — Sturtevant’s painting repeats, Warhol’s soup cans, Duchamp’s urinal, and so on, probably back to the second-ever cave painting. But Prince’s appropriation did, and still does, stir up controversy.
Concerns of copyright, fair use, “added value” (changing the original enough to call it a new work), originality, authorship, ownership, effort, legacy, history, and of course acknowledgment and compensation are even more of a concern now that text-to-image A.I. can generate (appropriate) any style of art or artist you want. “Generate a Frank Lloyd Wright drawing”, “Make an image in the style of Basquiat”…
… or Inceptioned: “Show me a photograph in the style of Richard Prince rephotographing Sam Abell’s photograph of the Marlboro Man”.
A.I. can do this because it scrapes — copies, samples, steals, plagiarizes — billions of images from the web to use as its generative palette.
When Prince appropriates an artist’s work and transfames it (not a typo) into capital-D Dollars, at least the original artist might get some PR glow from filing a lawsuit, or perhaps eventually even a small-d settlement. (Prince wins most, but not all*, of the lawsuits. Koons and Warhol have lost some too, because their iterations of others’ works were found to not be “transformative enough”).
Lawsuits are coming for A.I. though; for instance Getty Images is suing for having all its stock images scraped and databased.
Artists with less-deep litigation pockets have other options: there is software to camouflage artworks that are online. AI’s “eyes” are algorithms, so the camo-program blinds them, masking the images with code (but humans can still see them accurately).
Even better artfare is tech that can “poison” scraped data, sending false info to hinder an image’s “transferability”. It stops the steal of the artist’s style by tricking the artificial intelligence into seeing things that it isn’t. Kinda like the website slipping the AI some LSD.
My own site has been scraped (according to my analytics), all the images and words thieved and thrown in to some ginormous bouillabaisse of an AI database.
Unlike Prince, all the photos in this post appropriate (hijack) the event not the shot. With the staging stolen, the images are recontextualized. They are candid pictures of other people’s mediated messages. They are meta-photos of a crime scene, an advertising campaign, a tv production, an Only Fans session, a fashion shoot, a text home, a family album, wedding photos, dating app pics, Instagram posts, TikToks (with faux paparazzi), and selfies, selfies, selfies. A look at how we look.
These photos are simultaneously staged and unstaged. They record natural moments before the subject has captured, curated, and edited their ideal shot — we see the awkward crouch and reach to start the photo timer; the slow-walk-spontaneous-hair-flip-backup-and-repeat-naturally-five-times procedure; the stranger walking blithely right through the middle of the production... Somewhere the “real” images — the taker’s intended ideal ones — will appear in an ad or album or on social media, perfectly cropped and probably photoshopped and certainly beautiful. But in this series we see behind (or through) the filters.
And sometimes the actual real is more beautiful than the “real” — the imperfect photo above is as true, emotionally, as you can get — not revealed, on the solo staged image (which you see captured in both their phones), is the entire family, and the genuine pride of the parents… and, unfiltered, soft, but unseen: love.
NOTES:
-Even the famous saying about appropriation has been reappropriated dozens of times, and attributed to many different people: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal” -Steve Jobs 1998, onstage, stating that Pablo Picasso said it; “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” -TS Eliot, 1920 “That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil” -W.H. Davenport Adams, 1892. “Grunt grunt grunt, grunt grunt grunt” -Creb, the second-ever cave-painter, responding to Brun (the first one) when he complains of being appropriated by Creb, 30,000 BC
-“Great artists steal. Bad artists retweet”. “Great artists steal, Bad artists AI”.
-*Prince updated his appropriations approach a few years ago when he screenshotted (rephotographed) some Instagram posts (with his added comments), scaled them up and sold them for hundreds of thousands. He was sued by two of the IG artists, and Prince must pay $650,000 in damages and a combined $250,000 in court costs. Another artist rephotographed her rephotographed work, and sold her prints for 1/10 the price of Prince’s appropriations… which Prince appreciated.
-not male gaze. women were both the subject and the shooter in the vast majority of the staged shoots
-see if you can spot the photographer in each shot. one includes this photographer (sort of) for an additional meta layer
-all images from The Window (a 24/7/365/1 photo series) are candid and taken from a single location (a window, duh) at all hours of day, over the course of a year. The Window is a single portrait of this moment in time via a thousand connected parts. Weddings, shootings, Drake, a pandemic, a couple eclipses, robots, fights, Taylor Swifties, love, some supercars, diversity and AI…
BONUS IMAGE: another shot of the woman from the faux film poster, previous post
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more about this project (and weatherworks, and spliced works and…): www.nu4ya.com
