Appropriation
You rephotograph someone else's photograph exactly as it is, and it becomes your work. In September 1977, at Artists Space in New York, the critic Douglas Crimp put together a five-artist show called the Pictures exhibition. It made little noise at the time; the label the Pictures Generation spread only after Crimp rewrote his account of the show for the journal October in 1979. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are photographs in which she plays a scene from a film that does not exist. You feel sure you have seen it somewhere, and yet there is no source film anywhere. Sherrie Levine rephotographed the plates in a Walker Evans photobook and showed them as After Walker Evans (1981). Richard Prince rephotographed the cowboy from the Marlboro advertisements. This map, as it happens, holds a long line of copies. Not a single authentic work by Wang Xizhi survives; only copies carried him across a thousand years. Ukiyo-e was made by dividing the labour among the designer, the carver, and the printer. LeWitt sent instructions and nothing else, and other hands painted the walls. Duchamp chose a manufactured object and signed it. Appropriation sits downstream of all that, I think (the line back as far as Duchamp is drawn in several sources; tying it to Wang Xizhi and to ukiyo-e is my own view on this map). It went to court as well. In 2008 the photographer Patrick Cariou sued Richard Prince. The district court ruled against Prince in 2011. In 2013 the appeals court reversed that ruling and found 25 of the 30 works to be transformative uses. Where a copy ends and a work begins has taken the courts a long time to settle too.