RIP: A Remix Manifesto

RIP: A Remix Manifesto was extremely interesting to watch because it tackled a topic in art that is so frequently used by artists all around the world, that being appropriation. While this film addressed the topic through the issue of copyright, I believe the concepts are very similar because they both involve using information previously generated by a different artist and then manipulating said information to make it into something new.

We see this issue constantly where people attempt to protect their ideas and try to make it so that no one else can imitate or reproduce the same or almost identical concept for his or her own. However, much of today’s art, along with the very foundation of art production, is based upon the inspiration that artists find when observing another individual’s work. If we look all the way back to the 1600s and even before, art works that circulated throughout the world were largely reproductions in a sense. Male artists would travel to different areas to recreate as exactly as they could the works they had traveled to see so that way they could bring these recreations back and show them to people that would otherwise never see these stunning pieces of art.

Even in studios today, students are encouraged to dabble in appropriation to create new and intriguing works of their own, myself included. In fact, some of my best works have been created this way. What I find interesting is that the concept of appropriation and copyright seems to change depending on what medium is being used. For example, appropriation through drawing or printmaking appears to be far less contested than in photography. However, even in the case of photography, altering or appropriating an image is still changing the original concept of the work and manipulating it to have a new meaning specific to the appropriating artist, thereby creating a new and original work, no matter how similar to the appropriated work it may be.