112 / It's official: Blatant plagiarism in art is o.k. !

This story is cringe-worthy, it confirms Australia is a backwater as far as art is concerned. A major art-prize, the Wynne, was won this year by a blatant copy of a Dutch Master piece.

But if that was not enough, the blunder is being excused by both the judges and the director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon. Oh, yes, and the artist. And by our eminent art critic, John McDonald, who thinks … ah well, shit happens - in a couple days nobody will worry about it anymore … or something to that effect. Mr. McDonald, you ought to have returned to you the money you spent on your education.

Read about the whole catastrophe down below, or better still, watch it here. (Apologies for the ad you get clobbered with.)
These are two (unpublished) letters I wrote to the newspaper:

2) Not a hanging offence?

It beggars belief how this art scandal is brushed under the carpet. Apart from the fact that both the Wynne judges and Edmund Capon have lost all credibility over their defence of the debacle (yes, it's probably not a hanging offence - ostracising for life from all official art-related functions will do), a most disappointing aspect is how our most eminent art critic, John McDonald, has fallen over. For him, of all people, to say (something to the effect of), "well, of course it is a copy, but so what, there is going to be an outcry for a couple of days and then the caravan will move on." If one ever needed proof of the parochial state of our art-world, this is it.

1) Sam Leach redefines 'quoting'

 Sam leach says, "Quite clearly I'm quoting that original work …" Was his painting called, 'Proposal for Landscaped Cosmos (after A. Pynacker)' ? I don't remember that reference - and without it his work is not a 'quote', it is a copy. But the point is, with that reference the work would never have won the Wynne. Capon's stance is disingenuous - his first instinct was that it looks like a 17th Century Dutch landscape. In a competition for Australian Landscape paintings! What a joke!


Is bigger picture in art uproar that it's not Australian?

SMH, Rick Feneley, 2010.04.15

EMINENT Australian landscape artist Tim Storrier sees it as theft. When he looks at this year's winner of the $25,000 Wynne Prize, side by side with the Dutch master's work that inspired it, Storrier says: ''Tell him to give half the money back to the Dutchman.''

But Sam Leach, the judges who awarded him the prize and the Art Gallery of New South Wales see no problem with the striking likeness between his work, Proposal for Landscaped Cosmos, and the Adam Pynacker's 17th-century painting, Boatman Moored on the Shore of a Lake.

Storrier echoed the sentiment of many yesterday: ''What I see of it, it's not influenced by that Dutch painter, it's actually copied from him. So, from my point of view, it's a flicker of that rather odious post-modernist practice of appropriation, which essentially is theft. And I suppose if one really thinks about it, morally, the bugger should give half his prize money to the estate of the Dutch artist.''

Pynacker's estate might have some claim if only his painting wasn't almost 400 years old and long out of copyright.

If Leach had wilfully copied - or ''quoted'' as he put it - a painting still protected by copyright, it would be a problem, said executive director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia Robyn Ayres. Protection runs for the life of the artist plus 70 years.

Criticism of Leach is focused on his failure to acknowledge the original work in the title of his own. Even the judges did not pick the homage. Much of the criticism of the award centred on what Leach painted - not an Australian landscape, as befitting the spirit of the Wynne Prize, but an Italian scene in the original.

Art market analyst Michael Reid said: ''I think what Sam did was make a very poor decision in not referencing the work in the title, as a nod to another artist.'' But this was no hanging offence, he said.

Leach did not set out to deceive, and it was well known that his art practice included appropriations of past works. ''Go back to the fundamentals of Picasso, who said: 'Good artists copy; great artists steal.' There has been a tendency throughout art history for artists to sample other artists. In fact, one of the waves of post-modern art, or art since 1980, has been the appropriation of other artists, symbols, imagery. Artistic licence lets you cross any copyright boundaries. It's open slather.

''Think of it like like the net: open-slather use of anything you like,'' he said.

Reid, a lawyer, questioned the Arts Law Centre's hard line. Even if Leach were appropriating contemporary work, he doubted the courts would find against him. He believed the bigger issue was that it was not an Australian landscape.