A lobster on a telephone, a urinal on a pedestal,
even sheets of music pasted onto a collage
- they are all appropriation.
Appropriation in art and art history refers
to the practice of artists using pre-existing
objects or images in their art with little
transformation of the original.
This means copying, borrowing, and altering
images and objects that already exists.
Now, appropriation has been a strategy used
by artists for a super long time.
Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso took historical
artworks as departure points for their own
pieces.
Picasso was also one of the first to use items
from the mass media in his work, when he used
real objects such as newspapers in his cubist
collages.
Marcel Duchamp infamously appropriated a urinal
in his 1915 work Fountain.
Surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation
in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí’s
Lobster Telephone.
Appropriation took on new significance in
mid-20th-century America and Britain with
the rise of consumerism and the proliferation
of popular images through mass media outlets
from magazines to television.
Appropriated images and objects appear extensively
in the Pop art of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg,
Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman,
and Roy Lichtenstein.
They reproduced, juxtaposed, or repeated mundane,
everyday images from popular culture.
Warhol stated, “Pop artists did images that
anyone walking down the street would recognize
in a split second...”
These recontextualized familiar images at
once project and reflect the ideas, interactions,
needs, desires, and cultural elements of the
times.
Appropriation is powerful because it raises
questions about the nature or definition of
art.
What is originality, authorship, authenticity?
Even today, when appropriating, remixing,
and sampling images and media is commonplace,
it continues to challenge traditional notions
of originality and push the boundaries of
what it means to be an artist.
I hope this video helped you better understand
appropriation.
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Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see
you guys next time.
