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I was reading the December 12 issue of the New York Observer when I spotted something that irked me.
Now understand, finding something in the Observer that offends me isn’t at all unusual. Not an issue goes by when I don’t discover something to offend me in the salmon-colored pages of this snide, smarmy rag, which encapsulates just about everything I dislike about New York. It’s a publication for the 1%. When I think of its intended readership, what comes to mind is that picture going around of champagne-swilling bankers smirking while looking down at Occupy protesters from a restaurant terrace.
And to answer your unasked question—which I assume would be, “Well, then why did you subscribe?”—my subscription was entirely accidental. I had expiring air miles—from Delta, I think—and used them to sign on for a bunch of magazines and newspapers. I’d never read the New York Observer before then, and once the issues started arriving and I saw what I’d gotten myself into, I looked forward to the sub ending so I wouldn’t be tortured by its worldview. I’d read each issue while metaphorically holding my nose, doing my best to treat it as an anthropological study of a zeitgeist I despise.
And now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system …
What was it in particular that I suddenly felt a need to bring to your attention? Something I saw in a half page ad for the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery. It offered for sale a single painting: “Mjolnir—To Thy Master!”
Take a look for yourself.
The artist’s name was … Jack Kirby, right? Wrong. It’s the work of an artist named Sharon Moody, and Kirby’s name was nowhere to be seen. I investigated a little further, and discovered other similar paintings.
Here’s another.
This one’s by by Sal Buscema, right? Wrong again. It’s also credited to Sharon Moody, and unless you’re familiar with comics, you’d have no idea that every line screamed Sal’s name. Which is but one of the many reasons these paintings leave me … uncomfortable.
The intended market of buyers for these works of art would probably assume that the comics depicted in them sprang whole from the mind of the artist, and are a commentary on pop culture in general, rather than being line for line reproductions so close to the original comics that the artist might have been better served taking a photograph of the original comic book pages and framing that. Roy Lichtenstein, who I felt was profiteering on the work of great comics artists, at least altered them to suit his own style, as can be seen by this comparison plucked from David Barsalou’s site Desconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, which shows a Russ Heath panel side by side with Lichtenstein’s recreation.
I never looked at a Lichtenstein without feeling angry on behalf of the unnamed comics artists, because I always felt that a fraud was being perpetrated upon an ignorant audience, one that might assume he was making a commentary on the culture though the tropes of comics in general, as opposed to plundering specific artwork. (I believe any curator of an exhibit of Lichtenstein’s work who fails to include reproductions of the original panels falls down on his or her job.) But again, at least he made alterations to the original works, rather than passing along the unfiltered imagery of Joe Kubert, John Romita, and others as his own.
But when it comes to this current crop of paintings, it appears—at least based on the one page I could track down—that not an ink line has been changed. Check out Sharon Moody’s painting “The Shadow” side by side with a page from Batman #253 (November 1973) as penciled by Irv Novick and inked by Dick Giordano.
As you can see, they are so identical that the artist might as well have (as I wrote above) photographed the folded issue.
So what does Moody believe she’s doing here? According to an Artist’s Statement on her site:
Recently I have been making paintings based on games, toys and other forms of entertainment that reflect the universal human desire for amusement, diversion, and stimulation. These seem a proper subject for trompe l’oeil paintings, which by their very nature are intended to divert and entrance us with their illusionism and by the questions they raise—in a playful way—about perception and reality.
Ideas I am exploring include the relatively new (in the entirety of human history) concept of childhood; physical objects used as playthings; the process of play as a way to learn; and the commercial branding of products for sport and play. … Comics are thought of as adolescent fare, and are inexpensively printed for immediate consumption and immediate disposal; Something’s Going Down in That Museum Right Now depicts the anticipatory moment of turning the page at the story’s denouement.
I could write an entire essay on what’s wrong with the penultimate sentence of that quote, as it’s been decades since comics could be thought of as a product that’s “inexpensively printed for immediate consumption and immediate disposal.” But I’m more bothered by the paintings themselves rather than the theory behind them.
You might ask, but what’s wrong with this? Aren’t these just still-life paintings like any other? Aren’t there many trompe l’oeil paintings that can pass for photographs? Why should an artist be allowed to paint a bowl of fruit but not a comic book?
My issue is this—an apple, once you set aside either a Higher Power or human hybridization (depending on your belief system), has no creator, but the pages of art apparently reproduced here line for line do. What’s going on here is at the very least a collaboration with Kirby, Buscema, Novick, and others without those artists’ permission, and at the very most … well … I’ll let others decide whether they want to go there.
And let it be said that I have no problem with sampling, remixing, tributes, homages, allusions, or anything along those lines. I’ve enjoyed other works that have repurposed existing comics imagery, such as the collages of John Ashbery, which I shared with you here and here, and the photorealistic paintings of Glennray Tutor. And a look at my short stories, which incorporate takes on John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, and William Shakespeare, among others, will reflect that I believe in mulching the culture to create new works of art as much as anyone.
As to the copyright and fair use issues which surround the act of perfectly reproducing the words and pictures of another without change, to be honest, that’s not what’s paramount in my mind. I’ll leave that for others to debate. Because mine is not a legal concern, but an artistic one.
See, the thing is—these paintings don’t seem to be sampling, remixes, tributes, homages, allusions, or anything as transforming as that. Whatever power they have comes entirely from the unfiltered energy of the great comic book artists—and the writers who worked with them—whose work has been reproduced intact and without acknowledgement. It’s one thing to channel them to create something new, to take some of your soul and some of theirs and meld them together into a greater whole. It’s something else entirely to offer up the unchanged work of others as your own.
This is theft of another person’s work, plain and simple. At the very least, credit should be given to the artists whose work has been copied. Did Ms Moody use tracing paper?
Words fail. I, too, believe in collage as a valid art form, but this is not collage or fair use. This is appropriation, thievery, and as you put so well, Scott: anonymization. To call these unlicensed collaborations would be to give this “artist” too much credit. Anyone who knows comics well enough can recognize the works of these artists at a glance. It is their artistry that’s being exploited here, without consent, compensation, or even credit. Shameful.
Totally agree with the above, but this practice is not new. I bet the guy who painted on those cave walls didn’t get the credit he deserved!
Wow, she has some nerve to not even mention that the panels were originally created by other artists. I might buy that she is just showing a piece of Americana with the comics, if she were to admit that they were not created by her very audibly at every showing of her work. She has an artistic and moral responsibility to make it very clear to everyone that these images did not pop out of her own mind. The fact that she doesn’t makes her nothing more than a artistic con-artist, IMO.
I have drawn comicbooks for a number of years and I am formally educated with a degree in Fine Arts. I don’t find Sharon Moody’s work offensive. I could understand Scott’s perspective and I could see how all the commenters so far can mistake her presentation as stealing but you all are missing the point!
Sharon’s art is NOT in the line work. Its in the presentation of turning the page! She is making appropriate social commentary on the dying medium of comicbook pop culture with the advent of digital media. I applaud her work and to me as a former comicbook artist, it feels very sentimental!
Sharon’s point is obvious because I was once a traditional comicbook artist and now I work in digital entertainment. I miss the days of newsprint comics and I know comicbooks as an artform on paper WILL fade away.
—
Albert Holaso
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more commentary…
Comicbooks aren’t as prevalent an entertainment media as they were decades ago. Art that brings back that feeling of yesteryear is a good one in my opinion. The comicbook media in the present age is changing and adapting to the digital form.
I only hope that Sharon gives proper credit to her source…the great artists and writers who created the original works. If she does not then she is plagiarising and I do not condone that even for the sake of social commentary.
Everyone is caught up in original authorship, so I wanted to clarify how the art pieces spoke to me…
“The kids in the future won’t be turning comicbook pages anymore. They’ll be sliding their finger across the screen.”
The comicbook media in the form of printed material is declining (same goes for all printed publications including magazines and newspapers) We can’t deny that reality. I love the comicbook medium. It’s a powerful form and it is changing and adapting to a new format…digital. It is different and it will perpetuate the media but it is not the same. The art brings to light that the comicbooks we remember from our childhood might soon go away. It is not something that I would like to see go away. But certainly it is not growing.
The comicbook media in the form of printed material is declining (same goes for all printed publications including magazines and newspapers)
It’s actually not. Along with cookbooks, comics/graphic novels are the one printed industry whose sales are going *up* in the digital age.
(Example source: http://news.msn.com/pop-culture/free-comic-book-day-finds-print-digital-in-demand
John Jackson Miller, who tracks industry sales figures and estimates through his Comichron website, said that sales of single-issue comic books were up nearly $60 million to $474.6 million in 2012, compared with $414 million in 2011 and $310.6 million in 2003.
Miller said digital sales of comics were an estimated $75 million in 2012 compared with about $25 million the year before.)
On your way to your “degree in Fine Arts”, you apparently took no Latin. “…An entertainment MEDIA”– REALLY? “Media” is the PLURAL of the word “medium”, and has NO business after the SINGULAR indefinite article “an”. Comics are a MEDIUM– SINGULAR. Strangely enough, you got it right originally, with your reference to “…the dying medium of comicbook pop culture “– you just failed to carry it through your subsequent comments consistently.
Also, Mr. Edelman states plainly in several places that the original artists are NOT credited, therefor, your fervent “… hope that Sharon gives proper credit to her source…the great artists and writers who created the original works” betrays an inability to retain or fully comprehend what you’ve read.
Your conclusion, “…she is plagiarizing…”, with which I concur, is thus confirmed.
I don’t think she does. Even Lichtenstein didn’t copy the same art line for line, which as far as I can tell is what she does. This is theft, glossed over with a lot of doubletalk and bullshittery.
I love this post. As an art historian and comic lover, I agree with you completely. Making a duplicate of someone else’s work and selling it as your own is wrong. Derive from it, fine, we all do that, but make it your own in some way. And her artist statement is essentially that by turning the comic into a painting she’s giving it value it didn’t have before. Pretentious, and ignorant of the value of original comic art.
And to reply to Holaso’s comment – At best, this could be considered “performance” art, because what she’s selling, he claims, is the act of turning the page. Yet it isn’t the page-turning that she’s selling; her work creates a still image, the painting, that replicates a comic book page without giving credit to its original creators, and without reading her artist statement, it wouldn’t be obvious what her intent is.
And having worked with artists on creating their statements at my previous job in an art gallery, I know just how useless those things are – they’re created to sell something after the fact, to justify a work which doesn’t stand on its own. The only statements which have value explain references which might not be apparent, such as listing the comics involved – which she didn’t do – because art which works and is as “obvious” as Holaso claims doesn’t need to be explained.
No one is arguing her skill. It takes a fairly deft technical artist to replicate work like that, provided she actually did and this isn’t a digital canvas print of a photograph. However, her art isn’t in what she created but in the commentary she’s creating about the work. In that case, she has a responsibility to admit the image itself isn’t her creation, and credit the original artist. Simply put, without that credit, she’s stolen someone else’s work and lied about the attribution. I would never buy or show “art” like this.
Sal Buscema should get a big cut of whatever money this copyist makes on that Captain America piece, in a perfect world.
I agree with you that the work ENTIRELY hinges on whether proper credit to the original source is given.
Albert: While I can understand the artist’s desire to make “appropriate social commentary on the dying medium of comicbook pop culture with the advent of digital media,” that could have been done through the act of creating her own iconic comic book imagery as opposed to utilizing the work of others (down to the cross-hatching) without attribution.
I 100% agree with that statement. Which brings another thing to light, the artist does not have the capacity to make such an IMPACTFUL statement through her own original work.
Who would care about an original never seen before ‘superhero’? Or who would care about an interpretation of a comicbook page? Or who would care about a scene or page we have never seen before? The piece definitely loses its PUNCH then.
The artist is entirely dependent on nostalgia to make her work stand. The only thing the artist can do is give credit where credit is due.
>> Or who would care about a scene or page we have never seen before? >>
Really? How many people seeing those paintings have ever seen those pages before?
I think the work could have been just as effective if she’d created her own “pages” to capture (if she can, that is), because they’re not being marketed to people familiar with the source material. So no, if the pieces work at all, they work for people who’ve never seen those pages or scenes before.
Exactly, Kurt; if Moody’s sole aim is nostalgia, she could just as easily achieve it with her own generic image– provided she is merely trying to evoke that nostalgia through the presentation of an image of a comic book. It is possible that that was her intention – pure nostalgia – and not the exploitation of a famous artist such as Neal Adams, because other examples of her work utilized books by considerably less well-known artists (to be gracious & considerate of their feelings, I’ll not name any). Mr. Edelman may very well have seized on the iconic Adams cover simply because of its familiarity to him. The VAST majority of people who have seen, or will see, this painting or any other of Moody’s works will most likely have no knowledge of, or interest in, the actual drawings presented therein– they will see only “a comic book”, a relic from their childhood; therefor, an 8 1/2″ X 11″ mock-up would suffice. However, if the specific images and colors are vital to the overall composition, then we have an issue – no pun intended. If Moody is incapable of producing such a “dummy”, surely she could pay a starving would-be comic artist – there are probably, as a conservative estimate, dozens in her immediate area – to produce one, which she would be free to use again & again.
So you’ve basically contradicted everything you originally said, then. BACKTRACK BACKTRACK BACKTRACK
I agree with the main points made above — that the artist is presenting something she claims is just to trick the eye. But she is apparently incapable of acknowledging that the viewers would probably want to look more at the original comic book than her painting. I don’t understand how she thought she was beyond asking permission or giving credit where credit is due.
But I also cannot help but be staggered by her overweening presumption. Not just that she believes comics to be “disposable”, but that “the relatively new (in the entirety of human history) concept of childhood; physical objects used as playthings; the process of play as a way to learn; and the commercial branding of products for sport and play”.
Excuse me? Is she completely ignorant of archeology and anthropology? When have physical objects NOT been used as playthings? What makes her think the “process of play” as a way to learn is not as old as the human race? Does she REALLY think this is something that is “relatively new”?
There’s a core of arrogance about the whole hsitory of the human race, that her disregard of the origins of the art she is copying is hardly surprising.
I am staggered.
I’m not so sure I wholly agree with you.
In the history of art, it has been common practice to repaint the works of other artists. To name one figure who everyone knows, many of Salvadore Dali’s paintings include direct “lifts” from artists such as Messonier and Velazques. As you mention, Dali does recombine the images — in the same way hip hop artists use sampling in audio, but the areas of the painting containing the excerpts from the other artists are direct re-paintings and they lack a footnote to tell one they are. They count on the audience having a background in art history to get the joke.
But if we go further back in art history to Christian art, when ikons were the dominant form, the problem becomes even more pronounced. First, ikons were anonymously painted — there was no cult of the individual at that time. Secondly, there was a formula for each image — a Theotokos painting, for example, had to contain certain symbols in a particular order. Thirdly, the artists copied one another directly — again, there was no sense in which the artist “owned” the image; the idea someone could own an image was odd to them — and if one thinks deeply about it, it *is* a bizarre concept. The same sort of process was at work in ancient Egyptian art.
My point is, what this artist has done is nothing radical or strange. It has venerable precedents.
Kirby, Buscema, et alii, are all, to people *outside* the comics world, anonymous artists — many people know their images and style but almost no one knows their names, any more than they do Bill Ward or Leyendeker or Andrew Loomis; but our visual world in popular culture is influenced by them. It’s only people with specialized background knowledge who know the names of these artists — to everyone else, their images are part of the furniture of their world, much the way apples growing on wild fruit trees were the furniture of primitive people’s worlds.
The artist in question here appropriated images that are a part of everyone’s world (and people like Kirby did work in a medium that was partially anonymous and public and mass produced) and has chosen to freeze them on canvas (I assume) in another medium (paint of some sort). In a sense, it is an honor and an homage that this artist has chosen these *iconic* representatives of comic book art — they are instantly recognizable and special to everyone, and that speaks to their power. The artist has re-presented them to a public that probably hasn’t seriously considered the power of comics images to move them in a very long time.
And the artist has changed the images — by recreating them in another medium, in a two, not three dimensional way, in a static, not dynamic fashion (a part of the art of the comic is it takes time — page turning — to read them), so that the objective is to see the object as a work of art, a portrait of something important, in much the same way as an ikon or image of a king is a presentation of something important.
She, the artist, has not just had a printer reprint an issue of a Kirby comic and then signed her name to it — in which case I think your points would apply more strongly. She has frozen a dynamic and changing medium, reinterpreted it in a static medium through her own judgment, and made another work of art.
Does the work involve Kirby? Certainly. But all artists, when they create, are involved in a conversation with many other artists, all of the ones that influenced them, and they never get a mention, either. This woman is beholden to the trompe l’oeil artists that have gone before her… but then again, Michaelangelo was beholden to the Greek and Roman sculptors who went centuries before him, and there is no footnote attached to the David or Pieta. Artists count on their audience to care enough to learn whom they are conversing with — they are inviting you into the world of art. They are not writing an art history guide, they are making the art a history guide talks about.
I think there is more here to consider than you may have thought about. And the real question, in the end, is whether these paintings are good or bad art, why, and what are the standards we should use to determine that.
Eloquently put!
While I don’t think these works are great art, I don’t see the crime here that you do, Scott. Yes, it would have been nice if, in her notes at least, she cited the original artists whose work she lifts. But it’s not required, any more than Andy Warhol owed a credit to the industrial designer who created the Campbell Soup label.
As other commenters have noted, there’s an art history tradition of re-appropriating the work of other artists and artisans, from Duchamp’s readymades through Sherrie Levine’s re-photography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherrie_Levine) and beyond. As Richard points out, there is creative work in what Moody is doing: coming up with the concept, selecting the pages to paint, defining how and where the page curls, and of course employing the technique required to make it all look photorealistic.
As someone wise once said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Moody is not a great artists, but from where I stand nothing she’s doing here is outside the bounds of what is commonplace in the art world. Nor, to my taste, is any of her work as good as the great art that inspired her.
But I would be surprised if Moody didn’t have some awareness of who exactly she was copying. It’s not like those are the comics you would pick up if you just strolled into a comic store today (assuming you can even find one). I can’t peek into her brain, but odds are either she knows something about Kirby and Buscema or had the good sense to ask someone who does. It surely must say something about the divide between commercial art and fine art that their work only gets into the gallery when appropriated by someone like Moody.
Have you considered contacting her?
This reminds me of the uproar over whether Roy Lichtenstein had ripped off my old friend Jack Abel back in the 60’s. I came of age during the time these “Pop Art” paintings were done and received my formal education in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia. in ’72 I have also spent 35 years working in comics. I feel quite qualified to offer my thoughts on this issue although I don’t expect many will agree with me. Basically, I think it all comes down to whether or not the artist in question has created something new –or has merely copied someone else’s work. Artworks must be transformative. and I believe this one is. I maintain she has indeed created something new, and has employed considerable artistic skill in doing so. I also think it’s a comment on Pop Art as well as a comment on Pop Culture. I think it’s very respectful of the artwork and artists on whose work this is based. I think that often good art is thought provoking, misunderstood and controversial and this seems to be the case here. I don’t personally find trick the eye paintings all that interesting but we can all certainly agree that artistic taste is very subjective.
Two questions:
1) So whether or not there was attribution is not a concern for you in creating context?
2) Did Jack ever express an opinion about how he felt? I wish I’d thought to ask him myself!!
No, I don’t think the artist who painted the picture of a comic book needs to share credit with the comic book artist any more than Edward Hopper needed to share credit with the architect and builder of the Lighthouse at Two Lights. Painters of flowers need not share credit with Mother Nature either. To my mind, a painting of a comic book is nothing more than a painting. In this case the subject matter is a comic book. They are two very different things. And a comic book is a great deal more than colored ink on paper. If the painter had reproduced the entire comic book or a reasonable facsimilie of it and substituted her name for Kirby’s and produced multiple issues and tried to market them as her own work, then I would agree with you. I spent a lot of time talking to jack Abel, I don’t recall that he was holding any grudges against Lichtenstein. But if he had I would have tried to make him feel better about it by saying a painting of a comic book is not a comic book and a painting of a flower is not a flower. Then we would have talked about baseball.
I’m glad Jack made his peace with it. But as for the Edward Hopper issue, I don’t think crediting the architects of all the buildings in one’s paintings is quite the same thing. I didn’t exactly address that here, but I sort of got near to it:
http://www.scottedelman.com/2011/12/23/why-a-comic-book-isnt-a-hersheys-bar/
Wonder why this post from 2011 is suddenly getting traction again …
Lots of people on this page make good points, including Scott at the outset, but Richard’s response comes closest to expressing my thoughts. Good job, all.
I feel like some credit isn’t being given to the nature of the art.
This isn’t the kind of hoodwinking that comics fans have been up-in-arms about before. These aren’t deceptive recreations intended to improve the portfolio of a dishonest hopeful, or pad the output of a lazy commercial artist. These images are by definition recreations, but recreations that are entirely forthcoming about their nature.
The tone of your post feels more fitting for the charlatans who deliberately disguise the origins of the work. The painters, pencilers and thieves who deliberately duplicate in ways that leave a casual observer no other option but to accept that they are the originator. These images suggest the prefabricated product in its natural state, I think.
She shouldn’t be obligated to invent her own product, radically reinterpret reality, or develop an unassociated style. That would be something all together different. Fair to expect some credit to the original artists, and perhaps some information about the issues themselves, though.
Oh, but many comics fans WERE up in arms about Lichtenstein. How did you feel about him?
And I don’t believe these paintings ARE entirely forthcoming about their nature, since the high-end art market is not being informed of the contribution of the artists who are being copied.
I didn’t like Lichtenstein. And I like these less.
Like Richard alluded to earlier, the art is NOT denigrating towards the medium or comicbook creators as an art form. Rather it is a celebration of pop culture. Many here are caught up in the CONTENT because it is that pop culture art that reaches across a wide and deep audience…and that is why the artist chose her pieces. She could have easily created her own but it wouldn’t have the far reaching iconic effect she wanted to achieve. Her art is in the FORM, the medium she chose to express her message…the page turning…the peaking to the next page. If you disagree with her work then I suspect you would also disagree with the likes of Andy Warhol…which is fine. (Sean in the post above beat me to punch…DuChamp also is heralded for his FORM art work btw) Not liking something doesn’t invalidate the art…which in this case is the FORM strongly dependent on the CONTENT.
(Technically you can say she only created half the art. She faithfully copied 100% of the content :P)
Comicbooks are not any less or greater an art form. It is just different. I’m a supporter of any art and publicity that spreads the comicbook art form to a wider audience. For the hardcore comicbook fans, I would think twice about keeping the media so guarded. The original creators ARE due their rights ABSOLUTELY, but we should not attack the sharing of content across media. Would you deny the chance to spark the interest of someone who has never known comics? Fans especially need to stop being so elitist, it only leads to an incestuous industry and fan base that’s diminishing an art medium I love.
How is the art a “celebration” if the true artists receive no credit– where is their celebrity?
You say that “She could have easily created her own but it wouldn’t have the far reaching iconic effect she wanted to achieve”, thereby lending credence to the theory that she WAS relying on specific images – images which are not like fruit, furniture, or buildings, but are pictures, drawings which were conceived by other minds and manually transferred to Bristol board. Images which she did not create, and was not entitled to misappropriate. The artists were compensated by their publishers, adequately or not, for the right of first publication, NOT ownership of the physical piece itself. Moody is certainly not entitled to make use of others’ work with impunity without similar remuneration & credit when the identities of the true creators, the originators, of that work are readily identifiable, thanks to that handy invention, the credit box.
Even rap artists have to pay to sample another’s work. This goes way over just sampling. I’m not on the east coast, but east coast artists should protest this show in some fashion. Raise the alarm.
This is Trompe l’oeil. It doesn’t matter if the subject is a comic book, an old issue of Life Magazine or a used Kleenex.
I’m sure the LAST people who would be offended by this are the comic artists themselves.
some of you are just ridiculous. As a non-artist, and non-comic book nerd, I looked at these and thought she photographed them. When I found out they were paintings, I was blown away. Yet at no time did I ever think the painter did anything but literally paint an actual comic book page created by somebody else in order to make it look like a photo.
I admire it, it isn’t plagiarism, its a freaking still-life. Get over it. If it was a still-life of an Apple, Michaelangelo’s David, or Times Square, complete with Movie Poster artwork on the billboards, none of you would be whining or crying.
You Dinks out there are bitching not about the fact that Marvel/DC’s intellectual property might be infringed by this artist’s still life, but that the original guy who drew Marvel/DC’s intellectual property as a “work for hire” and has no claim to it isn’t getting recognized for it, as if that matters an iota to anybody. I wasted four minutes I can’t get back on this nonsense.
To respond to several questions at once:
While I don’t think “Andy Warhol owed a credit to the industrial designer who created the Campbell Soup label,” or that Sharon Moody needs to credit whoever designed the Hershey bar wrapper (which she drew in one of her paintings), I do believe Kirby, Buscema, Novick and the others need to be acknowledged, the same way Lichtenstein owed a tip of the hat to Kubert, Sekowsky, Romita, and all of the artists he copied. It is wrong for the original artists to be left nameless. She could have celebrated her unwitting collaborators in her Artists Statement. She did not.
Context counts for so much. It’s one thing to say — I loved that feeling I got reading the great comics of X, Y, and Z as a kid, and I want to share the emotions those creators gave me with you, by letting you see what it felt like flipping through those comics. It’s quite another to mask the source and not give credit where credit is due, as if the original artists had noting to do with whatever power is running through her own pieces.
She did, after all, choose more than just any old boring comics page picked up at random. She chose THOSE pages by THOSE artists, and to not share the identities of those who are being celebrated, to only speak of her intentions in terms of artistic theories, is like throwing a party and keeping the guests of honor locked away in a back room.
As for the comment that, “Artists count on their audience to care enough to learn whom they are conversing with—they are inviting you into the world of art. They are not writing an art history guide, they are making the art a history guide talks about.” Agreed that something like that is more the role of the curator or the gallery owner than the artist. But I think that by saying nothing, a sin of omission has occurred. I’m almost tempted to call the act of failing to credit the source material a form of cultural misappropriation … but I’m not quite ready to go there yet until I give it a lot more thought.
And as for the comment, ” Fans especially need to stop being so elitist, it only leads to an incestuous industry and fan base that’s diminishing an art medium I love,” I’d say that it is the failure to give credit to those who have gone before that is the elitism here. It diminishes, rather than elevates, the original work, and says, it is only important when Ipaint it.
As to whether I have reached out to the artist, I may do so, but only after I have visited the gallery to see what my reaction is to the works themselves as they hang on walls.
I have to express my agreement with the sentiments expressed so ably above.
What do you call someone who passes off the work of others as their own? A cheat maybe, or a plagiarist – or maybe just a liar? Whatever you call it – try it in an exam and find out what esteem it’s held in. You’d be failed and expelled in a heartbeat and your name would be mud. Unless, it would seem, you’re an artist (more specifically a commercial artist). Then you’re expected to suck it up because only the fine art mob can make your work worth taking even remotely seriously.
And they can sell and you don’t get anything. That’d be considered as something akin to fraud in any other arena wouldn’t it? Especially if the artist isn’t even credited. Even if it isn’t strictly speaking illegal it’s definitely immoral and unethical.
It’s not a remix – there’s nothing being done with the images that a photograph wouldn’t nail. It’s not a collaboration – any more than my tracing this piece and selling it is a collaboration. It’s not collage – as nothing is being done to change the context of the image. And that artist’s statement is just pretentious twaddle that’s being used to desperately justify this act of theft.
Short thought: It would have taken nothing away from the paintings to credit the pencilers, inkers, writers, letterers, colorists, editors and publishers of the comics the paintings are based on.
Longer thoughts: It looks to me like she’s trying to create the illusion of comics left lying on a table by a non-collector; by a kid perhaps called away to dinner, the comics folded over and the wind blowing the upper pages, which is a sort of cool idea.
Having said that, and whether she picked the comics at random from a quarter bin somewhere, or from her own childhood collection, or whether she’s an expert in comics, it is troubling that no credit is given to any member of the creative team of the originals. It’s not as if any research would have had to be done—the credits would all be on the first page or two of each comic. Most charitably, maybe one could say that even with the credits clearly stated in a comic, creators’ identities are interchangeable to non-fans. (Maybe that’s even a point she’s trying to make?) A comic stands as a cultural artifact the way, perhaps, a building does. When does one have to credit an architect for a photo or painting of a building? If the building is famous, is the responsibility to do so greater? Another thought: Would we feel differently if she had used The Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David without crediting the creators? What about lesser known works of art?
She’s a pathetic excuse for an artist, but there is nothing we can do about that. Now if someone would inform Marvel and DC that their copyrighted material is being ripped off we might get some action.
Okay, I have to disagree w/your assessment here. There’s a qualitative difference between what she’s done and what Roy Lichtenstein did.
These are trompe l’oeil paintings. in which the objective is to create a @D images that momentarily fools the eye into seeing it as a 3D object. in this case, comic books that have been opened with pages rolled back.
What Moody is doing is not emulating the story art per se, but as part of an object. It is immaterial to the point of her work if the sotires are by Kirby or Ernie Bushmiller; she’s not copying the story art as art, but the story art as an element of a 3D object.
In other words, she’s doing the exact same thing Norman Rockwell did when he used the covers of real EC comics as part of his painting of a group of rustic musicians practicing in the back room of a general store. The point was not the cover art itself, but rather used the cover art as part of the overall mise en scene.
What Lichtenstein did was to isolate a single discrete image in a larger work and base his painting on that w/o adding any further insight or originality to the final work. Perhaps if he had gone for an extreme close up, just a fraction of the total image, it would have been excusable, or if like the collage artist known as Winston Smith he had combined / juxtaposed different images to form a third meaning.
Moody is focusing on the physical comic book as a work of art in three dimensions, not as a series of illustrations. You say “The intended market of buyers for these works of art would probably assume that the comics depicted in them sprang whole from the mind of the artist, and are a commentary on pop culture in general…” I can pretty much guarantee you’re wrong simply from the titles of the paintings alone: Moody, quite the contrary, is banking on a comics / pop culture literate audience (otherwise they’ll look at her paintings and say, “What the hell is this?”).
Lichtenstein, on the other hand, did assume his audience was ignorant of the origins of his work and would interpret it as wholly original works of art, not rip offs of other artists (a couple of whom he served which while in the Army, IIRC, thus providing motive for his plagiarism).
I’m sorry, but i can’t equate the way Norman Rockwell used comics in this painting—basically as a minor bit of verisimilitude—with Moody’s use of complete comics pages in which the bristling energy of comic book artists are the main visual element of her pieces, pages being turned or not. Rockwell owed us no explanation; Moody, I feel, does.
And as for the defense that “she’s not copying the story art as art, but the story art as an element of a 3D object,” I’d like to see how far that defense would get her with Lucasfilm were she to sell paintings of the battered covers of old Star Wars novels for thousands of dollars apiece. (To which I add— have no idea as to the going rate for a Moody, but with a 57th Street gallery and a half-page ad in the Observer, I assume it’s got to be up there.)
She may be celebrating the comic book in general as pop culture object, but in her efforts to do so she’s belittling the very comic book artists who created those comic books and turned pop culture objects into art.
I am not a litigious person, but I very much hope that Marvel and DC bring legal action against this person asap. While I appreciate the claims she makes about trying to capture the joy of what-is-to-be-found-on-the-next-page, the fact of the matter is that these paintings are copies of copyrighted work. She made no attempt to alter he images she appropriated, much of which has been reprinted by the copyright owners within the last few years, and she is claiming the work as her own. This is wrong, and she should not be allowed to profit from it.
Comic book art has always been looked at by the “legitimate” art community, as not being art. That we create “junk food” art for the masses, not real art. Old school Illustrators had to deal with people looking down on them for how they made a living, at the same time, had to deal with others making money off of their creative works. From Movie and TV rights, merchandise, to owning their creations outright, artists would see their creations exploited, without receiving credit, much less given compensation. Comic Book Art isn’t good enough to be sold as fine art, but painting a reproduction of Comic book Art IS fine art. These Comic Book Legends were incredibly hard working professionals, who put all of their creative talent into making the best books they could make for the medium. They deserve better than to have the larger art community reproduce already-published works, without acknowledging the creative works of Comic Book Artists that were used to create new art.
Scott, we applaud you for sticking up for the original artists. But we’re not offended by these pieces. The best thing about your article is not the attack Sharon but instead that you pointed out her original comic sources. That’s positive informative stuff we enjoyed reading.
Unfortunately, the artists do not own these works. They are owned by Marvel and DC. So in a legal sense, the artists are not due a check. But again, we appluad you for giving credit where credit is due. If Sharon’s works bring about a greater awareness of comics as an art form, we can totally groove on that.
Interestingly, we just received a gift. It is a painting of the same Silver Surfer panel Sharon has painted, except it’s blown up to about 4 feet wide and has some interesting color additions and an impasto style. Very cool. It was done for us by another Jack Kirby fan.
I think this is a fascinating argument about the nature of art that is well worth our time and energy.
Then again, I just woke up today from the coma I’ve been in since 1961.
[…] Scott Edelman cited [ed. note: he’s my husband] of artist Sharon Moody creating works of art by copying entire comic books spread open and creating a trompe l’oeil effect on an otherwise blank canvas has several […]
I’m not sure it was abundantly clear in the article and it certainly doesn’t seem that the commenters understand this, but:
Those are trompe l’oeil paintings. That image that you see that looks like a comic book glued to a canvas painted a solid color is actually not there. They are 2-dimensional paintings. No paper or comic book was used. The only material being used to convey that image is oil paint.
The artist isn’t striving to be original or creative (not all art has to be….look at concert musicians who follow the symphonies of the greats note-for-note). These paintings are her attempt to practice the art of trompe l’oeil. Too see how well she can take a 3-dimensional still-life and make a 2-dimensional painting look like that still-life.
Moody shows real talent in her ability to simulate three dimensions, but the two of the three images you show here are little more than traced comic book pages with a little bit of curve added. (The Captain America painting shows more skill and imagination, but still focuses on the recreation of one or two primary pages.)
I would equate this with something like the Eiffel tower. You’re not allowed to publish a photo of the tower without the owners’ permission. You shouldn’t be able to paint a copyrighted work without permission, either, even if you add a few of your own flourishes.
[…] That joke Scott McCloud put on the cover of Amazing Heroes #200 neatly shows the attitude of most comics fans to the occasional plundering of comics by the high art world: slightly amused, somewhat defensive but mostly irritated. To see Roy Lichtenstein get the credit, fame and fortune for swiping the work of other, largely anonymous artists is annoying, though I do think we can get a bit too defensive about it as comics fans, not an artform adverse to a bit of creative stealing itself. Nevertheless I can understand Scott Edelman’s annoyance at encountering a modern Lichtenstein repainting comic book pages panel by panel allegedly without crediting the ori…: […]
To utilize or be inspired by these original works is one thing, fine, but to not give reference to the artists who slaved to create the originals these are based off of is morally wrong. At the very least, since these paintings wouldn’t exist as they are without these comic originals, the original artists should at be partly compensated for their contributions to the foundations of these pieces.
Two things.
First, the person posting as Nathan Greno above is a troll and not the real Nathan.
The below was posted at Bleedingcool.com by the moderator Joe B. Pangrazio.
I e-mailed Ms. Moody directly after all of this blew up (and again, at the urging of my artist friend). And got a response. I’m not going to post any of it yet (as I’ve asked permission and have yet to hear back) but I will share some of what was shared with me.
At the actual gallery, the original artists of the comics in question are credited.
As well, there is a book “The Art Prophets” which has a chapter devoted to early comic book history (well, Marvel/DC early history at least). It is on hand at the gallery and honestly, it seems like they’re doing everything I would have wanted to “be okay” with it (as though that matters). I hope that this puts some others’ minds at rest, as well.
When did you visit the gallery? Before or after all of this began? Just wondering whether credit was always there or whether it was hurriedly added once attention was paid.
If full credit always existed, I wish the gallery owner had said that in the one statement I saw. A simple, “Hey, we’re not trying to ignore the original artists, we’ve always been giving them credit” would have gone far.
I’d hoped to visit the gallery next week to see it all for myself while I was in NY for a couple of days, but unfortunately, they close between Christmas and New Year’s Day. You’d figure with all the tourists heading to town for the holidays, that would be a time to remain open, but that sadly wasn’t the case.
As for the comment you mentioned, I deleted it. It parsed strangely when I allowed it in, but now I see my original suspicions were correct.
The more I think about it, the more this confuses me. I’ve exchanged several emails with one of the co-owners of the gallery. If “at the actual gallery, the original artists of the comics in question are credited” — why didn’t he just SAY so? Why didn’t he simply tell me, “Hey, man, you’ve got it all wrong? We’ve been honoring the original creators all along.”
[…] of his Silver Surfer painting in our 2011 review of Mars. Then it got weird. Just a few days later, Scott Edelman posted on Reddit about artist Sharon Moody. We read the column and dug a little deeper. We looked […]
Scott, have you seen this “New York Times” article about “appropriation” in fine art? It seems to me that according to this Roy Lichtenstein sufficiently “transformed” his source material from comics to escape legal charges of plagiarism, but Ms. Moody has not. But in both artists’ cases, it is only proper that they acknowledge the creators of the source material, which neither of them did. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/arts/design/richard-prince-lawsuit-focuses-on-limits-of-appropriation.html?_r=1&ref=arts&pagewanted=all
Several people sent me that link — which I missed, as I’ve been traveling — and it does raise interesting issues which are certainly relevant. Thanks for sending it along!
I think there are two larger issues at work here, both of which bother the hell out of me with regard to the universe of contemporary art.
The first is the cult of the object. Is there anything more wonderful or genuine about a creation designed for mass reproduction than one intended to be a single object? I don’t see it. It was Bad John Barnes who pointed out (at least to me) that individual objects are lionized and canonized so that rich people could acquire things. Lichtenstein, IMHO, did not rake it in because he had such a delicious sense of irony–it was that he took reproductive art and turned it into individual objects that could be collected. And I find that problematic–if not loathsome.
And the other is art by catalog paragraph. An earnest description with the proper vocabulary asserting that no! Really! I’ve got ironic distance! is something a) that’s a poor excuse for actual vision and b) something that I thought the Conceptualists effectively slaughtered decades ago, making it as obsolete as, well, trompe-l’oeil in the era of photography.
It’s the tendencies that are anti-democratic that make me see red in this regard.
This is an interesting discussion, but I can’t help but wonder how much of it is proceeding at cross-purposes. There is an assumption at work here that as far as I can see has not been adequately addressed (I’ve read most of the comments, barring the last dozen or so). These artists employing comic book pages have little compunction about doing so because, to put it bluntly, they do not consider comics to be art; nor do they consider comic book illustrators to be artists. To these artists, comic book pages, SF book cover illustrations, etc, are cultural artifacts, no more and no less. This is the only way to make sense of their appalling indifference and lack of acknowledgement.
Moody could just as easily have painted a partly folded red and white checkerboard tablecloth from a roadside diner, and most of her artistic statement would still apply. On her part, with respect to comics, she is proceeding from ignorance (as far as I can tell): she invokes notions of nostalgia and childhood (but I seriously doubt that her childhood had comics in it), but in both instances her sense of how things are remains unaffected by how things really are (ie, comics are not going extinct as a medium, and comics are not the exclusive purview of children). So, in that sense, her work’s actually missed the mark. But either way, it simply doesn’t occur to such artists to actually acknowledge the original creators of whatever cultural artifact they are exploring.
It’s a lofty world up there among the conceptual arts, where copyists thrive and critics indulge in vague, meaningless hyperbole than passes for analysis: their definition of what constitutes art does not, alas, include ‘illustrators.’ One other thing about doing art based on cultural artifacts: it’s dissection, not vivisection. So, imagine the surprise when the seeming corpse on the table yelps in indignation! Of course, you can yelp all you want: if they eventually get irritated, they’ll just turn their scalpels elsewhere.
By the way, I’m all on the side of indignation. That said, you will only win when comic art is finally acknowledged as a true art-form. At least by that point, artists will have to use attribution, and speak in terms of homage, and the blatant ripping-off that’s presently going on won’t be able to continue, because the idea of comic art as a cultural artifact will no longer stand.
Good luck.
For Shame. What unmitigated gall.
Steve Saffel
Agree completely, Scott. These might as well be photographs–they aren’t stylized, emotionally charged representations, and as such they aren’t even homages to the original illustrators. If they’re meant to be homages to the original characters and comics, then they come awfully close to trademark infringement.