The Art of Appropriation is an essential artist for any artist or graphic designer to read.
From the article:
The way Vallen tells it, Shepard has based his 20-year art career solely around cashing in on the work of other people. Yet the images that Vallen uses to support this claim are almost all examples of Shepard’s street art from the formative stages of his career (1990s and early 2000s), and were sold only in editions of 100 or 200 at $20 or $25 a pop at the time. Considering that hundreds, maybe thousands of those same posters were pasted up on the street at Fairey’s personal expense, it’s certain the artist never saw a dime of profit from all that printing and in most cases probably failed to even recoup costs. Furthermore, none of Vallen’s reference points come from the art that Shepard has sold in recent years for substantial profit. It can’t be said whether Vallen tried but couldn’t find any clearly plagiarized imagery in that work, or simply didn’t bother to look, but his claims about cash cows simply do not add up, especially since Shepard didn’t have a single solo gallery show for the first 10 years of his career.
From the article:
The way Vallen tells it, Shepard has based his 20-year art career solely around cashing in on the work of other people. Yet the images that Vallen uses to support this claim are almost all examples of Shepard’s street art from the formative stages of his career (1990s and early 2000s), and were sold only in editions of 100 or 200 at $20 or $25 a pop at the time. Considering that hundreds, maybe thousands of those same posters were pasted up on the street at Fairey’s personal expense, it’s certain the artist never saw a dime of profit from all that printing and in most cases probably failed to even recoup costs. Furthermore, none of Vallen’s reference points come from the art that Shepard has sold in recent years for substantial profit. It can’t be said whether Vallen tried but couldn’t find any clearly plagiarized imagery in that work, or simply didn’t bother to look, but his claims about cash cows simply do not add up, especially since Shepard didn’t have a single solo gallery show for the first 10 years of his career.
Go here. Read this. Now.
That is all.
