Woops. . . Busted!
Samantha Beeston is a textiles designer from the UK who recently won a cash prize for a bunch of work it turned out was just a little too close to the work by another Illustrator, Lauren Nassef. The post was on You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, but the better images to compare the work are on the blog Books By Its Cover. The original artist seems to be fairly upset about it all, and rightfully so.
I was discussing it with a very local textiles designer and she reckons that a number of her classmates and even some of the local designers she’d visited were doing similar things. In her class they were told that as long as they changed 20% of the design, all’s well. That seemed unbelievable, especially if you applied that rule to photography. Another website I found stated that the general rule of thumb was a 30% alteration to the design made it original. I’m going to start cropping Ansel’s prints by 30%.
In the above examples it is pretty obvious that Beeston felt that adding many individual elements of Nassef’s illustrations she was creating a new work of her own. There is a pretty rich history of that sort of thing, Duchamp, his urinal and the Mona Lisa and that lady who inspires all the reappropriation of photographs debates in photography school (who’s name i can’t remember). The difference between those pieces and what Beeston did, is I guess that she was trying to pass copied Design work off as Design work. Duchamp used a print, a urinal and a pen to create his mixed media art. Even the photography example used non-artistic, found photographs in her mixed media and photographic projects. As in most artistic endeavours it is the intended purpose that is most important and Beeston’s intent for the designs were far too similar to the original designer’s intent.
Design and illustration have a strong connection to commercial art and thus infer certain rights as intellectual property as corporations attempt to protect their identities. Our society acknowledges the inherent worth of ideas as a result. I suppose this is also why Shepherd Fairey and the Obama image are so controversial, the AP owned that image and the look that Obama had on his face, and when Fairey appropriated the image for his illustrations, the AP felt it was inappropriately missing out on the income it is due. The differences between the Obama/Fairey situation and the designers is that the media are not the same. The photograph is a reflection of nature, of the environment, and external objects. Beeston took something that only existed in the original artists mind, was born of her imagination and came to life by her hand and much more importantly, by society’s standards, both target a similar market.
I think the moral of the story is, don’t steal, you’re going to lose more on legal fees than you’ll ever make on un-original work. Not to mention that there’s just too much inspiration in the world to both copying someone else’s vision.