How a Science Fiction Book Cover Became a $5.7 Million Painting
Basically, 'artist' Glenn Brown has been taking famous science fiction book covers and repainting them in a large scale. The article says his duplication of Chris Foss' cover for Isaac Asimov's Stars Like Dust just sold at an auction for 5.7 MILLION dollars.The fine art collector crowd would never buy one of Chris Foss' paintings, but a copy?
The video about Glenn's work is especially odd.
I am curious what others think about this. Ron Miller. local illustrator Tom Miller's brother has some cogent points in the comments section.
I suppose the real issue is not that someone did this but that some art collector paid that much for it rather than say maybe buying some actual originals by the artists he duplicated. If someone copies his painting copying Foss, will he go after that artist like Koons went after people selling balloon dogs?
At first blush and after seeing a couple of the pieces & reading one or two posts defending the "practice" this makes me sad and angry...I'll check out the other posts later. Incredible but not surprising. If only more folks would call BS on this crap. Thx Christina!
ReplyDeleteThe world of art as an investment is baffling and self inflating.
ReplyDeleteyep...I enjoy Sundays NYT Art & Leisure section but it's often accompanied by a good measure of eye-rolling on my part...just not sophisticated enough I guess.
ReplyDeleteWell I can tell you that this really pisses me off!!
ReplyDeleteFrom an airbrush artists point of view, being that it is the art form that most people consider us the "Bottom Feeders' of the art field(and I'm OK with that...lol) What makes me so mad about this is that each day is a constant battle both with customers at our shop as well as an internal struggle about the whole copyright issue....Do I paint a Mickey mouse shirt for this sweet little girl in a wheel chair or not?...yet we always say no.
We turn numerous people away that want a cartoon character or sports logo etc...(all things that are "copyrighted". We fight this battle because the general public is used to seeing airbrush artists in "Tourist trap" areas like Beach towns, Gatlingburg and even flea markets etc... who display nothing but copyrighted stuff. Then they question why we won't do it. I am constantly lecturing other artists on other forums about creating Original art and stop doing the copyrighted stuff.
So by this standard I should be able to paint Micky Mouse or Superman or the Bengals logo on a T-shirt...as long as I Blow it up real big and rearrange it a little on a T-shirt....lol
5.7 million dollars is probably more money than EVERY airbrush artist COMBINED has ever made by doing copyrighted stuff....but God help me if I hang a Mickey Mouse in my front window today for $20.00...lol