Is Damien Hirst a “plagiarist”? And what does that even mean?

The Guardian reports that Damien Hirst has been accused of plagiarism. More specifically:

Charles Thomson, the artist and co-founder of the Stuckists, a group campaigning for traditional artistry, collated the number of plagiarism claims relating to Hirst’s work for the latest issue of the Jackdaw art magazine.

He came up with 15 examples, with eight said to be new instances of plagiarism. The tally includes the medicine cabinets that Hirst first displayed in 1989, and its development in 1992 – a room-size installation called Pharmacy.

“Joseph Cornell displayed a cabinet with bottles on shelves called Pharmacy in 1943,” said Thomson. Nor were Hirst’s spin paintings or his installation of a ball on a jet of air original, he said, noting that both were done in the 1960s.

“Hirst puts himself forward as a great artist, but a lot of his work exists only because other artists have come up with original ideas which he has stolen,” said Thomson. “Hirst is a plagiarist in a way that would be totally unacceptable in science or literature.” (hyperlinks added.)

Here we go again. First of all, plagiarism is a loaded word that means nothing in the way that Thomson uses it except that he thinks that Hirst is a bad artist. There is no legal claim for plagiarism. There is for copyright infringement, though I can’t imagine that whoever owns the copyright to Cornell’s work would prevail on a claim against Hirst for infringement of the copyright in Pharmacy. You can’t copyright an idea.

Having not seen the works that Hirst supposedly “plagiarized,” I can’t say with any degree of confidence whether the other examples brought up in the Guardian article constitute infringment:

Aggrieved artists include John LeKay, a Briton who says he first thought of nailing a lamb’s carcass to wood like a cross in 1987, only to see it reproduced by Hirst. Lekay previously claimed in 2007 that he had been producing jewel-encrusted skulls since 1993, before Hirst did so. Lori Precious, an American, says she first arranged butterfly wings into patterns to suggest stained-glass windows in 1994, years before Hirst.

It is interesting, I think, that neither LeKay nor Precious intends to sue.“LeKay has become more interested in Buddhism than material wealth, so he does not plan to seek compensation.” (One could wish the owners of the copyrights in John Cage’s work were more attuned to the implications of Buddhism for a claim grounded in appropriation.) Precious is “[w]ithout the funds to pursue legal action.” She does note that, although the patterns in her work and Hirst’s are not identical,”[i]t’s the same material (butterfly wings) and the same idea (recreations of stained-glass windows).”

Perhaps Jackdaw ought to be more attuned to the importance of consistency. Laura Gascoigne, in a Jackdaw column entitled “Whose Art is it Anyway?“, argues that in contemporary art copying by fellow artists is a non-issue grounded in outdated notions of what originality is:

The insistence on the uniqueness of an artist’s imagery is a pathetic fallacy of the Romantic era which, like DACs, has only ever enriched already rich artists. Work by unknown artists has no rarity value. But the fallacy does, it’s true, provide artistic nobodies with the chance to rake back a quid or two from the big names.

In contemporary art, copying by fellow artists is a non-issue – the real issue is corporate theft of artistic capital. Gillian Wearing was quite right to complain that the use of her signs idea in ads for Volkswagen and Levi Jeans ìstops me doing my work because people think I’m working for an advertising agencyî, as was Andy Goldsworthy to prosecute Habitat for stealing his snowball idea to advertise chairs. Conceptual art is particularly vulnerable to this sort of abuse, as ideas in themselves cannot be copyrighted. Of course there’s an argument for saying that once an idea or an image is out in the world it belongs to everyone; but what belongs to everyone should then be protected from commercial hijack. The corruption of artistic meaning by advertisers is as repugnant as the appropriation of common language by corporations. Who gave Starbucks the right to trademark the phrase ‘Shared Planet’?

What is clear is that Jackdaw’s aim is to slag Hirst. In fact, that appears to be a central aim of the magazine, which on its homepage quotes Celia Walden from the Daily Telegraph:

[Jackdaw] is cultural samizdat, packed with earthy jokes and scandals that are ignored elsewhere in the interests of keeping folk such as the Margate Express (Tracey Emin) or Dick Flasher (Damien Hirst) sweet.