1. if a book paraphrases one explicit historical or contemporary predecessor in title, style and/or content, this technique is what I would call a “greatest hit”

2. Maybe the belief that an appropriation is always a conscious strategic decision made by an author is just as naive as believing in an “original” author in the first place.

3. It appears to me, that the signature of the author, be it an artist, cineast or poet, seems to be the beginning of the system of lies, that all poets, all artists try to establish, to defend themselves, I do not know exactly against what.

4. Custom having once given the name of ” the ancients ” to our pre-Christian ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers.

5. It is nothing but literature!

6. there is as much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing, as there is in inventing.

7. For the messieurs art-critics i will add, that of course it requires a far bigger mastery to cut out an artwork out of the artistically unshaped nature, than to construct one out of arbitrary material after ones own artistic law.

8. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

9. Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century

10. Certain images, objects, sounds, texts or thoughts would lie within the area of what is appropriation, if they are somewhat more explicit, sometimes strategic, sometimes indulging in borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating… being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed, quoting, rewriting, reworking, refashioning… a re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel… pastiche, paraphrase, parody, forgery, homage, mimicry, travesty, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke.

11. Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it.

12. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite.

13. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original

14. The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

15.

16. The question is: what is seen now, but will never be seen again?

17. Détournement reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies.

18. No poet, no artist, of any art has his complete meaning alone.

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On December 11 2009 six one sentence statements originated by the “artist /author” for the purpose of this piece were mixed, in a container, with eighteen one sentence quotes taken from various other sources; each sentence was printed onto a separate piece of paper. Eighteen statements were drawn by “blind” selection and, in the exact order of their selection, join altogether to form the “statements on appropriation”, for the presentation at Stichting Perdu, Amsterdam.

In the following bibliography the sources (…) may be found although no specific statement is keyed to its actual author.

Roland Barthes,”The Death of the Author”, (1967)

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library “(1931), repr. In “Illuminations”, (ed.) Hannah Arendt (1968)

Walter Benjamin (1936), “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, Frankfurt/Main 1963, p.15 (transl.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm)

Marcel Broodthaers (interviewed by Freddy de Vree, 1971) repr. in “Broodthaers”, Koeln (1994), p. 93

Ulises Carrión , “The New Art of Making Books”, Kontexts no. 6-7, 1975 and repr. in Guy Schraenen: “We have won! Haven’t we?”, Amsterdam, (1992)

Giorgio de Chirico, repr. in “The New Five-Foot Shelf of Books”, Allen Ruppersberg, Ljubljana (2003)

Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” Paris, (1967), Paragraph 206, (transl. Ken Knabb http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/8.htm )

Guy Debord, Gil J Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement” in “Les Lèvres Nues #8″ (trans. by Ken Knabb “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (2006))

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), repr. in Frank Kermode (ed.) “Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot”, (1984) London:Faber, p.37

Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images in an interview with “The Economist”, London (2000)

Kenneth Goldsmith , “Being Boring”, in The Newpaper #2, London (2008), p.2,http://www.thenewpaper.co.uk

herakleitos, Ephesos (around 500 BC), quoted by Plato in “Cratylus” (fragment 41)

Julia Kristeva “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1969), repr. in Toril Moi, (ed.) “The Kristeva Reader”

Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), “Poésies”, London (1978), p.68

Daniel McClean and Karsten Schubert (ed), Dear Images: Art, Copyright, and Culture, (2002)

Allen Ruppersberg, “Fifty helpful hints on the Art of the Everyday” in “The Secret of Life and Death”, LA (1985), p.113

Kurt Schwitters, “i (ein Manifest)” repr. in ” Kurt Schwitters – Das Literarische Werk” (ed.) Friedhelm Lach Band 5, p. 120, Koeln (1973/1981)

Leo Steinberg, (1978) repr. in Schwartz, Hillel, Culture of the Copy, Zone Books, New York (1996)

Max Stirner, “Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum” (1844), Stuttgart (1972), S.16

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see also: Douglas Huebler, “Variable piece #20″, Bradford, Massachusetts 1970

If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs. Misunderstandings are really kind of an epidemic and acceptable. I think it’s about one thing, but someone else will say, ‘That song is kind of a rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “Repent, repent!” I think that’s great.

Why do I bring up Waits rejoicing in the fact someone might hear one of his songs as a “kind of rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “repent, repent!” Because the lawyer for Patrick Cariou believes that a work of art appropriating another work can only be interpreted to be sufficiently “transformative” of that earlier work if the appropriator expresses in words a transformative purpose. Richard Prince, in appropriating Patrick Cariou’s photographs for his own artistic purposes, said he had no real interest in the meaning behind Cariou’s work, and that he used it strictly as “raw material,” that it was “taking for the sake of taking.”

Cariou’s lawyer thinks that Prince’s inability to state an artistic purpose is fatal to his case. In his eyes, the law requires a 2-step process: “First the defendant has to say” he was engaged in a transformative use of the work he was appropriating. “Only then does the court go on to say, ‘Well let’s see if this is reasonably perceivable.’”

As I made clear yesterday, and as I think Tom Waits makes clear far more vividly, it seems absurd to limit the meaning of a work of art to whatever the artist might state it is. Nor is this particular controversial. The phrase “intentional fallacy” was coined in the title of an influential scholarly article (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946) claiming that artists’ intentions are neither available nor desirable as a standard for assessing art. As has been pointed out, “Intentionalists disagreed, arguing that any sense of the artist’s intention, however obscure, can be a useful resource in interpreting a work of art.”

But the point is, even “Intentionalists” acknowledge that judging, interpreting, and assessing art calls on attention to the art and all it evokes in the eyes of the viewer. Those judgments, interpretations, and assessments are never limited to what the artist wanted the viewer to see and think.

So Cariou’s lawyer is advancing nonsense when he suggests the court should be limited in that way. Nor is the precedent for court reliance in making fair use decisions on the expressed intent of the appropriating artist particularly compelling support for that nonsense. It is true that in Blanch v. Koons the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit relied on what Jeff Koons stated his purposes were in appropriating a photograph for use in one of his paintings. But there were no competing interpretations submitted to the court. As the court pointed out: “Koons asserts — and Blanch does not deny — that his purposes in using Blanch’s image are sharply different from Blanch’s goals in creating it.” Quite simply, the court was persuaded by Koons’ explanations. That the court was so persuaded does not mean, however, that the artist’s explanations are the only means by which the court could be persuaded.already stated their intent to parody. Nor, as Cariou’s lawyer contends, did a lower court find that 2 Live Crew’s re-working of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” depended on 2 Live Crew’s assertion their song was a “parody.” In fact, the Court found that 2 Live Crew’s words parodied Orbison’s and remanded the case so a lower court might determine (a) whether there had been any negative economic impact on sales of Orbison’s song in the potential “derivative market” of rap cover versions, and (b) whether the quantity of musical elements taken from Orbison’s song were more than necessary to 2 Live Crew’s purposes. Campbell, 510 U.S. at 590-91. After remand, the case settled, and there were no further court hearings.

But the struggles inherent in the transition from old and established ways of doing business are ongoing and will continue to be. Today’s example comes from the world of science. As the New York Times reports, “For centuries, [scientific] research [was]cdone in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large.  . . . Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ‘if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.’”

But Dr. Nielsen and others argue that science can happen much more quickly and accurately using the new technologies, and reality is catching up to their ideals (even as established institutional players such as universities and grant-makers still depend on the “traditional published paper” as their exclusive criterion of judgment):

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

But no one was there before John Oswald of Plunderphonics. A mere fraction of his career’s chronology demonstrates that he is perhaps the pioneer of the genre:

1973-75

With the sanction of William S. Burroughs, John Oswald cut up recordings of him reading his texts advocating cutting up methods, & consequently discovered an acoustic pallindrome, mediations between backwards & forwards, polysyllabic masking & phase imploding.

1975

Oswald melds a radio evangelist with alleged satanists Led Zepplin in the early rap track POWER. released in 1995 by Musicworks magazine.

1975-85

MYSTERY TAPES assembly & dissemination (by Mystery Tapes Etc.International), include many early plunderphonistic experiments.

1980

Oswald guest produces a one hour radio show for CFRO in Vancouver called Sounds Wrong which includes the first public issues of Dolly Parton & Rite of Spring transformations.

1982

Collusion, a British magazine publishes an article by Oswald, entitled “Revolutions & Mr Dolly Parton – a vortex of of androgeny”.

1985

An essay by John Oswald entitled “Plunderphonics, or, Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” was presented at the Wired Society conference in Toronto.

1988

The original Plunderphonics EP (never-for-sale, out-of-print) was for its time the most extreme example of sampling ever produced. Four well-known music personalities representing four musical genres & four notable epochs of recording history were presented in surprising ways, or, as the press release put it: warp drive.

1989

The Plunderphonic CD (never-for-sale, remaining stocks destroyed by Michael Jackson & CBS) has become an underground cult classic. The realistic cover photo of a nude Michael Jackson revealed as a white woman paralleled the musical transformations depicted on the disc. Other electroquoted artists included Bing Crosby, The Beatles, Glenn Gould, Public Enemy & (consequently) James Brown.

You can read a more complete biography of Oswald here.

Far more interesting is an extensive recorded interview with Oswald. One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is Oswald’s account of his experience with the overwhelming legal forces brought to bear in the name of copyright enforcement against his new compositions. In a series of events not unlike those experienced by Negativland in connection with their composition U2, every last CD Oswald retained of his recording was destroyed. Of course, he had already distributed some of those CDs and was unable to recover them. And we all know digital media metastasize beyond any capacity of corporate control. So, of course, as with Negativland’s U2, Oswald’s recording not only continues to exist; it is available (for free) for digital downloading.

For your listening pleasure, I include here one track from the album: Glenn Gould-Aria(mp3).