Appropriation can be original, but sometimes it can be theft too. :)

In an installation entitled Whose Coat is that Jacket You’re Wearing?, British artist Mike Ballard fills a store — doubling here as an art gallery with expensive brand name leather jackets, parkas, sport coats and their contents. As my long-time friend Matthew Rose reports, Ballard stole all the coats and is not only capitalizing on his years as a thief to make it as an artist — he’s also welcoming the owners to come reclaim their goods:

Ballard says he lifted the jackets in a decade-long revenge binge, nicking them from pubs, and once back in his studio, emptied the pockets, cataloged the contents, scribbled poetic notes about each item and never told a soul. The artist’s kleptomania, inspired by the theft of his own prized blue Diesel 55 jacket when he moved to London from North Wales, came to an end in 2009 when he sought therapeutic help. . . .

Since 1999 [Ballard has] walked out of crowded pubs with more than 200 jackets by simply putting them on – his own jacket on top – and sailing out the door. Cheers, folks!

And now, a week before the annual London art orgy – the Frieze Art Fair – Mike Ballard lifts the veil on his secret store of stolen jackets, asking the world to come and get them, to please forgive him, and at the same time lift his star high above the door as he exits through the cloak room, a nod to fellow Brit guerrilla street artist Banksy. The installation in the abandoned Walker’s Tailor shop near the Great Portland Street tube station is a wall-to-wall closet: The jackets hang from the ceiling like sides of beef, tagged, dated and numbered, ready for pick up.

The cocoon of cotton, wool, leather and nylon is impressive in this tiny store. You can’t stand up without getting lost in the stink of beery bars, smoke and body odor which is overwhelming. (The artist is considering spraying Febreze around to deodorize the show, but remains undecided.) He hasn’t worn any of these jackets since he stole them, nor has he smoked any of the hash or spent the cash (about 1000 pounds) he’s found in the pockets; nor has even thought about selling off the diamond ring he discovered. Instead, Mike Ballard turned into an archivist of sorts, cataloging everything down to the loose rolling papers and 2 penny coins, photographing them, and scribbling a bit of prose and poetry as well as the relevant dates and locations of each theft. The texts are printed on tags hanging from the sleeves, along with the cross-referencing numbers which, when flashed against the petitioner’s claim, will prove if in fact this is their stolen jacket.

Artists learn to cobble together successful careers.

QuestionCopyright.org describes an emerging new paradigm for artists in The Cobbler: A New Career Model for Artists and Entertainers:

“Filmmakers, musicians, and writers now have the opportunity to work in a more stable, less risky way — with an economic model like a corner shoe cobbler, with a skill and a loyal clientele. While it may not have the glamour of red carpets and stadium shows, it can be a life in which one’s vocation is sustainable, at a level that pays a living wage and allows one to be one’s own boss. One trades a small chance of making a lot of money quickly for a greatly improved chance of making some money steadily. For many artists, that’s a good trade-off.”

In short, artists are using the new means of production and distribution to control the creation, marketing, and sale of their work. It’s the inevitable outcome of what I described last January at Critical Mass regarding the future of books — the loss by the publishing, recording, and entertainment industries of control over the means of production and distribution of their products. As I wrote then, “[t]he entire publishing industry as we’ve known it is a walking corpse. You can almost imagine it as a zombie — composed of parts of Sarah Palin, Oprah, Dan Brown, and Tiger Woods — lumbering down Manhattan’s avenues.”

This new paradigm is no hypothetical. My sister, Amy Friedman, has written over 1000 stories over the past 20 years for Universal Press Syndicate (UPS) under the title Tell Me a Story. Since UPS was doing nothing to further develop the content, Amy managed to persuade them to sign back over to her the copyright for a handful of the stories. She, herself, put together musicians, actors, and recording engineers to produce three CD compilations of the stories. The first is 14th on Amazon’s list of audio books today. The third won a 2010 Audie Award, the equivalent of an Oscar in the world of audio books and spoken word entertainment. The second is pretty great too.

Amy is not alone. Matthew Rose is a dear friend, an artist who lives in Paris, and the inspiration that, through the resources of the online world has produced A Book About Death, a phenomenal exhibition that is ever evolving and ever-appearing in new incarnations in the physical world,

I could go on among just my acquaintances. The long and the short of it is this: don’t wait for the publisher, the recording company, the agent, the gallery, the production company.