Plagiarism is property of power, plagiarism is in museums, in institutions; Plagiarism is owned by the greatest gallery owners and collectors ... Plagiarism is introduced into the entire economic structure of the art world, and that is why talking about it is taboo for the vast majority of art theorists and practitioners ... Demonstrate so explicitly against him, and worse still against a specific case, is to put at risk the professional prestige, acquired within that social, cultural and economic structure, and consequently put at risk the livelihood itself ...

 

In plagiarism, in addition to undue appropriation, there is a destruction of the original work in terms of deconstruction, because if the person who practices it is more famous than the plagiarized, or even if it is not - cut the road - getting to institutions or large collections before the original author, which is more frequent than you think (it is only a matter of marketing), nothing can do the damaged, because the power will not accept it, since it discredits the work of his property and above all he despises and depreciates it ...

 

No one in this way will accept plagiarism: neither economic power nor those around it ... That is, what will have really occurred is a destruction of the original work, which will remain cornered forever.

 

For this reason, "it is of interest" to maintain a very open concept, very elastic, poorly defined and, above all, little determinant of what is considered plagiarism or not; otherwise, many collections would have to discard works for which they have disbursed a large amount of money, most likely advised by "experts" or "theorists" of art, to whom they will of course continue paying their minutes.

 

The aforementioned is manifested to such an extent that all the artist who has the audacity to claim plagiarism on any of his works, is vituperated by the artistic collective, as, among other cases, we could recently verify when the photographer BAURET sued Jeff Koons and to the Pompidou Center for a shameless copy of a photograph of him, which Koons exhibited in that center in the form of a sculpture.

 

Let's see who explains to him who, advised by a very expensive theoretician, paid 8 million dollars for a sculpture, which has to destroy it because at last, and against the collective of institutions, museums and collectors, one of the numerous lawsuits filed against he declared her plagiarism. Not to worry, also here he won the pressure of the "art world": he was compensated with 20,000 euros to the victim, while the plagiarist sold the sculpture at 8 million!

 

The artistic collective usually uses the groped sentence "you cannot put doors to the field" and on a recurring basis they use "appropriationism" and the limits of it as the basic concept of all their argument that always concludes by stating: "This is a very subject delicate… ”But deep down we all know that in appropriationism there is an explicit or implicit recognition of the work of the appropriate author; just the opposite of plagiarism, where what underlies is a true concealment, sometimes through shameless subterfuges, of misappropriation.

 

A few years ago I could see in a New York art gallery a video of an artist in which he recorded his own suicide; the artist assumed with his death the consequences of his work. Why does a plagiarist never assume the consequences of his crime? ... Among other reasons because the court of collectors, museums and art theorists who have taken it up, are the first harmed in their heritage or in their prestige, possibly carried by the Absolute ignorance of the facts. Such ignorance grants them a certain halo of innocence ... but their subsequent silence, or their rejection of those who claim their legitimate rights, betrays them.

 

Plagiarism is not really an isolated event, but it extends as if it were an epidemic; and this has its explanation in the very nature of the copy: something that is interesting in itself is copied, that is why it is copied. As a consequence, and especially if the plagiarist is an artist of "recognized prestige," another artist plagiarizes the plagiarist and so on in a pyramid form, eventually destroying the original work by "boredom in the concept," déjà vu. If at that time the original author claims plagiarism, he is vilified by an entire “great-pyramid” structure, and by the theorists, institutions and collections that at the time gave protection to such a succession of hoaxes.

 

There are also those that we could call "artists-plagiarism", paradigms of the same, which were not limited to copying one or several times from different sources under the subtle veil of "inspiration", but only once, the first, and after giving a convenient make-up they dedicated themselves to plagiarize that first undue appropriation without limit in time, copying themselves, plagiarizing the plagiarist for the rest of their lives. Sometimes, for example, in sculpture, the path is very easy, it is achieved by simply changing positions, or adding an object often stolen from other artists, the previous one already plagiarized.

 

I assume that it can be frankly difficult, having managed to place these previously wrapped works in pages and pages of laudable criticism, to assume such a crude reality: The work is a farce, the collectors have an investment that is worth nothing, theorists will not want to know about their tremendous mistake, and the artist does not deserve that name.

 

True, a beloved and admired art critic commented to me, that we all know artists who have repeated themselves to satiety; but nobody was plagiarized in origin, and it is a will of the markets and of the art world in general, to appreciate them or not based on this concept, because no one was deceived.

 

Contemporary art is a garden paid for plagiarism; With the introduction of the “interdisciplinary” and “multimedia” concepts that are positive in themselves and that undoubtedly open doors to creativity, there is also input to a thousand ways of copying, being able to extract the substance of a performance for example , of only one stolen image (let's not say when many images of it are stolen), not having the plagiarist but a little makeup to hide the body of the crime. Like the jewel thief who hides and sells them by adding a different crimp.

 

And we enter the more than sobados "limits of art": Artists, no matter how grandiose cheesy call themselves "creators", we are not above the law. Being an artist allows you, for example, in the context of a performance, to steal a wallet from a pedestrian and throw it into the river; but you have to assume the consequences of theft, being an artist does not exonerate you from it. And with more reason, if possible, you are not exonerated if the portfolio is stolen from another artist.

 

I think it is right if I say that this text does not make too many friends, because it is alarming to see to what extent the tentacles of the politically correct thing in the art world extend ... Quite contrary to what they claim to pretend, those tentacles strangle art.