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According to Tate Glossary, appropriation is "direct taking over into a work of art of a real object or even an existing work of art" (Tate). The practice of appropriating others' works can be traced back in history. Examples are abundant, and it's not surprising that such popular image as Raphael's Judgment of Paris (1515) was copied time and again throughout history. One of his colleagues Marcantonio Raimondi made an etching of the image, which was then copied by Marco Dente da Ravenna. Édouard Manet's famous Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe is known to have derived from a portion of Raimondi's etching. After Manet, there have been numerous parodies of the motif, including that by Pablo Picasso (Harvard).
Bottom right-hand corner of Marcantonio Raimondi's Judgment of Paris
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Pablo Picasso. Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe. 1961.
http://www.join2day.net/abc/P/picasso/picasso212.JPG
Avant-garde artists as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque incorporated objects like newspaper pages and wallpaper into their Cubist collage compositions (Tate). Then the Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp challenged the definition of art with his ready-mades and were followed by the Surrealists that made use of real objects like a telephone (e.g. Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone) (Tate). In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Pop artist like Andy Warhol also appropriated found images in their works. However, it was mainly with the American artists of the1980s that appropriation was used extensively and boldly. Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and an English artist Damien Hirst are among the most ardent practitioners of appropriation still thriving to this day. Appropriation art has many opponents that criticize its debatable lack of originality and integrity. In order to delve further into this issue of plagiarism, it is essential to understand how the copyright laws came about and what regulations are laid out by these laws as well as the differences between the various types of appropriation employed by some of these aforementioned artists, because the application of copyright laws differs depending on the kind of appropriation in question.
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Copyright Act of 1976 is probably the most significant for our purpose because it was only by this Act that artworks came under the protection of copyright law. It put down five exclusive rights for copyright holders: the right to reproduce (copy), the right to create derivative works, the right to sell, lease, or rent copies, the right to perform the work publicly, and the right to display the work publicly. 17 U.S.C. §106. The duration of copyright protection was extended to 50 years after the author's death. It was further extended to the author's life plus 70 years under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act.
Changes in the duration of copyright term
Fair use is one of the most important provisions made in the 1976 Act. According to Judge Pierre Leval, the copyright law represents "a recognition that creative intellectual activity is vital to the well-being of society. It is a pragmatic measure by which society confers monopoly-exploitation benefits for a limited duration on authors and artists (as it does for inventors), in order to obtain for itself the intellectual and practical enrichment that results from creative endeavors" (Leval). However, certain appropriation of existing images is permitted under the "fair use" doctrine. Copyright Act of 1976 provides that "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright"'
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