Copying = Plagiarism?I've known since the beginning of the year that this is not a question with a straight answer; it has about as much grey area as a film from the 1920's. The Venn diagram between copying and plagiarism looks more like one circle than two. What it comes down to is one's definition of copying, which can be anything from being inspired by something to creating a faithful replica. If your definition is the former, then if copying was plagiarism, just about anybody who has ever made anything ever would be a plagiarist. If it's the latter, then that still technically wouldn't be plagiarism unless you said the idea was yours. The definition of plagiarism, after all, is "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." Essentially, stealing with minimum modification to the original. I think that is where the line is drawn amid the fuzziness between copying and plagiarism: modification to the original. Reasons artist use observationAgain, this answer is rather similar to what it was at the beginning of the semester:
If there is some sort of deeper meaning here I'm missing it. What is the point of this class?You'll notice, apart from this one, all my answers have been essentially the same throughout the semester. That is because art class is not the only time I think about topics such as these. I can't say my opinions on complex subjects like plagiarism and the definition on art have changed much in the past few months, but I can nevertheless say that this class has had an impact on me. Because, tell you what, that class was full of people several times more skilled than me. Before I was in this class, I thought I drew some really good pictures, and now I know I only draw pretty good pictures. My jealousy fueled me to start carrying around sketchbooks and now my free time is spent drawing instead of doing twirly pencil tricks. Now I use art as a verb. I use art as a verb. What Even Is Art though?I've been known to have a radically inclusive definition of art (actually, I'm not known for that at all, this isn't the the sort of topic people talk to me about very often). My definition of art is "anything that is made that is not exclusively for utility." Humans have this rather unique trait of doing stuff for no logical reason (some of the more intelligent animals, like dolphins and elephants, have been known to do this, but not on the same scale). Our society has advanced to the point where not only do we not have to worry about supplying ourselves with necessities of survival, but we have to worry about oversupplying ourselves with those necessities. We do not spend the periods of time between eating and sleeping looking for means which we can eat and sleep, because we don't need to. What I think art is, is what we fill those periods of time with; either making art or taking part in it. Movies, drawing, dancing, reading, using the internet; these are all art (the internet being one of my favorite pieces). Things like martial arts, which took thousands of years to evolve from exercises based on animal movements and become an insanely complex assortment of systems with different philosophies, each giving you hundreds of ways to find a solution to a problem, are art. Not only are video games art, but some video game playthroughs can also be art. To hold our economies and lives together, we have professions, which are almost never entirely for utility, and are therefore art. Even the Wake County Public School System, which I spend a fair share of time complaining about, can be considered art (granted, a particularly underfunded piece of art), as it took a lot of people to make and plenty of its parts have no logical use. In some religious beliefs, a deity or deities created the universe as a work of art. Even Jackson Polluck paintings can be art. I don't know, maybe I'm stretching the word "art" beyond its reasonable definition. Anyway, it is this food for thought I shall close the semester with, because It is almost midnight and this accursed sea lion has been staring at me all day.
Please don't delete my entire post again Weebly
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The assignment for this one was to make something observational, so I decided to observe and paint my own painting, and then this happened. Meanwhile, my table-mates were trying to institute bottles of Liquid Paper as a the new unit of tablewide currency. The last week has been a blur, I haven't played any video games yet today, my house is out of ice cream, Weebly just deleted the last paragraph the last time I tried to post this and I have rewritten all of it, I still haven't watched the series finale of Avatar, and I have one more blog post to write. woohoo
One day I was looking at The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and I thought "Well, that's nice and all, but it hasn't got a big cat in it." And so I set out to remedy this problem. The second inspiration I had was from one of my own cats. You see, I have giant Lego model of the Tower Bridge in London for a mantelpiece in the living room of my house because it's so great. My cat also thinks it's great, and we all know cats show their admiration by attacking things. For instance, my cat really admires feet, and everything on my mother's desk, and plastic milk rings, and laser pointers, and the strings on my hoodie, and, of course, the Lego Tower Bridge. One day I caught her with a taxi in her mouth, rubble and detached bridge pylons in her wake, and thus my idea was born. The painting slowly progressed from being a river, then a river with a town, then a river with a town and a bridge, and then things started getting weird when people appeared on the bridge, running from seemingly nothing. And then I added a giant cat attacking the city and everything made perfect sense. I was planning something fancy and extravagant for my destruction project, but all those plans came crashing down one winter's day.
It was as close as it possibly could be to christmas at school (note the sock-monkey-santa-hat) in the picture, the day before winter break. I was celebrating the completion of my most brilliant work yet, a painting of a certain colossal feline attacking a certain capital of England during a certain industrial era, but I shan't say too much about that. Anyway, the end of the period approached and ms. Rossi, bread-hater extraordinaire, requested of me in a tone that implied that what she was about to say was in no way a request, but a demand, that I dispose of my beautiful bread windmill. I know not why she would want to rid the room of such a thing, besides of all the totally valid reasons which would drive somebody to rid the room of such a thing, one of which was that it was about to stay in school for about two weeks without any maintenance or supervision and who knows how many art thieves would try to break in and steal my masterpiece. I decided that instead of allowing my art to be grabbed up by the grimy hands of the black market, I should destroy the art that I had worked so hard to create. I set it upon the table, said my goodbyes, and then tore it apart with my bear hands. I assembled the mangled, segmented, pulverized corpse of my creation into a new creation. A memorial, of sorts, to the fun times this piece and I had had, with a smiley face at the heart of the pile. Then I threw everything into the trash and never saw it again. Though this story may have began and ended within five minutes, and the nature of the world is temporal and temporary, as I realized after abandoning the shards of my art in the trash and left the art room door one last time before christmas break, I may take some comfort in knowing that this story has been immortalized on this blog, like a distinctly digital Akkadian tablet that upon second thought is not so much like an ancient Akkadian tablet and more like a computer. So I was sick for a few days and when I came back I found that Allison's face had mutated into that of a hideous monster and that Brandon had turned into a jalepeño person. And here begins the legend of the hydra.
The assignment was to create a piece of art with the entire table collaborating, so everyone knew beforehand that this project's outcome would not have a coherent aspect of any kind. We expected it to be the kind of art that if it was found one thousand years in the future by archaeologists it would generate confusion about the way citizens of this era perceived the world. The archaeologists may have previously theorized that during the information age, knowledge, literacy and intelligence in general was prevalent in the developed world, but this mysterious piece of art would throw that theory into question. When I arrived at art class after my brief plague I saw that everybody had drawn characetures of each other in the form of disembodied heads. I watched as my peers held their own disembodied head (or embodied Jalapeño thing, as the case may be) and wondered what to do with them. To me, the solution was obvious; attach each head to the neck of a hydra. The overall consensus of the group was that it was an okay idea that they would probably go along with because no other ideas presented themselves. I drew the body of the hydra for a while but then Allison got upset because she is an expert of hydra anatomy and I was offending her by not drawing everything properly. After a brief squabble we compromised that I shall continue drawing and that she would be the consultant of all things hyrdanatomical. Shortly afterwards she drew a giraffe neck onto the hydra. This was followed by each contributor drawing their own neck; Ottoli's neck was a snake, which coupled with the disgusted expression on her cartoon's face formed the perfect Slytherin section of the hydra. Charlie's neck became a sort of doctor Suess style furry thing with an intermittent smiley face. Jacob's neck was a tower with arrows and Rapunzel dropping a cereal box or something. I feel like there is a story here that I'm not quite appreciating enough but I'll blame that on my phone's photo quality. Nathan's neck was actually drawn by Brandon (who does not have a neck of his own to fill in, poor lad) because Nathan was probably off frolicking in a meadow somewhere, but was not it the art room. And last but not least, my neck, naturally, was a pineapple. After Jacob finished coloring in the background we proclaimed our masterpiece complete. After some internal strife and a lot of procrastinating, our teamwork finally payed off. Good job, wonderpets! |
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January 2015
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