God save the Damien Hirst rip-off industry!
Artists launch orchestrated campaign to flout copyright of Britart 'bully'
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Independent Minds
www.redragtoabull.com
REFACE - Masterwork 2 by James Cauty
For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.8 - Ltd Edition Print
More pictures
It all began when the Turner Prize-winning multimillionaire artist Damien Hirst threatened to sue an entrepreneurial 16-year-old who used an image of his diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, to create a collage to sell on the internet.
Hirst reported the teenager, who styles himself Cartrain, to the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which ordered him to hand over his £200 profit to Hirst, as reported in The Independent last December. Now a collective of prominent artists is seeking revenge on the teenager's behalf.
Creators of the website redragtoabull.com, who include Jimmy Cauty, a former member of KLF, Jamie Reid, best known for designing the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" single cover, and artist Billy Childish, have produced a series of skull images which flouts copyright regulations and deliberately provokes one of the most powerful – and richest – artists alive.
Writing to The Independent, Cauty said: "Unlike Cartrain and his gallery, we are not intimidated by lawyers and if an injunction is issued, we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of speech." He suggested the concept of copyright, which was changing in the music industry, had some way to go before it was "abolished and replaced with something more flexible".
Reid, meanwhile, called Hirst a "hypocritical and greedy art bully", adding: "Hasn't he got enough?"
The limited edition images, sold under the title For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture, a pun on the title of Hirst's skull, are designed by Reid as a deliberate variation on The Sex Pistols' cover. There is also an image of a man whose face is superimposed with Hirst's skull reading a book entitled Copyright and Intellectual Property Law.
Another image pretends to have been created by Hirst's fellow YBAs, the Chapman Brothers. It bears a graffitied skull image and the words: "We Always Knew You were a C**t!" An exact copy of Cartrain's collage is also on sale. A representative of Hirst's company, Science, did not comment yesterday, but Jake Chapman good-naturedly said: "To be honest, after our persistent 'collaborations' with Goya, we're the last people on earth to claim the sanctity of authorship."
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Comments
cynical britain sucks...
After reading what Red Rag to a Bull was all about - and who was going to benefit from their sale - I was reminded of what's so good about Britain. Good luck gents. No cynicism here.
I thought everyone was on a bandwagon in hating this guy, I thought it was jealousy speaking, but the more I hear about him, the more I am convinced that he is simply a rich, spoillled little brat who, now he doesn't play fast brum-brums, is systematically ruining a very fragile industry. Reading about Hirst or reading Emin's column in the papers is enough to convince me that modern British "art" is a total sham.
I once saw him/ Emin being interviewed by Jon Snow for the news, Hirst was constantly just running away and hiding behind exhibits, peeking out and grinning like some idiot on LSD and making squeeking noises. Even snow was finding this hard to deal with and flatly mentioned the words "teenage child" if I remember right. There was one moment when Snow paused over a bike laid on its side and asked what it symbolised. Emin shot a look that seriously suggested, "I dunno, we're just at it. Damien was riding this bike around the studio after 2 bottles of wine, grinning like an idiot and he crashed and, "MIAO! WOOF!" It symbolises the transitory nature of the universe!" She just totally made it all up, it was a bike on its side, there was nothing deep about it and she plainly had to think quickly to make it appear deep, It really did look like someone had just crashed it whilst playing and then chucked a couple of cones around it to highlight it.
Please go back to playing brum-brums and stop ruining an entire industry comprised of genuinely talented people trying to make a living. I know that my respect for Brit-art could not get much lower.
That it sells for repulsive amounts of money indicates nothing of merit.Kylie Minogue also sells and she is also tat, which says more about the show offs of oligarchs and nouveau riche lack of taste, than it does about mine.
He gets an" idea" - . mostly swiped in a collage of this and that idea of others ,and now there is a complain HE is ripped off? Come on.Pull the other one.
http://artbutnobecause.wordpress.co
"We would like to point out however, that although this appeal was focused on the Hirst vs Cartrain episode, it was intended to be a creative excerise that mocked and exposed the idiocy an overbearing and thoughtless approach to copyright control that creates fear and censorship in the arts. It was and is not a critical crusade against Damien Hirst as an artist or the nature and degree of his success. Thanks to all of you who sent in artworks with more fevered opinions about this, but for the sake of clarity we will save them for another occasion."
Wonder what happened there then?
Damien Hack