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Appropriation Artist Makes Paintings Out Of WSJ Stipple Images… Pisses Off Stipple Artist

Culture

from the brewing-legal-battle? dept

Wed, Oct 14th 2009 11:48am -

If you’re sitting around waiting for the Shepard Fairey lawsuit to move forward, here’s another brewing situation to follow. As you probably know, the Wall Street Journal is famous for its “stipple” illustrations of various newsmakers — in fact, some people consider it to be quite an accomplishment in life to be memorialized in a WSJ stipple image. Appropriation artist Jose Maria Cano obviously recognizes this and has created a series of paintings called the Wall Street 100 — made up of large painted versions of the WSJ’s stipple images. There’s no effort, whatsoever, to disguise this. In fact, the painting even include snippets of text around the images:

The fact that the collection of images is called the Wall Street 100 might be another tipoff. And yet… the WSJ stipple artist who created the original Obama stipple that was used for the image above is pretty upset about all of this, and says that the Wall Street Journal legal team “is on top of this case.” If this actually turns into a lawsuit, there’s probably a much stronger copyright claim here than in the Shepard Fairey case, but again, I’m left wondering what good this would do. The complaint from the original artist, Noli Novak, isn’t about money (she doesn’t even own the rights to the images), but about Cano getting credit for her artwork — even though it’s pretty clear that Cano’s work was simply making paintings out of the WSJ images. Cano seems to be doing standard appropriation art, taking something from elsewhere and turning it into “artwork.” While you can understand why Novak might be offended, it’s difficult to see what sort of “loss” there is here that’s worth being concerned about. Why not just be happy that someone decided the little stipple drawings were worthy of being ripped from the newsprint and turned into serious art?

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Comments on “Appropriation Artist Makes Paintings Out Of WSJ Stipple Images… Pisses Off Stipple Artist”

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75 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

I have a feeling that this is exactly what Jose Maria Cano wanted. If he had painted a shocking image I imagine not many would care as shocking has been done to death in the fine art world.

The future of art will hold more lawsuits over what is and is not acceptable.

Although I wonder why Noli Novak doesn’t do a large stippled portrait of Michelle Obama and sell it?

tripe (user link) says:

perfect examples of lying thieving media to get their cut first

YOu faceless liars. YOu know SHE deserves a future cut of whatever that man gets premiere visage for that stealth. YOUR lethal addiction to dissing a artist alone… not just the female type…is a wanton plagurism that you pretense hath no bearing because it’s not your life of future profit portend that’s being tampered with.

The whole jackass lot of you ought to have your own life staved for a solid 22 years and then letter rip…see how THAT sets with you. ALL latins be LIARS, and you knew it before you utter two sentences with this false representation of a story gone beefasterr’d.

Dark Helmet (profile) says:

Re: Re: perfect examples of lying thieving media to get their cut first

Did you see the link to his site? Broken out as words instead of a URL it is: Family Had Head Now Abolished

While I’m far too frightened to travel to the site to find what the fuck THAT is about, I am IMMENSELY curious as to its meaning. Here’s a few possibilities I came up with:

1. The teenage boy of the family, sex-starved from being ugly, started a protest group called Head Now. His platform was that he wanted fellacio to be performed on him. The family abolished the group post-haste.

2. The entire family lives in Rwanda and is a member of the infamous opposition group there. They all had heads on their bodies until they were found by the Rwandan government. They left the much anticipated hearing that followed without heads.

3. A family of cannibals used to have human heads for dinner every night, but the local government since abolished the practice of eating human heads.

4. Tripe is retarded

Feel free to add your own…

Chronno S. Trigger (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2 perfect examples of lying thieving media to get their cut first

Joke: From the sounds of the word is sounds more like beef ass turd, so not delicious (maybe the end result of delicious).

Serious: From the context it seems like he was trying to say befustered (I have no idea if I got the spelling right) which is like FUBAR.

Dark Helmet (profile) says:

Re: Re: perfect examples of lying thieving media to get their cut first

“In the name of God somebody please tell what the hell “beefasterr’d” means!!!”

It’s a type of burger meat that is made from the slaughter of a specifically rapid moving cow. Because of the majical speed properties contained within the cow’s genetic code (apparently at sometime in the late 90’s Sephiroth went around to calving facilities and began just randomly casting haste on everything), the meat is processed by the digestive system at a nearly breakneck pace. Some taste-testing ranchers in east Chile have actually reported that they were shitting their pants before they even finished eating a single hamburger, that’s how fast it turns into turd.

Hence, beefasterr’d, or translated: beef fast turd

Cool, huh?

Anonymous Coward says:

The bottomless ego of Jose Maria Cano

As far as I’m concerned, when a newspaper is brought to market, and put on the shelf, it’s done and a finished product. But some people let ego get in the way. Some people see it complete, while others take a different perspective and may see it as incomplete, and add a little here or there for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. It was put on a newsstand or shelf and sold. Done. Thank you. Good Bye.

If I buy a bag of flour, and decide to make cookies, the flour company doesn’t come to sue me. How is this any different? I paid for it. Your work is done. Let it go and get your butt back to making more for tomorrow’s story.

1karbuni2 (profile) says:

Re: The bottomless ego of Jose Maria Cano

f I buy a bag of flour, and decide to make cookies, the flour company doesn’t come to sue me. How is this any different?
You made cookies, not a bag of flour. If you take the flour, go out and say you,re the flour maker you made the flour, you re lying and committing fraud.
The photography rights were attained by the wsj with permission from wsj. Cano
never even tried to get permission. He uses the label “apppropriation” as his “artistic license” to charge 36,000 pounds for his “fine art”.
The point made that the illustator has no right to demand $$$ for damages is true, she knows as a hired illustrator, she has no rights to her work published by wsj. So her motive of money by R. Miles is stupid!
when one looks at the works of Ferry, Warhol , Koons, et al you see the artists version and the original version. When i look at these pieces they look identical. Ones a copy.
If this isnt a case of copy right infringment, what is?

ReallyEvilCanine (profile) says:

Maybe because it's not "serious art"

All that Cano did was use an opaque projector to enlarge someone else’s work, without permission, without credit, without adding anything beyond bigness. It is not derivative in the sense that the Obama “Hope” icon is.

The actual artist has a name: Noli Novak. She has a blog. There are very few people (and no Photoshop filters) able to create these very old-fashioned stipple images.

Cano is as much of a thief as is any group of guys playing some pop song 40dB louder than the original and claiming themselves as the creators.

Shell says:

Re: Maybe because it's not "serious art"

I’m a stipple artist and as far as I can tell there is NO Photoshop/Painter brush that can replicate stippling. Not properly. The size of the inked dots, their placement and the white space between each one is entirely in the eye of the artist. Blowing up an original, small stippled drawing (and believe me, the detailed originals are probably small!) is lazy.

I’m not a great fan of “appropriation” art, but things could go very screwy quickly here. What’s to stop the trademark of a line width created by a nib? Can brush strokes be copyrighted?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Maybe because it's not "serious art"

“The size of the inked dots, their placement and the white space between each one is entirely in the eye of the artist.”

I love Photoshop, but I have to agree this is where a filter or quick tutorial would fail. I’ve seen tutorials that approximate the effect, but the regularity of it gives it away as a computer work. I COULD do it in Photoshop with my Wacom graphics tablet (pressure sensitive pen would allow for variance in dot sizes), but at that point I am still going to be drawing each and every dot and it would be just as much work as on paper/canvas (not to mention needing the necessary artistic eye).

Shell says:

Re: Re: Re: Maybe because it's not "serious art"

Stippling with a Wacom just ‘doesn’t feel right.’ Even on my Intuos. For years I used Staedtler rapidographs before their wonderful disposable, archival-quality liners hit the market. There’s something about the “feel” of the nib on bristol that can’t be replicated on a tablet. I don’t know if it’s the feel of the stylus on a plastic board or the sound.

DocMenach (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Maybe because it's not "serious art"

Stippling with a Wacom just ‘doesn’t feel right.’ Even on my Intuos. For years I used Staedtler rapidographs before their wonderful disposable, archival-quality liners hit the market. There’s something about the “feel” of the nib on bristol that can’t be replicated on a tablet. I don’t know if it’s the feel of the stylus on a plastic board or the sound.

Way to pass off your opinion as some sort of statement of fact. I know of many artists who love thier Wacom tablets. To them the nib on bristol “doesn’t feel right”.

Shell says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Maybe because it's not "serious art"

Uh…I thought it was pretty clear I was basing my opinion on my personal experience rather than fact. You must’ve brought your own issues to this discussion.

I use both traditional ink and bristol as well as CS3 and a Wacom. They are very different tools and neither is better than the other and it’s all up to the preference of the artist. For the record, I love my Wacom too; but when you’re stippling it’s an up-and-down motion like a sewing machine rather than strokes, hence the difference in how the nibs feel.

OG says:

Mike, to answer your last question, “Why not just be happy that someone decided the little stipple drawings were worthy of being ripped from the newsprint and turned into serious art?” the reason she’s upset is probably the “why didn’t I think of that” factor. I don’t know what kind of agreement Novak has with the WSJ. I imagine the paper owns the rights to the original stipple drawing. However, whether she could have painted over-sized versions of her works and actually sold them for a profit is another question. I wonder how much she gets paid for each drawing as compared to the price Cano has set for these paintings.

Drew (profile) says:

Enlargements?

Maybe I’m dense, inartistic, or didn’t RTFA, but it doesn’t look like the secondary artist added much content to the original, beyond making it bigger. If that’s the case, the WSJ may be justified.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I’m not, I don’t think the Shep Fairey precedent is germane. What kind of value is being added here?

DocMenach (profile) says:

Re: Enlargements?

Maybe I’m dense, inartistic, or didn’t RTFA, but it doesn’t look like the secondary artist added much content to the original, beyond making it bigger.

Well actually there are quite a few things that Cano contributed, beyond just making it big. Type of canvas, type of paint, framing, and presentation are all artistic inputs.

Egad says:

Read through all 200 comments on the stipple artist’s blog. She was asked repeatedly if she’d used a photo to create her illustration or credit the photographer, and she did not answer.

Many comments in her favor were, I thought, incredibly entitle-istic. The guy did not just ‘blow up’ a picture he found in the paper, he used those pictures as source material to make work by hand – just as she likely did to create her illustration.

But beyond that, she’s going after the wrong person. Why hasn’t she bitched to WSJ that they didn’t think to perhaps credit her?

Because they likely own her work done for hire.

She should be flattered and using to advantage the fact that another artist thought so much of her work to use it as a springboard for his own. Her work has been further immortalized. She should contact him, thank him. She might get mentioned then, since WSJ doesn’t seem compelled to do so.

Sheinen says:

I get her point, it’s gay that she’s not being personally credited, but she wasn’t anyway so she hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

The fact that cano has let people know he’s based his art work on the WSJ stipples is crediting the original artist! He hasn’t lied and said ‘I did this from scratch’ he’s said ‘I did this, from a WSJ picture, look at how good the WSJ pictures are!’

I’d be proud to have a reprisentation of my art in the White House!

1karbuni2 (profile) says:

Re: Re:

The artisti is upset that someone else is getting ALL the credit for a COPY of her art.
Only if she speaks out will the artist be able to have pride for her art being in the white house.
Re Ironic
All of us “heard” of her band because of YOU bringing it up, Cano has said nothing about the artist, he doesnt care about who the artist is at all!
Also, the title of Canos exhibition is “The Wall Street 100” but most of the personalities have little if anything to do with wall street, The appropriation (no pun intended) is all 100 personalities were portraited in the wall street JOURNAL. But why wasnt the exhibition rightly titled the Wall Street JOURNAL 100?

Anonymous Coward says:

2006 article about WSJ HedCuts here: http://bit.ly/348Tta

What’s really funny, sad, and frustrating about this is not just that Noli Novak doesn’t own the rights to the image or seem to understand plagiarism*, it’s that the images she makes, and that all the other WSJ staff illustrators have been making since 1979, are based on a 5 step process of tracing from a photograph. It’s called a HedCut. (WSJ used to have a tutorial online, but it has been removed: http://www.dowjones.com/DJCom/Uploads/headcuthowto.pdf).

*plagiarism implies an intention to pass something off as one’s own, which is almost exactly the opposite of appropriation. The appropriator’s intention is clear in this case – even to those unfamiliar with contemporary art –not just by the choice of such a well-known style, but also by the inclusion of newspaper text. The source image is obvious to most people with eyeballs, so to criticize the artist for failure to cite the source falls flat. Credit was given.

Phil says:

Ironic

@1karbuni2:
Yes, you heard about the band because I brought it up, but I found out about it because of what Cano did, which made me want to learn more about the artist. I’ve always thought the WSJ artwork was interesting, but I never took the time to actually look into what and who were behind it. I understand that you don’t like him taking credit for a copy, but Cano’s work appears to have been acknowledged as an appropriation of WSJ staff artists (of which Novak is only 1 of 6). Has there ever been a claim that that this art was Cano’s original likeness of Obama? If you are upset that Cano did not attach a credit to the images, is it not fair to observe that the WSJ, which prints these images every day, doesn’t attach any credit to Ms. Novak either.

Jaxkat says:

We contain multitudes

This has been the talk of the art town in Jacksonville recently, where Novak and her husband, who’s a self employed screen printer have a house and live part time. They also have have a condo in NYC and a house in Croatia so the Wall Street Journal must pay their staff illustrators pretty well in return for owning the rights to their work and not giving them an illo credit anywhere in the paper.

The hypocrisy of this woman’s complaint stinks to high heaven. The last couple of years she and her husband have been trying to make a name for themselves as street artists under the cool as shizzit name URBISMUS. All caps. Very important.

Hey look they have a blog too: http://www.urbismus.blogspot.com

These two have been illegally plastering buildings all over downtown Jacksonville with large photoshopped images snagged form a variety of photographs. Now I might not be the smarted tool in the shed, but judging by the range of subject matter and the style of the photos a lot of them look like they were originally professionally shot stock type images.

I guess that since Novak and her husband have been only pasting these up on properties that they don’t own but not trying to make a buck off them then there’s no need to credit the original photographers.

Oh, snap! I almost forgot. They have had gallery shows where they’ve put their work for up for sale.

Bzzzzzt next. Higher Moral Ground Fail.

edmond (profile) says:

Re: We contain multitudes

It’s very interesting what you are saying. I’ve checked the images of Noli Novak’s street art with her husband and they not only appropriate images of other people but they sign them URBISMUS in a very visible place.

I wonder what her hooligans in her blog would say if they get into know this.

I wonder what the people in Jacksonville would say if they get to know what Noli Novak is doing. She plastered their streets with other people images signed by her and now is accusing Cano (who is making a conceptual series based on the Wall Street Journal: http://www.josemariacano.com) of stealing her work in her blog (http://hedcuts.blogspot.com and http://www.urbanjacksonville.info/2008/01/28/interview…/).

Scott says:

Techdirt won't mind if we copy their articles

I am going to copy all of techdirt’s articles and put them on a new website called techdart.

While I can understand why techdirt might be offended, it’s difficult to see what sort of “loss” there would be. You should just be happy that I decided your work is worthy of being ripped from the web.

What’s that? Techdirt is upset? That’s weird. Didn’t you write that the artist should just be “happy” that he work of worthy of being ripped off.

Weird.

Dreckie says:

Novak plagiarizes Shepard Fairy!

How is this for a hoot?
Noli Novak and her husband George Cornwell have been selling work in Jacksonville Florida as “street artists” named URBISMUS. Here is a piece that they sold recently. 80% of this image is made up of direct tracings of Shepard Fairy’s Obey images. They are selling his work as their own: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shopbogda/2732832234/
I sure hope they got permission from Fairy and are giving him a cut of the money.

QDS (profile) says:

A painting of the Italian president Silvio Berlusconi by the Spanish artist Jose Maria Cano is for sale at Sotheby’s in London. The painting belongs to his series Wall Street 100 with portraits of prominent figures of the financial world. It is painted in encaustic on canvas and the estimate is 30.000 to 40.000 GBPounds. A painting of the same series and the same artist with the portrait of Queen Elisabeth II of England was sold in auction 2009 for 60.000 pounds and a portrait of Alan Greenspan in early this year for 67.000 pounds.

Jump2Lou says:

Those stipple hedcuts are completely traced

those stipple drawings are traced over a photograph so the photographer should be more ticked off about this than any of the staff illustrators. Those big paintings in wax are could arguably be more transformative than putting a sheet of tracing paper over a photograph and filling in the dots. Huffington post link with a video tutorial of how the wall street journal hedcuts are made is here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/08/wall-street-journal-hedcut_n_780481.html

Mentiroso says:

Novak stole photos for her "street art" she sells

Take a look at the image of smashed computer far right Urbismus label “street art” work she has for sale here

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaxscene/2567256691/sizes/o/in/set-72157605535708984/

Now look at where she got that image from

http://www.tineye.com/search/2bb352607855daa69786902d9ad735783983b765/?sort=size&order=desc

does she credit the original photographer or license image or does she feel too much work to track down photographer so she will just take and use. This appears to make her a thief first if she really thinks what Cano the fine artist did was stealing. I would like to know why she thinks what she does is accepting and what Cano does is not.

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