I am angry! Hear me roar!

Gah! I am so annoyed!

I just saw this kickass post over at Sunbelt, and it reminds me of one of the reasons I don't work in the arts world anymore:

It's full of losers.

Sure enough, some guy (or woman, I'm so angry I don't even care! Take that, hippies!) has complained because, oh no, Google used a Joan Miro picture on their Google search page thingy. Cue angry fool from some group "representing" the artist's rights (more accurately, the artist's likely-not-as-talented relatives who want all the cash) kicking off and demanding the images be removed.

WHAT A CROCK!

"It's a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,'' Feder said.

Oh wow, there's a new one!

Let's look at this for a moment - that "distortion" combined a whole bunch of different works into one cohesive image.

Newsflash Brainiac, that ain't ripping off, it's called a transcription.

As I said in the Sunbelt blog comments, I have an art degree myself, and one of the first things you do on an art degree is start making transcriptions (ie nice arty word for making ripped-off "inspired by" copies of OTHER PEOPLE'S ART).

Nobody cares, certainly not the artist, because it has been an accepted part of artistic development and learning the ropes since the dawn of time, and really came to the fore during the middle and late periods of the Renaissance. Miro himself would have been subject to the same artistic grounding. Unless the Miro people want to start trailing round all the art schools where similarly "derivative" works can be found. In fact, they'd best call for all the Art courses on the planet to change the way they work, or face the wrath of their legal people. Bloody students.

And wait a minute, shouldn't the estate of Matisse go and kick up a stink with the Miro people? How about Picabia? The Surrealists? They could all lay claim to being "ripped off" in some way by Miro, but of course they won't, because it's stupid. In art, you'll always find someone who ripped off somebody else. It's how it works, for God's sake. It's just that our definition of ripped off is not the same as the guys in the suits.

Quick, someone better dig up Michelangelo and tell him to burn all the work he did in his twenties!

In fact, you better go wipe about about 95% of Picasso's work while you're at it, because it's all ripped from other sources, baby! Like the man himself said, "If there is something to steal, I steal it!"

Yeah, take that, stupid idiots in suits who know nothing about the thing that they are talking about with the dancing and the singing and the legal jibber-jabber! Have another Picasso atom-bomb on me:

"A bad artist imitates, a good artist steals!"

Bam, right in the pipe!

The only people worried about artistic copyright and related issues are the vultures that circle round them, the dealers, the brokers, the merchants and the flunkies from the "we will help you!!" groups like that one. I met enough of these clowns to last me a lifetime, and I wish them nothing but misery and jinxed family members, a werewolf curse will do for starters. All of the above have conspired to turn art schools into a crying joke, where the most important thing is not to produce something halfway decent as a work of art, but to make sure your health and safety forms are signed so they don't get sued if you trip over in a corridor.

It's the same attitude reponsible for people spending more time reading the little card next to the painting than looking at the image itself, and telling art students that looking at a third-rate, watered down reproduction in a book is as good as seeing the real thing in a gallery.

In reality, most practicing artists out there in the real world are more concerned about where their next paycheck is coming from, then whether Google "stole" their image. Hell, they can have some of mine for free!

Joan Miro has the luxury of not having to worry about this anymore, because he is already a) filthy rich and b) dead.

Rest assured that most artists - especially the good ones - were not the pretentious, idiotic fawning characters that the groups springing up around them (the money men) would have you believe. Give me a healthy sense of disrespect, give me a line saying the "best thing in art galleries are the windows" (bonus point for guessing who said it), give me tales of a famous painter trying to paint one of his masterpieces with a paintbrush tied to his wang, throw me the Monet guy who reportedly had his cataracts taken out, looked at his late paintings and said, "What the Hell is this sh*t!", pass me that famous pencil drawing by a famous artist who thought it'd be a laugh to draw his similarly famous artist friend with his wiener hanging out of his pants, lash me tales of Picasso terrorising the Nazi scum during the war with his scary humour and CRAZY EYEBALLS and give me transcriptions, baby!

Some of the most famous pieces of art ever produced were - shock, horror, transcriptions. Treat this as an art project and go find out which ones.

And oh no, do I hear the ghosts of Beethoven, Mozart and a whole bunch of other dead composers kicking the door down in blind, pumping rage? Yeah, watch it, Arts Trust! Old dead composers liked breaking it down in a transcription sound, too! Look out, Bela Bartok is coming at you from behind with an axe!

Seriously, the arts game winds me up and makes me want to smash things. I now need to go into the garden and chop some wood, kick some stuff and burn some old paintings. I expect I'll have calmed down in about, oh, six months or so.

Picasso, no! Put those films down!

/ Edit - I was so annoyed by this, I emailed the Feder guy with a nice summary of the above. I'll let you know if he gets back to me.