" ' " and i quote..." ' "

Photo: Michael Hale

There's a sliding scale of acceptability spanning our culture's citation-free landscape — from the high ground of meme and "general knowledge" to the muddy bog of rip-off and appropriation; from mimicry to theft.
     But what about forgery? It it the same, or the opposite? Plagiarists claim ownership; forgers disavow it. Their common ground, of course, is deception.

"Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Edison, Darwin, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. The commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorized by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything was a commercially successful take-off on the commonplace book in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality.
     Invention and innovation grow out of rich networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the preexisting."
— David Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"That may seem short to you, but according to modern estimates of the entropy in ordinary running English text [thanks to Fernando Pereira for information that led me to revised this post on April 26], if you graph the word positions in English text against the number of words that would be grammatically possible as the next word given the last few words of the text, although the numbers vacillate wildly, the average across them all tends to settle in at something approaching 100. If that's right, then at any arbitrary starting point in an arbitrary text, if text was being composed at random, the probability that you will find the next 14 words match some previously designated sequence of 14 words is very roughly in the region of 1 in 1028, i.e., 0.0000000000000000000000000001." — Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log
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“Plagiarism is passing off one’s work as your own, but that doesn’t necessarily make it copyright infringement,” Justin Hughes, the director of the intellectual property law program at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said. “In an infringement action, a person can use a ‘fair use’ defense. That is, that they didn’t use so many words as to be guilty of infringement.” — The Harvard Crimson
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i am what you think i am

On loan from the forger John Myatt, "Harlequin Disturbs Sleeping Fish,” is in the manner of Joan Miró. After almost a decade of forging paintings and a brief prison term, Myatt continues to produce and sell works in the style of other artists. The back of each work bears the inscription "Genuine Fake.” from: Antiques and the Arts Online

"In the first room there are some masterpieces by de Staël, Chagall and Giacometti – but they are really by John Myatt, one of the greatest forgers of the late 20th century. And as an example of changing fashions within the art market there is a ‘Balloon Girl’ stencil print in the style of Banksy, the contemporary graffiti artist.
    It raises so many questions. If John Myatt can paint as well as de Staël, Chagall and Giacometti, does that mean he is the greater artistic genius (because unlike them he is not trapped within a certain style)? Why should the price of a luminous painting crash just because the certificate of authenticity is shown to be worthless? (I know, because it’s a market, and we are paying for the connection with the artist and for the investment)." — Stephen Wang,  Bridges And Tangents
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Photo: Michael Hale

" [...] when [piano music connoisseur] Distler loaded [Joyce] Hatto’s CD of Liszt’s “Transcendental Studies” into his computer, he noticed something peculiar. The iTunes database recognised the disc as a recording by the Hungarian pianist, Laszlo Simon.
     Gramophone asked Andrew Rose, an audio expert, to investigate and by comparing the waveforms of the two recordings he could see instantly that ten out of 12 tracks were identical to Simon’s performances. Rose then discovered that Hatto’s version of the fifth Liszt study, “Feux Follets”, was indistinguishable from a recording by a Japanese pianist called Minoru Nojima. What is more, the performance had been speeded up, but digitally manipulated to remain at the same pitch. 'That rang alarm bells,' Rose told me. 'When you speed up recordings, you change the pitch--unless you have set out deliberately to mislead.' [...]

     "Do you experience King Lear, or Robert Stephens’or Paul Schofield’s Lear? It is a paradox that these masterpieces come mostly vividly to life bent through the prism of an almighty interpretative ego. And therein lies the trap. Although our knowledge of the performer enhances our aesthetic experience, it inevitably distorts our critical judgment. [...]"

     It turns out that some of the most widely acclaimed Hatto performances were lifted from several sources and spliced together by Mr Barrington-Coupe. An American collector and pianophile, Farhan Malik, has spent months deconstructing the forgeries. 'In some cases the speeding up really does improve a performance,” he tells me.' I will give you an example: the Chopin Godowsky "Fourth Etude." That’s Carlo Grante. It’s really much better than the original Carlo Grante. Carlo Grante has to slow down for the middle section because it’s more difficult. But Joyce Hatto doesn’t.' [...]
     The Hatto affair raises a number of intriguing aesthetic questions. If Hatto was considered 'one of the greatest pianists no-one has ever heard of' (as Richard Dyer said in the Boston Globe), does this mean that 66 largely-obscure pianists who provided her material deserve the same accolade? Or did the magic spell of these recordings vanish when Hatto was revealed as a fraud? And were Mr Barrington-Coupe’s doctored recordings actually an improvement on the original versions?"— Rod Williams, More Intelligent Life
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