Public Art, Plagiarism & Vernacular

Plagiarism was the topic on C-SPAN's BOOK-TV, March 31, 2007, rebroadcast a panel discussion held at the 2007 Chicago Humanities Festival. The old simple idea of claiming someone else's work as your own is not so simple anymore. Federal Judge Richard Posner laid out some legal theory about plagiarism in the age of growing copyright powers. (Ironically while stealing his book title, 'The Little Book of Plagiarism', from the uncopyrighted 2003 manuscript by Marie Stinson of Leeds Metropolitan University)

Writer Jonathan Lethem saw the 20th century as the age of appropriation and collage, which followed a history of mankind, where starting with the works of other artists was the norm. (Read his excellent Harper's Magazine essay.) To Professor Francoise Meltzer "Everything is cumulative. The originality myth has come to a close." as reprinted by the Chicago Reader.

Originality as the ultimate artistic goal may be over as per Dr. Meltzer, but originality will always have a significant place in a culture that celebrates the uniqueness of individuals and freedom of action. An old term - vernacular - needs to be added to complement originality and, its brother, craftsmanship.

The Public Art field ignores conscious and unconscious plagiarism (not deception, but plagiarism in the positive "open source" use as described by Lethem). It is too dangerous to touch. But after sitting through 200 visual applications for a public art project, repetition and similarity dominate the brain. Whether the repetition is in glistening stainless steel "abstraction", smiling bronze children on a bench, or rivers of terrazzo in giant lobbies, the concept of originality SHOULD start to fade. Instead the unfortunate artists in the repetitive pools drift into a blur and the "unique" artists jump forward.

Public art administrators don't want to discuss this because it strikes at the conflict of audiences. Every public art administrator, curator and advocate wants unique works that verify the artistic credibility of the program to art institutions. Every civic leader wants public art like other places, only different. The supportive general public appreciates public art that looks like excellent art from all qualities of museums, galleries and, most important, art fairs. A transition of desire exists from originality to unidentified plagiarism.

Avoiding the WORLDWIDE repetition of artwork concepts and productions fails to secure an intellectual position that could expand the impact and implementation of artistic influence on the public realm. (It also discriminates against the talented artists who are without the desire to conceptually separate their work from the pack.) In architecture, fashion and product design, the appropriate ideas of the moment move quickly (and literally) across the landscape. Stuck only with originality, public art cannot move the built environment.

Adding an updated concept of the vernacular could expand the foundation of public art. Remove the folk or traditional attribute of the definition of vernacular. It becomes a repetitive method of making within a specific industry and sometimes modified for local places. The vernacular becomes as much a mental repetition as a physical one.

With originality and craftsmanship, vernacular makes legitimate the comparison to similar thoughts and objects both historic and contemporary. Repeating some attributes would become the best choice. A community could want "more of that" and still find ways for "more of that" to be invigorating artistically.

Vernacular has a powerful concept of "of a place". Freed from only originality, public artworks can merge with the location and adapt to the changes during the future. This additional definition of the vernacular was my intention regards to the work of Morris Lapidus on Miami Beach's Lincoln Road. The work was part of the vernacular global thinking AND is now part of Miami Beach.

Ries Niemi wrote in a letter to Aesthetic Grounds that Lapidus saw these follies as pure original invention. Niemi is probably right given the time period in the 1960s, but I was interested in what happened to the artworks. The concrete canopies are now part of the vernacular of the 1960s and the contemporary streetscape due to the respect of other artists and designers in the 1990s. Lapidus's work is original, well crafted AND vernacular.