The Wynne Prize of $25000 has been won by a work that is a copy of an old painting.

What do you guys think about this?
Is the $25,000 prize excessive for what appears to be a “copy”?
Did the painting meet the brief?
Do the other entrants have the right to be angry at the win?
Will this open up the doors to future “copies” being entered in to art comps?

I’m sure this win by the artist poses many more questions – I’d love to hear them……and any answers!

I think the comment by one of the trustees about it raising interesting issues about originality is very comical, clearly a bit of post rationalisation on her part as it is obvious none of the trustees realised. The fact that it might have been intended to raise these interesting issues seems slightly beside the point when there is a strong likelehood it was chosen simply because it was considered a high quality landscape painting. It does also seem to break the rules about it having to be an australian landscape so in that regard I do feel sorry for the other artists and I think the gallery has made a mistake because I really don’t think they were aware of any alternative concept beyond the representation of a landscape.

That aside it probably does raise some interesting questions about originality. If you were to be technical in a legal sense, i may be wrong, but surely it is a derivative work and therefore a copy/ forgery/copyright infringement or whatever else you want to call it. So if we assume that the artists intention goes beyond a simple landscape painting does this somehow absolve him of any accusations of plagerism? I am not sure about this and struggle to see anything beyond mockery of art competitions and the notion that artwork can somehow be judged against each other when clearly art goes beyond simple technique. I am not sure whether this makes him a very clever artist, a very profitable artist or both.

Interesting discussion Kafka.

Hmmm…it raises a lot of questions about just how much juries know about art that they did not spot the similarities…that being said if it his metier to take older works and do something different with them, in order to make some sort of comment, as was mentioned in the piece, then I don’t see why he should not get the prize…they must have considered it to be well painted…in the tradition of Chinese painting, you were expected to copy the masters down to their signatures…one wonders why they circumvented their own rules, since it was not a painting of the Australian landscape..that indeed must rankle with the others…
I don’t think it infringes any copyright, since he altered it considerably…it now comes under “fair use”…in any case the copyright would have long expired as the painting is over 100 years old…whether he is clever or not I can’t tell, but he is certainly setting the art world by it’s ears, and he will sell lots more that way…nothing in life is fair and the art world has more than it’s share of that…that’s just the way it is…

Appropriation is accepted in current art-making, and hoaxes have a history in the australian art world. Personally I think he’s pulled off a great hoax on the judges but at the expense of the other artists and of course the genre of ‘Australian landscape’. Maybe the judges realised – they like a good scandal to go along with these prizes, good for publicity. The fact that he won the Archibald as well makes it a bit much.

I’m thinking of entering next year, I’m going to find myself a beautiful landscape by Monet and put a kangaroo in it. Then maybe I’ll get the double by entering the Archibald with a painting of the Mona Lisa.

ART THEORY AND WHY YOU ARE RIGHT by Paul D. Robertson

Deconstructing Post-Modernism by Carson C.T. Collins

the thing i find most interesting is that he simultaneously won the Archibald prize

mx

You’ve made some great points Kafka….Maybe we need to see it in real life to be able to judge…

I looked at it blown up through Google Chrome (twice as big as this)…you get a much better impression..

This is what was said about him…

“Sam Leach is known for his exquisitely rendered paintings that reference the techniques and motifs of 17th Dutch painting. Very often – as in this case – the work is small with labour-intensive detailing to encourage an intimate and individual encounter with the work. The painting is coated in resin, which forms reflective and protective barrier that isolates it from the world around it. At the same time, the reflection draws the viewer into the picture.

‘This work draws on 17th Dutch landscape paintings and the tradition of Baroque landscape painting, especially the way they created very idealised constructed landscapes,’ says Leach.

‘Historically, those paintings went on to inspire landscape gardeners to try to realise those idealised forms. I looked at that and thought about expanding that task and trying to arrange the entire universe with its stars and galaxies into neat geometric patterns. So I have extended the idea of constructing an idealised world into constructing an idealised universe.’

Leach is also the winner of this year’s Archibald prize. It is only the third time that an artist has won both the Archibald and the Wynne prizes in the same year, the first being William Dobell in 1948, while Brett Whitely won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in 1978.

Born in Adelaide in 1973 and based in Melbourne, Leach has a Bachelor of Arts, Honours (Painting) and a Master of Art (Fine Arts) from RMIT University. He won the Metro5 Art Award and the Fletcher Jones Prize in 2006 and the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award in 2007. He has had ten solo shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and has been represented in various group shows".

@Janis & Zefira: all one has to do is visit the forum at Saatchi’s web site, and compare it to this one, in order to know what that crowd is all about.

Why I am a Remodernist

I am going to throw a spanner in the works….here are two quotes from two very famous people, one a famous artist and the other a very famous poet….

“Good artists copy, great artists steal:..Picasso..

“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

Was Sam Leach a great artist or great “poet” or only just a good one?

Ok, Leach is a smart fellow and knows and plays the game well and has talent (like a Xerox machine). What I have a hard time with is all the bullcrap said by trustees and Leach himself after being exposed as what really amounts to as a fraud. If some want to explain away stealing, copying, and just plain lack of creative originality through evasive doublespeak (like well there was a long tradition of artists copying and this is a conceptual idealist landscape blah blah blather and on and on). Of course after getting busted (Leach and the trustees) for being stupid they had to come up with some bullcrap and when it’s deep and thick well you know….get the boots on! Any one of us artists that has been at least sketching since we were kids (myself since 7) know how easy it is to copy! I even frown somewhat on artwork (non-camera) that is photo-realistic because for me it’s boring (my personal taste). Now before cameras well ah ya! Now photorealism or copies of anything (non-camera) are merely a technical demonstration of hand eye coordination and does for me not make an artist but seems to me makes the artist into a camera and that is not an artist (to me). It so funny how I can do a work of art that is abstract and people are like, “oh that’s interesting…what is it supposed to be”. But if I do something realistic people will say, “oh that’s good”. So it’s like, “Oh, deary, just paint-em a pretty picture”! So to make a long story just alittle bit longer, I wish I could see what the competition for Leach was because Leach’s stuff does nothing for me (in fact maybe like Warhol he projected the images up on the canvas with a projector and basically traced and copied like a Xerox-(they kinda look that way-stiff with little movement or life). Of course different strokes for different folks. Speaking of artwork that for example is very much alive and full of movement and life is Janis Zroback (hi Janis!- I’m super big fan of Janis). But one last thing that bothers me is the comment of one of the gallery trustees that the fact that the landscape was not an Australian landscape was not a problem. Ah, gee, ya guess it wouldn’t be a problem if admitting you were wrong was a consideration…but an ego-head admitting they were wrong….well could be asking too much. Gee, I wonder if the other 1800 entries thought submitting something other than an Australian landscape would be wrong….or right? Wasn’t that a criteria? How many shows, or competitions, or even some groups here at RB that if an artwork was submitted yet didn’t adhere to the criteria set forth would be rejected? And thus the Danish landscape should have been (or yet still) be rejected if only solely based upon the criteria set forth in the competition itself. Although, the elitists have to stand by thier decision with piles of doublespeak bullshit lest they be seen for the incompetent buffoons that they apparently are. And the poor 1800 artists should easily recognize the caliber of people they have to deal with to make inroads into the art market arena there in Australia and not sure it’s much if any different here in the U.S.. (“oh, honey that won’t go with the color of the sofa”). Think I might do artwork just for me (as a spiritual exercise-like a moving meditation like Tai-Chi) and just stack-em in the closet!

Unfortunately Janis there seems to be some policing in need (especially in Australia with reagrd to the Wynne Prize). Also, from what I’ve seen and experienced myself over the years (and even recently) is that those who promote and package art like a commodity (namely gallery owners) are far from poetic in thier dealings with both art and artists although varies somewhat from type of gallery and from place to place. This that happened in Australia (which I think is totaly bogus) is indicative of a larger problem and trend in dealing with art and artists. Be nice if we lived in a perfect world.