I view the term “self-plagiarism” as an oxymoron, and a misnomer. It denotes the commission of an intellectual crime, and indeed a legal one, as well as an ethical breach, where an author most likely has committed none of those offenses. Use of it as a blanket term to paint any and all such repurposing as acts of bad faith that somehow cheat editors, publishers, readers, and one’s fellow professionals only brands the accusers as self-righteous know-nothings while demonstrating a deeply unprofessional failure to research standard practices in the field. […]
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Writers, musicians, visual artists, choreographers, and other “content providers” regularly return to, reconsider, revise, borrow from, and otherwise cannibalize their previous output. No one even marginally literate in the arts can claim unawareness of the copious evidence of this as common practice. So I challenge the concept of “self-plagiarism,” an oxymoron because plagiarism involves taking material you haven’t created and claiming it as your own. You can engage in self-parody, consciously or not; you can repeat yourself, consciously or not; but you can’t plagiarize yourself. […] I gather that you aspire to becoming a working photography critic — which might mean that you would piece together a revenue stream from some different activities, as I have (some writing, some teaching, some lecturing, some curating perhaps), but that you’d get paid for all of them, including the writing. In which case the writing would be done vocationally, not avocationally, meaning that you’d take it on as part of your daily job, not as a hobby or sideline. […] I have the greatest respect for Gray as a Dylan scholar. I’ve actually read the print version of his hefty 2006 Bob Dylan Encyclopedia from cover to cover; it’s eccentric but, overall, brilliant. It also contains the following statement, on page 433: “Jazz musicians generally regarded the blues, too, as beneath them, and thereby disqualified themselves from playing any of it well.” This is one of the most deeply ignorant comments about jazz by a renowned writer on popular music that I have read in my entire life. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Self-Plagiarism: Oxymoron Invasion (3)
Reaching out from beyond the grave, the late Ansel Adams self-plagiarized once more by permitting the trust he created during his lifetime to grant permission for yet another use of his classic image ‘Moonrise over Hernandez.’ Including his posthumous record, Adams has now self-plagiarized this image over 5000 times in various media. […]