It’s not to much to ask of a western European NGO that it revitalize itself after half a century of same old same old. It’s in that spirit — hoping for signs of some tectonic shift, though not expecting any — that I accepted the invitation to attend the opening reception for World Press Photo 2012 in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby at United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan on August 15. […]
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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. […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (3)
Late last year I gave a talk in London, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” in which, among other things, I bemoaned the fact that the newspaper and magazine industry has begun to replace specialized critics grounded in the visual arts (like me) with “cultural journalists,” generalists with no depth of […]