Let’s get this straight: Eastman Kodak didn’t get blindsided by the digital evolution. Its middle and upper management of the 1980s and ’90s — top-heavy with overfed, overpaid, overaged, complacent suits — actively turned a blind eye to it. […]
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Most if not all of Bob Dylan’s “Asia Series” paintings are based on identifiable photographs not of Dylan’s making — none of them recent, but at least some of which remain under copyright protection. I consider it perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable, as a visual artist, to the same strictures his attorneys would hold anyone who produced and marketed an interpretation of his work. In what ways are graphic artists allowed to respond to photographs — and, conversely, disallowed from responding to them — both legally and ethically? […] Quaking in My Boots Thanks to the several readers who sent expressions of concern. Yes, we survived the August 23rd east-coast earthquake handily — though, working in our second-floor sunporch, I felt the tremor distinctly and recognized it for what it was, having lived in quake-prone San Francisco in the ’60s. My stepson […] While I consider the protection afforded me by the copyright law appropriate and necessary, I also believe in the justness of the “fair use” exception thereto, when properly applied. I make use of this myself, as a researcher and scholar and author, and allow others to make use of it in relation to my own work, so long as they respect the rules that apply to “fair use.” I can’t recall ever complaining about anyone quoting an excerpt from my writing — even a lengthy one — in a non-commercial context. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Bob Dylan: The Painter and the Photograph (2)
There’s undeniably a difference between painting from sketches or photos you made of real-life scenes you yourself observed and painting from someone else’s sketches, or someone else’s photographs. Just as there’s a difference between witnessing and bearing witness, there’s a difference between direct, firsthand observation and response — no matter how creative and accomplished — to the observations of others, not unlike the distinction in law between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. So asserting, á là Whitman, that “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there,” stakes out a position akin to Goya’s “Yo lo vi (I saw this)” in his etching series “The Disasters of War.” […]