Monday, May 17, 2004

Bigger Isn't Better

A number of people like those in this article are urging John Kerry to "go big" in his campaign. I'm not sure if they want this because they think it will win him more votes or if they just want him to put on a show. Either way, I tend to think it may be too early for what they suggest. We have a long way to go before Election Day. I am more inclined to agree with this weblog post by Joshua Micah Marshall and view it as a wise early strategy. Of course, I would like the guy I vote for to stand for a lot more than John Kerry seems to represent...but I think there's plenty of time for that. When your opponent is suffering a steady stream of self-inflicted wounds...that's a good time to keep your yap shut.

• Posted at 11:25 PM · LINK

Oddments

June 6, a group called Aid for AIDS is hosting a fund-raising Tony Awards Party in Los Angeles. While I'm sure it's a good cause, I'm a bit baffled by the sales pitch. A full-page ad that keeps appearing in Variety makes the same claim they make on their website: "The Only Place on the West Coast to See The Tony Awards Broadcast Live via Satellite from New York."

Uh, the only place not counting my house. Or the home of almost anyone in California, Oregon or Washington who owns a satellite dish.

Do they really think no one else can watch the broadcast live out here? Or am I missing some subtle nuance in their ad line?

• Posted at 11:15 PM · LINK

Jack Bradbury, R.I.P.

Another great in the world of animation and comic book art has passed. Jack Bradbury died last Saturday after battling renal failure for months. He was 89 years old, having been born December 27 of 1914. Bradbury's art career began at age 20 when he went to work for the Disney Studios as an in-betweener and soon graduated to the rank of animator. Several key scenes in features were his handiwork, including the stag fight in Bambi, the Pegasus family gliding in to a watery landing in Fantasia, and Figaro walking across Gepetto's bed in Pinocchio. In 1947, following a brief stint in Friz Freleng's unit at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, he began a long association with Western Publishing. There, he illustrated hundreds of children's books, including Little Golden Books and others published in the millions, and also appeared in most of their comic books published under the Dell and Gold Key labels. He was the main artist on Pluto stories but could and did draw almost every animated character they published. His renderings of the Disney characters were so "alive" and so faithful to the source material that Walt Disney himself reportedly told the Western editors that they didn't need studio approval of anything that Bradbury drew. When Dell adapted the Time for Beany puppet show into a comic, producer Bob Clampett (who knew a little something about good animation-type art) specificially insisted that Bradbury be the man to transfer his characters to the printed page.

As good as his work was for Western's comics, many of his fans prefer the hundreds of comic book stories that Bradbury drew for a "shop" arrangement run by a cartoonist named James F. Davis. Working in his own style instead of some studio's, Bradbury drew strips like Spencer Spook and Hucky Duck for Ha-Ha Comics, Giggle Comics and others published by Nedor, Standard and ACG. (Davis also drew the Fox and Crow comic books and occasionally got Bradbury to fill in for him.) Some of today's top animators and young cartoonists have sought out Bradbury's work as a masterful example of how to pose a character and achieve maximum expression. One such student/fan, a popular cartoonist named Dave Bennett, became a friend of Bradbury's and illustrated a limited edition "first day cover" envelope release that Bradbury autographed to coincide with Bugs Bunny's appearance on a stamp. That's it, complete with Dave's portrait of the artist-as-rabbit, illustrating this piece.

Eye problems and personal matters forced Bradbury to curtail his drawing after around 1970, but he continued to work intermittently for the Disney folks, mostly consulting and occasionally drawing for merchandise, especially coloring books. He was one of the greats and I'm sorry to hear of his passing. (Thanks to Dave Bennett for letting me know and supplying some of the above info.)

• Posted at 8:03 PM · LINK

More on Roy Lichtenstein

Tom Lundin sends the following e-mail which felt like it oughta be posted here and answered...

I think condemning (however lightly) Roy Lichtenstein's use of preexisting source material for his artwork is somewhat disingenous and misses the point. Many fine comic artists themselves made use of published photographic material cribbed from magazines, newspapers or other sources and traced them with an Artograph projector, recomposing the images along the way to create a derived work. (Today, we'd call it "repurposing", but whatever you call it, it's a time-honored artistic technique. The Rules of Attraction website has an excellent history of photorealistic comics.)

As artists are wont to do, Lichtenstein took that technique one step further — pushing the artistic envelope a little and, perhaps, pushing the intellectual property boundaries a little more — by enlarging the essence of certain comic panels as standalone works of art.

That his derived works commanded thousands of times more money than the original art is less a comment on his art skills than a reflection of the relative value a culture places on various forms of art, entertainment, or sports. Art is what people say it is, and it's worth as much as they're willing to pay. In comic form, pages of art were worth 10 or 12 cents. In canvas form, one panel was worth a few thousand dollars.

Part of an artist's raison d'etre is often to try to make society look at something from a new perspective. You can't look at a picture of a Campbell's soup can label today without thinking of Warhol — well, I can't, anyway. So, too, Lichtenstein tried to redefine the comic panel in acrylic colors and larger-than-life size. Is it art? Is it new? Is it copying? Is it valuable? Is it wrong? The questions that the artist forces us to confront are often as much a part of the art as the object itself.

Well, the main thing I'd disagree with in the above is a personal aside — the use of the word "disingenuous," since I meant exactly what I said. Beyond that, we are into the shady world of to what degree a work of art can parallel another without being classed as plagiarism. The standards are murky and can only be adjudged on a case-by-case basis. I assume you agree that it is possible for someone to so totally copy the work of another that it does become an act of theft. All of the standards and questions of art can still apply, and the derivative work can still have its own value...but underscoring it all is that one artist has signed his name to work that was substantially created by another. I also think there's a substantive, obvious difference between basing a drawing on photographic reference, even when a tracing device is employed, and tracing another man's drawing. In the case of Lichtenstein and the comic artists from whom he borrowed, we're talking about exploiting an image that the other artist conceived from his own imagination. When Lichtenstein replicated a Russ Heath comic book panel, he was selling a visual that Heath conceived and transferred to paper, but doing so with neither credit nor payment to Heath.

That Lichtenstein's work has a standalone merit is not, I think, in dispute. Though I suspect his popularity was based more on transitory fad than on substance, people did buy his work and cram into galleries to view it. Apparently, they still do, so I wouldn't question that he did make people look at something from a new perspective. I just feel that he crossed the line between taking inspiration from an existing source and passing someone else's work off as his own.

• Posted at 2:51 PM · LINK