The Art of the Copy: Labour, Originality, and Value in the Contemporary Art Market

Recently, a number of highly publicized cases have brought the contested history of appropriation in art to the foreground. In these cases, an artist is often accused of having stolen the intellectual property of another artist, individual, group or business. The defense to these accusations generally lies in highlighting the difference of art, and the need to be able to access cultural material in order to create new art or cultural commentary. This paper picks up on those works and cases, but examines them in parallel with an important tradition of copying in the art world that exists outside of the frame of intellectual property. My interest lies primarily in a series of extremely recent works that employ copying for a variety of political purposes that cluster around issues of ownership and labour. What these works do is to reframe questions around copying and copyright, so that the issues considered are not first and foremost profit and property, but rather making and labour. The majority of this talk focuses on Dafen, China – the “painter’s village” where more than 60% of the world’s “copied” paintings are manufactured and sold. Dafen, however, also provides the fodder for the work of a number of Western contemporary artists, who either employ Dafen artists to make their work or who work with the “artist-workers” in order to create conceptual pieces that enter into the global art world and market. Dafen raises a number of questions about authenticity, forgery, copying and counterfeiting that unsettle that way that issues of art and intellectual property tend to be considered.