Appropriate appropriation

One is not like the other... can you spot which of the three artworks (above & to the right) is different?

Two of the images are conceptual art by Christine Bailey, who mimicked artist Cara Ober's style for a recent show in the T. Rowe Price lobby in Baltimore. The top image is Ober's and the two bottom images are Bailey's.

Ober, not surprisingly, was upset. She was quoted in a Baltimore Sun article:

The best analogy is this: How would you feel if someone stole something from you that you loved and cared for?" said Ober, 33, who lives in Charles Village and teaches art classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. "It's a bitter pill to swallow."

Bailey explained the show's motivation in an (after-the-fact) email to Ober:

For me, this was very much a project about how or if I could steal someone's artistic identity and what that would look like. Could I be the Old Navy to Cara Ober's The Gap?

A Washington Post article connects the appropriation show (which was called "New Work by Christine Bailey") to Bailey's earlier work of "curating" shows of imaginary artists based on virtual online personalities (a Second Life character, the Ikea online assistant, etc.):

...She's adopted someone else's manner specifically as a way to move away from the standard issues of taste and the cliches of personal identity and expression that still tend to govern art, especially in more conservative scenes such as Baltimore's. "I'm really interested in the idea of anonymity, and not having a brand -- moving from style to style. . . . I really enjoyed making these paintings, because I didn't have to bring anything personal to it."

On a side note, the Post article (by Blake Gopnik, who discloses that his wife is a colleague of Bailey's) is markedly dismissive of Ober's work:

Bailey's paintings capture all of Ober's telltale tricks and tics. Nostalgic imagery is pulled from older sources. Bird books, old encyclopedias, decorative wallpapers? Check. Tender, pastel colors -- soft washes of pale yellows, blues and pinks -- with brooding splashes of black on top? Check. Scraps of dictionary definitions, presented in old-timey fonts? Check. An overriding sense of capital-P Poetry, without ever making clear quite what that poetry's about? Check.

Mate?

Whether one considers Ober's art interesting or not is parenthetical to the larger issue... and to take pot shots at it seems mean-spirited in this context.

Irene Hoffman, the director of Baltimore's Contemporary Museum, suggests that an audience's knowledge of the appropriation is key:

On the one hand, the success of any act of appropriation requires a knowledge of the source. Was the appropriation evident to the audience? If so, it's a very similar gesture to those of other, more famous artists, where the audience recognizes the source.

I think Hoffman speaks to the heart of the matter. Bailey's show certainly explores interesting issues... artists spend years building up a style & body of work. In comparison, mimicking an artistic style is quite easy. To take the mimicking short-cut questions what is the value of the pioneering effort (& sincerity) of the original artist... and whether the artist matters at all.

Circling back to Hoffman's comment about the audience recognizing the appropriation, it strikes me that Bailey's show could be more effective the original artist's involvement (which would also settle any ethical questions about plagiarism). Much more effective than a show that silently copies the work of some artist whose work I'm not familiar with, would be a show in which an example of the original artist's work is paired with Bailey's style appropriation. And why limit it to one artist, the show could consist a dozen such side-by-side comparisons.

Update: I was looking at Cara Ober's blog and noticed this post, where she gave Bailey's space to explain the thinking behind the appropriation exhibition.