Bunny Inspiration, Bunny Plagiarism (or Hotchpotch, Farrago, Jumble)

Spoiler alert: Olive, stop reading here.

Besides they irrepressible Flopsy at my preschool, this is my favorite rabbit in the world.
Somebody was painting it around and about in our old neighborhood in southeast a year or so ago. I fell in love with the design and stole it.


I used it for Oopsie's tea party invitations. Or I should say rather for the shower for the impending Olive.

I exacto-ed it onto some Ikea window film for the bathroom. Terrible stuff to work with, all sticky and difficult.

And watch out, parents of small children, I have more plans for it in the coming spring months.
In this pillow for Olive, it turned out pixelated, which I like. (On a side note, I've really been digging printable fabric lately... you just have to figure out what the hell to print on it that's not super lame and creepy... no photos of departed pets or grandmas).

But... It's somebody else's bunny. And that somebody else probably even lives here in town. I think the verb I used above is accurate--I stole the design.

But what we would call derivative in the academy, or really straight up plagiarism in a comp class, is called "inspired by" in the craft world. If I make a softie just like somebody else's softie but with some inovations, I'm encouraged to post it in their flickr group and am congratulated on what I made. If I write a poem just like somebody else's poem but with different fabric and longer ears, I am summarily dismissed. Unless maybe I can convince everyone that it's some kind of postmodern statement. I'm thinking of MV's cover stories, fellow MFA-ers.

There's definitely something postmodern going on here, yeah? A good opportunity to use the wonderful bi-labially plosive term "postmodern pastiche". I like wikipedia's definition of pastiche better than the one I ususally come up with in front of a classroom on the fly: "...a work is called pastiche if it is cobbled together in imitation of several original works. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, a pastiche in this sense is 'a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble.' This meaning accords with etymology: pastiche is the French version of the greco-Roman dish pastitsio or pasticcio, which designated a kind of pie made of many different ingredients." I always think of TS Eliot, "shoring fragments against our ruin" (perhaps I shouldn't use quote marks when I am paraphrasing, or more specifically, misquoting). So... is there something fundamentally postmodern in the current craft movement? High art and its notions of originality be damned. Hell, the auteur notion of art be damned?

And then street art, too, which is by its nature public art, the vandal artist both leaving his mark and stealing secretly away. This calls further notice to issue of originality, authorship, and venue. Until, of course, MOMA buys it. Graffiti is not copyrighted per se until it turns up in the halls of high art, right? But what if it's somebody like Banksy?
You come across this on the streets of New Orleans, as we did, and you know it's him, and you know it's art. And it's also graffiti and it's illegal. But let's just say Urban Outfitters wanted to use it on a tee-shirt. They like that kind of thing. I think they couldn't. I think there's some kind of implied intellectual property there. What if the artist is unknown?

As for my bunny, I think I would be crossing a line if I were to attempt to sell stuff printed with it. Is that where the line falls? At commerce? Ethically that seems satisfactory, but philosophically, there's more to parse out.

Especially in the days of stenciling and wheat-pasting, everything a copy...

I did study folklore for awhile in college, and I believe one of the definitional differences between folk art and high art is that in folk art the basic pattern must have arisen from a cultural group of people (though of course there is individual variance) while high art must be attributable to a single progenitor. Graffiti, however, was then considered folk art and not high art. It's been fifteen years. I wonder if ideas have changed.

And sewing and so forth stands on this wavering line, an interesting wavering line. There are fiber artists, and there are crafters. What's the difference? I feel quite strongly about the depreciation of craft. Even Terry Tempest Williams said this the other night "I thought mosaic was just a craft--I was wrong. It's not a craft; it's an art form." Really, Terry? What then does qualify as "just a craft?" But I digress...

While we as a culture figure this one out, I think I'm going to go on being "inspired by" street art. My husband does take such wonderful photographs of it. And so if you know who made this bunny, umm... don't tell them. Unless they're really collaborative-minded.