Artists Using Doll Likenesses without Crediting [Mijn Schatje discussion]

Oh yeah I forgot about that animated thing she mentions in her Facebook, I wonder what that will be.

 

Yes, I am actually very curious, but I can't believe she has so many fans! I even saw one with a BJD as a profile picture...

 

I'm so angry with her. Her work is disgusting! She copies BJD faces and other artist's work. Then after she copies the head the bodies she does are very unattractive (to me). I can't stand that women.

 

It could be something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Y3tz85Rhg

It's pretty but, to quote Gertrude Stein, "there's no THERE there".

 

As an artist I am discusted by this person. If she even decided to show her "work" in a gallery in my area I would talk to the gallery owners.

 

Oh, just an update:

Private Owener B on Radiotrash's site was contacted in Japanese, and she replied back that no, she had not been notified, and she would like the pictures of her doll taken down immediately.

 

Great news! How much do you want to bet that the mermaid tail on the first photo created from Private owner B's image was also appropriated?

 

Oh, I'm sure it was... I'm actually inclined to believe just about every element in her "art" is not her own.

 

I have had no luck locating the jellyfish part of the "Jellyfish" image...though I know that I have seen it before. I'm probably not hitting the right search parameters (but I now know more about jellyfish than I ever thought I would). I'm continuing to try!

 

Hmmm I have to admit but I think her art is very special. (of course there are BJDs) I like it in a kind of way, but the fact that it's fake and not hers makes it ugly. Can't stand it that she makes a lot of money out of it...

 

I may need clarification (both this thread and subject are a bit overwhelming), but from what I understand:

The artist or "artist" in question essentially takes a variety of images, uses a form of digital tracing to transform it into another visual medium while at the same time making adjustments and applying her own additions to the new work.

She then goes on to claim that her works are based on her own original ideas and does not make any notice of where her resources are from, all while making quite a bit of money off of her work. From what I gather, this is what is upsetting most.

If the above is correct, then my thoughts are:

The basis of her work seems to be nothing more than a visual form of what we call sampling* in music creation. Perhaps not the best example of such a thing (or at least I am not fond of her work, others have been doing this sort of style for a long time and much better I might add), but certainly not worthy of all this fuss and far from what I would consider morally wrong. Legalities on such things are all over the map, so I won't get into that.

In regards to her claims, yeah, it's playing dirty, that I will say, nor does it settle well with me how she seems to be very much about making a buck or two instead of painting for art's sake. However:

Is she really deserving of so much flak? No, I don't think so, though I understand why she is receiving it. We all dearly love our dolls, that is for sure.

Is what she doing wrong? The answer obviously varies from person to person. In some ways I disagree with the artist, and in others I am indifferent; there really isn't enough unbiased information in between all the heated discussion for me to make any decisions beyond the issues I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.

Is it illegal? Hell if I know; if it isn't, then I imagine it would not be too difficult to make it so considering how broken copyright law is and has generally been over the decades.

Just a cent or two, of course. Carry on.

*Could someone more informed than me in the visual arts inform us if there is an equivalent technique?

 

Actually, the 'sampling' comparison is not so far off, in my opinion. And if you are familiar with sampling and the music industry, then you must know that you can be sued for sampling someone else's music and publishing it in your own work without getting permission and probably arranging for licensing and royalties. You also must know that you need permission to publish a performance of someone else's song, and that credit must be given to the song writer.


If you haven't checked out

http://www.radiotrash.org/mijn

Skip the discussion and just look at the picture overlays... they are very compelling. All debate aside, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The equivalent of sampling would be to copy a piece of an image and then paste it into your image.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhNy...D88CA125&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=70

This is an example of one CG program that has a vector tool... I think M.S. used Adobe Illustrator. You bring in a digital photo, trace over it with lines (vectors) and then fill the lines with color. This is like singing over someone else's voice track with your voice. If you changed the voice track of a song, mixed in a few samples from other songs and published the final product, believe that you would be served papers as soon as someone recognized... well, any part that was theirs.

Like it or not, that is the way it is. If you think it is not morally wrong, you may change your mind if someone takes something you have invested you time, money, and heart in to use for their own notoriety and monetary gain.

 

I read the links and all only in the first post.

I thought her artwork was something like those semi-realism or realism types of drawings.

So...forgive me for being blunt.

But the beautiful dolls she copied had been turned ugly by her 'art'. I kept staring at the photos and seriously wondered how the heck did she manage to get famous with those styles of artwork. It's like she's trying to make them Blythe or Pulip style...? Huge heads and small bodies...?

And she seriously turned the beautiful dolls into non-beautiful work pieces.

Ya...wanted to say that.

Frankly speaking, I do not think that copying a photo is art. Art whereby dolls are to be used as models involve the dolls standing or posing while the artists sketch away at them. That's my meaning of art. If copying is art. I swear I'm filthy rich right now for copying other artists' art works.

She could have gotten away with it if she had altered and edited obvious details. Like in one of the photos, the doll's eyes were not aligned properly. If she had edited and aligned them properly, edited face shape and stuffs, she seriously could have gotten away with it. I've read the stuffs and linked to my friends who are artists a few days ago. And they all said the same thing that if she had edited/cropped/reshaped certain things, it'd be considered as original art. E.g. The sofa-chair thing could have been made shorter/smaller...

Another that I really feel that she ought to be shot is that she's earning so much for her copied and overlayed works, and yet she only 'pays' the models' owners with large resolutions of her work. She should at least send a gift or cheque.

And also that her works aren't what I would call art. They looked to me like hastily put together pieces...Like different parts of the picture had been painted separately and saved in different files. Only to be reused by cropping and merging in photoshop. And looks more like it took less than 2 hours to be put together. It's like a cut and paste thing. That was the first thought I got when I saw her works. But she still could earn from those works...makes me wonder where the people have their eyes grown on...

Well...one man's meat is another man's poison. Maybe it's ugly and hideous to me. But gorgeous art pieces to others. If she had turned one of my boys into work pieces like that...I swear I would've gone ballistic and tried to sue her.

 

What she does is really more like collage, which is a legitimate art form. Unfortunately, however, she claimed that she came up with these images all on her own and drew them herself when she did absolutely no such thing. This is what is offending a lot of people right now.

I do think she is deserving of the flak due to the way that she's handled the situation. She seriously misrepresented herself and her artwork, and when called out on it has continued to lie, as well as be very dishonest with the companies that have contacted her about the situation. Had she handled things differently, things might not be so bad for her now. But that was not the road she chose to take--really she brought this on herself.

 

I never thought to compare her work to sampling, but as a huge fan of electronic music, I can certainly see the similarity. And as a fan, realising this makes me a tad uncomfortable, because now I'm questioning whether or not I'm a total hypocrite for my reaction to Mijn's work. Looking back on it with this perspective, it sort of was an overreaction...

I am well aware that many DJs and electronic artists do obtain the rights and pay royalties to use their samples, but in the past few years I've gotten into listening to bootleg (or "mashup") albums, and these are totally illegal. It's essentially taking two or more songs and mixing them in a way that brings a whole new perspective to each song, but each song used is still recognizable. In a way it's creative, but the artists who are responsible for the hard work that went into the original didn't give permission, and don't get anything from it, and I suspect some of them would be right pissed, if not amused. The DJs responsible usually post these albums for free, however, they do make money off of performances where they play the bootlegs, and/or mix them live.

It's interesting that I whole heartedly support this, and yet don't support Mijn. Is it just because I actually like mashups and benefit from them? It goes back to some other posts that ask if we're really condemning her just over legal reasons, or if our personal feelings towards bjds are coming into play here.

 

First off - kudos to you for your ability for frank self-assesment!

And while you're at it, you have also hit exactly what I see to be the issue with this situation: MS has failed, I think to provide any justification for her 'borrowing' because what she has done does not create a larger whole, nor deliver any re-interperetation of the meaning of the images. The content of her paintings are no more (or possibly slightly less) than the sum of the borrowed elements - that makes it 'stolen'.

Well...up until she got called to task for what she had done. Now the things have content, in that they serve as evidence of her plagiarism. Ironic, ne?

The 'tracing' is -to me- beside the point. I work extensively in numerous graphics programs, as well as being able to draw in what many perceive as the 'proper' way. It is far easier to draw an image 'by hand' than trace it! Vectors are annoyingly unruly, and whille Illustrator does have an 'auto-trace' applet, it requires a lot of tweaking to get it to perform in a specific way. I don't know how many times I've scuttled a file I thot I could sample off a photo and drawn it "old-skool" because the vector process was too annoying and time-consuming.

 

To play with your metaphor... what she's doing is more akin to not only mashups but then claiming she composed the music she's using.

Remember Vanilla Ice? It wasn't so much that he sampled Under Pressure that he then went on to claim they were nothing alike because he changed one note value. People don't like to be treated like idiots. They know what they can see and hear.

 

Chai-Fiend, Tigerbaby and Leloi,
Excellent points all!
Thank you!

 

I've heard some legal and illegal mashups that are quite good, and which could be considered art in their own right. In these cases the artist taken a small piece of a known work and transformed it into something new and beautiful. I know that some of these artists feel that having to get permission to use a sample "ruins" their art, i.e., it's troublesome, expensive and time consuming to get the necessary permissions. However, I also know a couple of recording artists on the opposite side of the fence-- people who rely on royalties to earn their living. It's not fair to those artists to be ripped off, whether by DJs, people downloading illegally, etc. A musician's life is pretty tough-- my friends spend most of their time away from their families touring (and not necessarily sleeping in first class hotels). They are by no means rich. But even if an artist isn't making a living from his or her work, it's still unfair to use it without permission.

But MS has taken someone else's work (like Vanilla ice-- speaking of no talent--LOL!) and claimed it as her own, and when caught has made light of the facts. And the worst part is, her work isn't even transformative. Collage is a real art form, IMO, but it's more than cutting and pasting random pictures together. To me, that's the look MS's art has, as though she got online, found some images that appealed to her and pasted them together. Imporantly in her work the whole isn't more than the sum of its parts. It's all about the doll face-- remove it and what's left is boring and inconsequential. Nothing is transformed, and the originals are more beautiful than her finished product. And worse, she doesn't even call her art "collage"-- to do so would be to credit others for the images she uses.

 

What???? There should be a give an take.
With this case, she should have gotten permission.
Now she's saying the images are 'strangely close' to her drawings?

I think copying is good only for permission or following stock rules if you want to make a buck this way.

In all honestly, I take these art and music theft always at a case by case bases but in this case, it was wrong for her to copy then claim everything as hers.