Digital Homage or Theft ? Blu's original and innovative work a sign of the times ?

I found the image above on richard pettingers blog via google. It's funny but it might also be a visual metaphor for the advertising journey taken by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe - well all except the bit in the bottom right hand box.

After seeing their advert/insert on my telly, I was more than slightly reminded of an earlier post of mine here before I remembered that I'm not actually a British tv license payer, I got an urge to fire an email or snail mail off to the BBC.

I wanted to offload a diatribe about ownership of ideas, the unattributed regurgitation and repositioning of someone else's work, the blatant theft of craft, all those utterly repugnant additional activities that a genuinely creative individual finds utterly repulsive; weird worming around the potential theft using semi-complex language, justifying by deflection, the usual mechanisms of evasion such as denial by omission - If I don't say it up front, then it might be missed and I might get the kudos for this iinovation.

I'm interested in such things, I did explore that very idea in one of my own digital fiction works called : Bob Casio's Dead Cameraman - a hopefully obvious reference to Boccaccio 's seminal work. (it looks old, it looks badly designed and its meant to for perhaps not immediately obvious reasons.) I even set up a blog back in June of last year where I might further explore those ideas about theft or homage... occasionaly I post to it.

Now the thing is this, I happen to become aware that Chris Reed and Gerel Orgil have both written excellent blogs on this very same subject so let me just direct you towards their posts which explore this question in a perhaps less emotive (& therefore less potentially actionable way).

the relative merits of street cred

I recently saw this image above from Banksy and wondered about the tag currently attached to him, as 'the world's most famous street artist'. - Well that's the trouble with fame, credibility and particularly 'greatness', like Einstein's theory - they are all relative.

Below is some awe inspiring street animation from the Argentinian artist BLU (don't mention the Falklands pls) which to some more than tops Banksy for street cred...... originality and artistic endeavour. It may be like comparing apples and oranges - but hey isn't it tremendous to have such wonderful fruit:


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.