Oh, to be Bob Dylan. I swear. That guy can get away with just about anything.
From ALLEGEDLY totally inventing entire parts of his history to ALLEGEDLY copying his lyrics from the works of numerous poets, Dylan has gotten away with ALLEGED truthiness from the very beginning.
So, it should come as no shock that some questions have been raised about his artwork, currently on display at The Gagosian gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
According to the New York Times, the gallery has been touting the exhibition, called “The Asia Series,” as “a visual journal” of Dylan’s travels “in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea,” with “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.”
But since the show opened on September 20, it has come to the attention of some people that some (or many or all, I’m not sure) of the paintings bear a striking resemblance to various widely available photographs not taken by Dylan.
And when I say “a striking resemblance,” I mean that, from what I can tell from online photos, to me they look exactly alike.
The Times points towards a spirited discussion at the Dylan fansite Expecting Rain, where people are posting links to photos that look just like the paintings. (You can see a lot of them there. I can't legally post the photos. There are also examples posted at the Times link.)
One example is a Henri Cartier-Bresson (a French photog, apparently considered the father of modern photojournalism) photograph of two men, one a eunuch who served in the court of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. Tzu Hsi died in 1908. Another is Léon Busy's photo "Woman Smoking Opium. The Times says Busy was an early 20th century photographer.Michael Gray, who runs the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia blog, points out another similarity between a Dylan painting and a photo by Dmitri Kessel.And he writes, “The most striking thing is that Dylan has not merely used a photograph to inspire a painting: he has taken the photographer’s shot composition and copied it exactly.”Perhaps most amusing is the Expecting Rain post by Flickr user Okinawa Soba, who claims that “six of his paintings were drawn from my series of old JAPAN and CHINA images on my Flickr photostream,” and that probably unbeknownst to Dylan, in one case he had painted an element Soba added to the original photo.“All I could think was, ‘Oh my God...Dylan painted my fake line!’”Some commenting on Expecting Rain are suggesting it’s no big deal. Milkcow writes, “Does anyone besides me find it really funny that the man who has had more of his output bootlegged and/or imitated than maybe any other person to ever have walk this planet should be whipped on for his use of various other source material items [...] let he who has not downloaded a bootleg, copied a song from a friend (on line or otherwise), or borrowed a lyric line to try to make someone think you are cool, watch an unauthorized youtube video, or attempted to sing a song in the shower with the Dylan twang .... be the first to post ....”
Others suggest Dylan is having a go at his audience and that it's all a game.
A press representative for the Gagosian Gallery has addressed the issue in a statement, saying, “While the composition of some of Bob Dylan’s paintings is based on a variety of sources, including archival, historic images, the paintings’ vibrancy and freshness come from the colors and textures found in everyday scenes he observed during his travels.”
Uh huh.
I think one astute commenter on the New York Times story night have hit it on the head by pointing out, “Of course this gets glossed over because it's Dylan. If it were anyone else, people wouldn't be so tepid in characterizing this as what it really is. Those paintings aren't ‘similar,’ they are exact.”
|
 |
|
