ART + PLAGIARISM?
Sharing an experience from one artist to another.
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IMAGE FAR LEFT “This Much I’m Worth” (A self evaluating artwork) PROTOTYPE 2014 - Ongoing Artist: Rachel Ara Unique Work Displaying it’s sales price in GBP 3314 Press photo after winning the International Aesthetica Art Prize in 2016. |
IMAGE SECOND LEFT The Value Manifesto Released June 2019 Team of 4 + people lead by Timo Niemeyer Edition of 250 Displaying its sales price in CHF 3750 Found on @Valumanifesto Instagram 2019 |
This is a summary of my experience of what had appeared to be the plagiarism of my work by another artist. I don’t want to say too much as the letters speak for themselves and you can form your own opinion. I hope by doing this it will give other artists some insight into what can and can’t be contested in law and maybe the letters could be re purposed for similar cases.
I am indebted to my lawyer who assisted me in writing the letters and provided free legal guidance which I could not afford at the time. The whole process was (and continues to be) incredibly frustrating as the other party, who is corresponding through a law firm, consistently refuses to answer questions and makes accusations and threats in return. This process can be mentally exhausting and demoralising, which I would not lightly recommend to anyone and has the consequence of distracting you from your current work.
What has been great is that this process has not been a hidden one. New social media platforms have enabled me to get opinions from others and share my frustrations. My followers, fellow artists and friends have been incredibly engaged and supportive. It’s been a useful exercise and I have learned a lot from this. Would I do it again? I would definitely share the story on social media and send out a firm first letter to the “offender”. I think from the first response you can probably predict how the case is going to evolve and the attitude of the person on the other side. In this case I feel that the other artist has more (financial) resources than me and has not engaged with the moral aspects of the argument. There is a danger whenever there is a mismatch in resources that the stronger party can string you along until your resources run out, which would be detrimental to your mental health as well as your bank balance!
Here goes ....
I am indebted to my lawyer who assisted me in writing the letters and provided free legal guidance which I could not afford at the time. The whole process was (and continues to be) incredibly frustrating as the other party, who is corresponding through a law firm, consistently refuses to answer questions and makes accusations and threats in return. This process can be mentally exhausting and demoralising, which I would not lightly recommend to anyone and has the consequence of distracting you from your current work.
What has been great is that this process has not been a hidden one. New social media platforms have enabled me to get opinions from others and share my frustrations. My followers, fellow artists and friends have been incredibly engaged and supportive. It’s been a useful exercise and I have learned a lot from this. Would I do it again? I would definitely share the story on social media and send out a firm first letter to the “offender”. I think from the first response you can probably predict how the case is going to evolve and the attitude of the person on the other side. In this case I feel that the other artist has more (financial) resources than me and has not engaged with the moral aspects of the argument. There is a danger whenever there is a mismatch in resources that the stronger party can string you along until your resources run out, which would be detrimental to your mental health as well as your bank balance!
Here goes ....
At the end of July 2018, I received an email from Timo Niemeyer who was concerned about the similarities between a piece of work he was developing and one of my existing works “This Much I’m Worth (The self-evaluating artwork) – The Prototype 2014 - Ongoing”. In conjunction with 4 other people, he was developing a work incredibly similar to mine. He stated “We were taken completely by surprise when we saw some unintentional similarities in your past and our present project …”and was willing to fly over from Europe ASAP to discuss this. On reading more about his project I was quite taken aback from both the visual and conceptual similarity of the works. At that time, I was artist in residence at the V&A and was frantically working on a new installation for London Design Festival at the V&A due in September. I forwarded the information to a couple of colleagues at the V&A who had experience dealing with IP – they indicated to me that the work was so similar he would not get away with if challenged. My work had also received a lot of publicity and was quite well known in the art world. It had won major prizes, been shown at major museums and featured on the cover of the FT Wealth, so overall, I was not too worried about this. Coupled with the fact that I had little time to devote exploring this issue further I put it to the back of my mind. I realise now (but didn't at the time) that Timo sent two more emails to my V&A that I missed with everything else that was going on.
In June this year a fellow artist who I was showing with at the MMCA contacted me via Instagram. He had seen a piece that looked remarkably like mine (visually) and highlighted the text accompanying the work “Those machines [the works] only purpose is to display the currently highest real-time value of the crypto edition in Swiss Francs” – it was a near exact copy, it seemed even my text had been appropriated. It was being launched at Art Basel in the following weeks. I now realised that Timo had continued to develop his project, despite knowing of mine, making no effort to change his work visually or conceptually to create a distance between our project. My first reaction was disbelief – I would never do this to a fellow artist.
My first step was to post this on Instagram to gauge my followers' and fellow artists reactions. Most people were shocked by the similarities and posted comments to that effect. From that post I was also lucky to gain the advice of a pro bono IP lawyer and people's comments reinforced what I thought about the potential for plagiarism so it gave me the confidence to challenge Timo.
With most of my projects, I tend to put quite a lot of details on my site, especially with this one as it was quite complex. The aim is to expand on the work and also to document the build. I do this especially with the idea of empowering women to build more challenging work. So I wasn’t too enamoured upon reading back over Timo's emails from summer 2018, which said: “My team, family and I were extremely fascinated about your art projects of the last couple of years: we spent a lot of time on your website and were watching the interviews and the reportings with and about you." And then later stated, “with the discovery of your much earlier project, a new perspective was opened to my project vision".
Although Timo has stated that his project was developed and near fully-formed without knowing of mine, which I partially believe, the fact remains that when he did know about mine, he freely admits that it did influence his project. What gets me the most – is that fully knowing that his project visually and conceptually were so similar – he made absolutely no effort to alter the appearance of his project – and just continue with no consideration given to the effect on me and my work. As my prototype was clearly marked “2014 – ongoing” – it was still a developing project and what Timo has succeeded in doing is to curtail further development of my project by superimposing his executive toy edition on top of my work.
Here is the upshot of what I have learned:
To pursue this further in a court of law to have greater certainty on the evidential position would cost a lot of money and energy, which I would rather put into my other projects, and at any rate it would be focused on a much narrower issue than that which is my real concern. I would still like to see Timo answer the questions I have posed, but I am not holding my breath.
In June this year a fellow artist who I was showing with at the MMCA contacted me via Instagram. He had seen a piece that looked remarkably like mine (visually) and highlighted the text accompanying the work “Those machines [the works] only purpose is to display the currently highest real-time value of the crypto edition in Swiss Francs” – it was a near exact copy, it seemed even my text had been appropriated. It was being launched at Art Basel in the following weeks. I now realised that Timo had continued to develop his project, despite knowing of mine, making no effort to change his work visually or conceptually to create a distance between our project. My first reaction was disbelief – I would never do this to a fellow artist.
My first step was to post this on Instagram to gauge my followers' and fellow artists reactions. Most people were shocked by the similarities and posted comments to that effect. From that post I was also lucky to gain the advice of a pro bono IP lawyer and people's comments reinforced what I thought about the potential for plagiarism so it gave me the confidence to challenge Timo.
With most of my projects, I tend to put quite a lot of details on my site, especially with this one as it was quite complex. The aim is to expand on the work and also to document the build. I do this especially with the idea of empowering women to build more challenging work. So I wasn’t too enamoured upon reading back over Timo's emails from summer 2018, which said: “My team, family and I were extremely fascinated about your art projects of the last couple of years: we spent a lot of time on your website and were watching the interviews and the reportings with and about you." And then later stated, “with the discovery of your much earlier project, a new perspective was opened to my project vision".
Although Timo has stated that his project was developed and near fully-formed without knowing of mine, which I partially believe, the fact remains that when he did know about mine, he freely admits that it did influence his project. What gets me the most – is that fully knowing that his project visually and conceptually were so similar – he made absolutely no effort to alter the appearance of his project – and just continue with no consideration given to the effect on me and my work. As my prototype was clearly marked “2014 – ongoing” – it was still a developing project and what Timo has succeeded in doing is to curtail further development of my project by superimposing his executive toy edition on top of my work.
Here is the upshot of what I have learned:
- The law is not well-suited to protecting ideas and the conceptual elements of artworks. The legal questions appear to be directed at the execution of ideas and the physical, visual form of that.
- In copyright law, if two works are created independently and without any knowledge of the other, the second does not infringe the first. This is obviously a matter of evidence and is very difficult to prove beyond doubt. Following the logic of 'the infinite monkey theorem', a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare without having copied it or being aware of it.
- Given that (1) and (2) are true, Value Manifesto does not appear to be an infringing copy of mine in a legal sense, if his evidence is to be believed – he appears to have been looking to create a work based on 7 Nixie tubes since March 2015 and to have finalised the physical form of that in 2017.
- We can't expect a monkey to be embarrassed by accidentally producing the same work as somebody else, but I do think we can and should expect more from fellow artists. There is a moral question here that is bigger than the legal issue. I can't understand how Value Manifesto were prepared to go ahead with their work, without making any changes, given what they had known about mine for almost a year before their launch.
To pursue this further in a court of law to have greater certainty on the evidential position would cost a lot of money and energy, which I would rather put into my other projects, and at any rate it would be focused on a much narrower issue than that which is my real concern. I would still like to see Timo answer the questions I have posed, but I am not holding my breath.
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@Valuemanifesto have now started deleting comments and blocking users from their social media accounts who may point out the similarities between the two works. It's a shame they could not respond to the comments instead of hiding behind lawyers. Documentation: I've uploaded all the correspondence here, so you can use this as an example of what happens. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments. Other References: ValueManifesto on Instagram --> LINK ValueManifesto on the Web --> LINK |
| 1_-_2019_07_01_inital_letter_from_ra_to_vm.pdf |
| 2_-_2019_07_07_reply_from_vm_to_ra.pdf |
| 3_-_2019_07_08_letter_from_ra_to_vm_lawyer.pdf |
| 4_-_email_correspondnace.pdf |
| 3_1_evidence_from_vm.pdf |
| 3_2_whitepaper_vm.pdf |
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