Art is always about inspiration, and inspiration can come from anything, real life, outer life, inner life, and other art… but artists have to be honest about their source of inspiration.
Bob Dylan’s paintings, ‘The Asian Series’, which are exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery on the Upper East Side in New York City, are currently in the middle of a controversy.
The problem is that the paintings were announced as ‘a visual journal’ of Dylan’s journey ‘in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea’ showing ‘firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape’.
His own visual journal? Errrr, but when you looked at the pictures posted by the New York Times and bobdylanencyclopedia.blogspot, taken by well-known photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel, or Léon Busy, it’s absolutely striking, Dylan’s paintings are exact copies of these photographs.
The Gagosian Gallery reacted with this statement: ‘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.’
So only the colors are from his own visual journal? They are trying to save their ass and Dylan’s, I don’t know who is to blame here, but they should not have advertised the paintings as they did at the beginning, this was simply a lie! Of course, I have nothing against art inspired from art, but this was misleading…
Dylan has been accused to have stolen lyrics before, and I know what you’re gonna say, as Picasso said (and he had apparently kind of stolen it from T.S. Eliot), ‘Good artists borrow but great artists steal’….
One last thing, since these pictures are famous and widely available, don’t tell me Dylan thought this would not be discovered! So may be the whole thing was a set up?