15.3: Appropriation and the Death of Originality

Taken together, these artists make clear that appropriation was never just about copying. It was a way of thinking through images—through who makes them, who owns them, who circulates them, and who gets represented inside them.¹ What begins as a challenge to originality quickly becomes something larger: a challenge to the systems that assign images their value and authority. In the hands of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Yasumasa Morimura, appropriation becomes a tool for exposing how photographs operate inside culture rather than outside it.²

That is one of postmodern photography’s most important shifts. The photograph is no longer treated as a stable record of the world, but as an object already caught in networks of repetition, performance, display, and desire.³ Images quote other images. They borrow authority from institutions. They shape fantasies as much as they document reality. And once artists begin working with that recognition, photography starts to look less like a transparent medium and more like a contested visual language.¹ ⁴

This also helps explain why appropriation mattered so much internationally. Although the strategy appeared in different local forms, it repeatedly opened questions about cultural ownership, historical memory, gender performance, and the politics of visibility.² In other words, appropriation did not end the image; it made the image more complicated. It revealed that photographs are never only about what they show. They are also about how they mean, where they travel, and whose power they reinforce—or disrupt.² ³

From here, photography moves more fully into the broader postmodern field: the staged photograph, the performed self, the museum and archive as image-making systems, and the increasingly unstable boundary between document and fiction. Once originality has been unsettled, a new question comes forward: if the photograph is no longer trusted as simple truth, what kinds of image can it become?³ ⁴

Footnotes

¹ Douglas Eklund, “The Pictures Generation,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-pictures-generation. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

² Receptions: Louise Lawler, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), sample PDF, https://www.moma.org/d/pdfs/W1siZiIsIjIwMTkvMDcvMTAvMTVqNmM2bWU4OF9XZWJTYW1wbGVfTW9NQV9MYXdsZXJfZmluYWwucGRmIl1d/WebSample_MoMA_Lawler_final.pdf; Eva Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/courses/Respini_Will_the_Real_Cindy_Sherman_Please_Stand_Up.pdf; Brooklyn Museum, “Ambiguous Beauty/Aimai-no-bi,” https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/154573. (The Museum of Modern Art)

³ Eva Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/courses/Respini_Will_the_Real_Cindy_Sherman_Please_Stand_Up.pdf. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁴ Douglas Eklund, “Art and Photography: The 1980s,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/art-and-photography-the-1980s. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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