Written by Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas, “On the Rights of Molotov Man”, explores the issue regarding plagiarism through art. Throughout the article, the authors are aiming to raise the questions of such, “who owns the rights to this man’s struggle?” (55). This man’s struggle is referring to the controversies on the extent to which an artist have the right to control their work to who and how can comment.
The article starts out with the progression of Joy’s beautiful artwork of the Molotov man. Her painting was created based upon an image on the internet that inspired her. However, she did not acknowledge the picture’s credit and was called in by Susan Meiselas’ lawyer. Meanwhile, Joy was caught in the long process of negotiation of the image permission, Joy’s painting went viral through the Internet. More and more people start to create an appropriation and thus the real meaning behind this image had vanished and was taken away. Susan supports that “the image has been subjected to many kinds of reappropriations, most of which, far from condemning, I have welcomed” (57).
Since I used to learn art in high school and did much analysis of artworks. I know that just a little bit of similarities should be acknowledged. No matter where the image is from, you should give credit to it. Even if you were inspired by someone, you should also document it down. I feel like what Joy did was wrong as she is taking another person’s work for granted, plus she changed the intention behind it. However, it seems that it Internet really made this whole process of appropriation or plagiarism available. This is because everyone has access to it. For instance, as an artist myself, I sometimes draw images from the internet. It is very hard to acknowledge everything we use. The artist herself sees the images as very different and that we are not ruining or effecting anything but actually it might be changing many things that weren’t meant to be. Therefore, it is very important to acknowledge what we have done by giving credits and thus consider the effects it has on everyone.