17.6.14

Exhibition cartoon: Pastiche or piracy?

Click image to enlarge

I've got a few cartoons in an exhibition called Pastiche, Parody and Piracy, which opens at the Cob Gallery in north London on Friday (June 20).

The exhibition, which includes contemporary artists as well as cartoonists, looks at works that riff off, and indeed rip off, other works of popular culture, as well as brands, logos etc (yes I've also got one of my many HMV dog cartoons in there!)

For this cartoon, I completely redrew (OK, traced) the Roy Lichtenstein "original" (he famously ripped off an actual a comic book image). But I wonder if that was really necessary? Should I have just changed the original in Photoshop as some cartoonists do?

Some works in the exhibition do use directly lifted material. This has been common in the art world since Duchamp, if not before, but continues to be controversial (see the comments here). Whatever you think, it looks sure to be an interesting and thought-provoking show.

Footnote: This cartoon features in my book collection Cartoons on Demand, which you can read a review of here, and buy here.