ABSTRACT
In contemporary practice and theory, appropriation in art is rarely distinguishable from the longstanding artistic practices of reference, imitation and citation. Indeed, despite modernist claims to ex nihilo creation, the formal, stylistic or conceptual reference to prior sources is simply integral to the recognizability of a work of “art” as such. Nevertheless, in the post-WWII era, the renewed reception of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the use of mass media and popular visual culture by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and the rise of appropriation artists such as Barbara Kruger, Je Koons, Sherry Levine, Hans Haacke, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince, gave rise to a new and inƒuential American artistic legacy of “appropriation” with broad eects across many genres, areas and disciplines of cultural practice. With reference to this recent history, appropriation has come to signify nearly any reuse of objects, images, gestures, forms, ideas, works and intellectual properties from any pre-existing artistic, political, institutional or commercial source. Moreover, appropriation is considered a performative act, a tactic, or a gesture assumed to intentionally mount a critique of the institutions, corporations and values crucial to the Western valorization of originality and individual property.
