The current redragtoabull.com project is highlighting and exploiting some tension between the street art camp and the mainstream art camp re copyright theft... both camps being guilty of moaning and gross self-importance... Re Save Our YBAs from the Street Urchins: D-Face claims the Chapmans stole his idea about defacing money... clearly an absurd allegation as artists have been defacing canvases for years... my piece is a forgery of a piece D-Face might have created in retaliation, but in fact did not (as far as I know) create…. If he did want to reproduce my work which he probably doesn't I probably wouldn't object

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/take-note-artist-claims-that-chapmans-stole-graffiti-idea-394805.html

The purpose of this piece is to blatantly infringe the copyrights of the Chapmans and D-Face thus inciting even more tension by creating a unique ''super copyright infringing'' work...why? Because it's there!


Likewise, the Hirst/Cartrain piece is a recreation of the original Cartrain work (slightly improved to meet L-13 minimum production standards) that was withdrawn after threats of legal action from Damien Hirst's people.

Unlike Cartrain and his gallery we are not intimidated by lawyers, and if an injunction is issued we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of expression. We also operate a 'copyright out of control' policy which in our world makes us immune from prosecution...( so far )

A few years ago it was considered slightly subversive to appropriate images from large corporations, change a few things around and create a new meaning usually detrimental the corporation or government agency concerned. More recently however, the corporations have got wise to this practice and have stopped threatening artists with copyright infringement and seem to welcome a certain amount of culture jamming... the thinking being it actually looks like they're ''down with'' the street artists or are somehow involved in the ongoing creative process. Court action against artists always makes the larger company look bad... as does court action by artists against artists.

Over the last couple of years my work has appropriated images from Disney/Warner Bros/The Beatles etc and at no point have i been sued...Its for this reason I plan a new approach in the future possible creating original works of art from scratch, but this radical idea has not been tried yet!

http://cnpdonline.com/

In the 1980s I was threatened with court action by Abba for using samples of some of their songs in a new composition, sampling was thought of as a crime...these days record companies actually encourage sampling to revive long forgotten acts. The same thing is beginning to
happen in visual art, although we still have some way to go before copyright as we know it is abolished and replaced with something more flexible.

( If Damian wishes to appropriate my work to create a more meaningful and critically acclaimed work he should feel free to do so )