I haven't posted in a while, a problem with my foot has meant I haven't been in the studio much and so have little of my own work to talk about. For some reason this has also impacted on my other blogging. The hiatus has made me think therefore about the way in which this blog in particular is going.

Initially I had high intentions of creating a wide ranging resource for artists covering business planning, profiles of other artists and general posts on art matters. I recognise that was ambitious of course. The business planning work has gone no where - it is difficult to build up enthusiasm for a business plan when the business is moribund. I had some early success with profiles, but although I have had lots of acceptances, artists generally tend to be less good at following through. I haven't harassed people about this apart from a few gentle reminders, so they have fallen by the wayside. I have one still to post, so watch this space.

My own work is picking up again and I've made some new monotypes - all tiny - so although I do not want this blog to be about my own work exclusively there will be some posts soon on work in progress. This may rekindle the business planning work, we will have to see.

The music posts are fun to do, but in order to avoid copyright problems I want to use YouTube or Vimeo videos and I have had reports that these posts are causing problems for some people. I will come back to them, but I suspect I will only embed one or two and provide links to the rest. I will also experiment with embedding lower resolution versions.

Longer posts on art are more of a problem. I'm not sure how much interest there is in these but in any case writing them takes time and I need to be inspired and as ever inspiration has been in short supply lately.

So, for the future expect posting to be irregular and when it comes to be more about my own work than anything else. Thoughts and ideas on topics to be covered would be welcomed.

Have you come across 'pocahotties'? I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. It is apparently the term used for young women who dress up in 'Red Indian' outfits in which to prance around on Halloween. I have to confess that until recently, being as happy to watch scantily dressed young women capering around as the next male, I would have seen this as essentially harmless, although it isn’t prevalent in the UK. However, reading the reaction of those on the receiving end made me realise that in practice this is just as offensive as would be putting on blackface and an 'African Princess' outfit. While there are, and probably always have been, people who respect Native American culture and see virtue in emulating it, dressing up for a party is not respect.

Following this up, I came across the term 'cultural appropriation’, defined on Wikipedia as “the taking – from a culture that is not one’s own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge.” It is perhaps best used to describe the broader process of acculturation from the perspective of a minority or weaker culture.

While I understand the 'pocahottie' issue, I have immediate problems with this wider concept. Almost every term used in that definition has further problems of definition. What does ‘taking’ mean? What is a culture? Can we locate the source of ‘intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge’ at a cultural level? Can the appropriation of objects like works of art be considered in the same way as appropriation of content like artistic styles or culturally significant rituals?

Moreover. as the term has passed into wider usage, its meaning has become confused, muddled and riddled with inconsistencies. In particular it has become used to justify claims that the use of concepts from other cultures is in some way unacceptable, to be avoided and perhaps even racist. Dig into blog comment threads and you will arguments to that effect about judo and other martial arts, yoga, textile patterns, music and a huge range of artistic endeavours. Most of these arguments moreover take the ‘donor’ culture at face value, without looking to see how far it is itself a synthesis. The implied suggestion that these cultures cannot stand up for themselves but must be defended by others and, implicitly, fossilised is also at best patronising and potentially racist.

To take this further let’s look at some cases of alleged content appropriation in the arts.

Jazz and blues are generally considered to have their roots in African-American culture. It has been argued in the past that when non African-American musicians attempt to play jazz or blues they are cannot perform with the right sensitivity and feeling and are also damaging the culture from which they are ‘stealing’.

So far as the first argument is concerned there is plenty of contradictory empirical evidence. Many years ago I saw a TV interview with musicians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee in which they recounted how, when they first heard a recording by the British artist Lonnie Donegan, they thought it was by Leadbelly, so accurately had he captured the sound and feel.

Philosopher James O Young in his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts" target="_blank" title="Cultural appropriation and the arts">Cultural Appropriation and the Arts recounts how the trumpeter Roy Eldridge (Young calls him ‘Ray’) bet the music critic Leonard Feather that he could reliably tell the difference between jazz performances by African American and non African American musicians. Eldridge failed miserably.

A third example can be found in the almost universal praise for the work of Eric Clapton from black artists like Muddy Waters and B B King.

The second argument about damage to the donor culture also fails to stand up to investigation. The classic 'St James Infirmary Blues' is a case in point. The words and melody have their origin in an 18th century traditional English folk song called "The Unfortunate Rake" (also known as "The Unfortunate Lad" or "The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime"). There are numerous versions of the song throughout the English-speaking world. It evolved for example into other American standards such as "The Streets of Laredo". Effectively the song is the product of a long process of adoption, adaptation and transmutation into the blues we know.

A similar case is the song ‘Goodnight Irene’ recorded in 1950 by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. This was an adaptation of a song called ‘Irene’ by Leadbelly and proved controversial at the time. It turned out however that the Leadbelly song – which he had copyrighted – was based on a traditional Southern folk song he had learned from his uncle. That song was in turn an arrangement of a waltz written in the 1880s by Gussie Lord Davies, an African America composer who wrote however for a largely white audience. Probably Leadbelly’s uncle had come across it via that non African-American channel. Davis of course had in turn appropriated the waltz from the music of Vienna. The song has now permeated British culture to the extent that it has become the club song for supporters of the English football club Bristol Rovers.

In both cases these songs have been passing in and out of African American culture over an extended period. The extent to which they can be placed within a specific culture is minimal and the extent to which any culture has been harmed by the process is probably zero.

Film is another example of appropriation resulting in positive outcomes. The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made numerous films based on Western literary sources. Perhaps the greatest of these are Ran (derived from King Lear) and Throne of Blood (derived from Macbeth). Another of Kurosawa’s films Seven Samurai was in turn remade as The Magnificent Seven, while his film Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars.

Shakespeare was himself an arch appropriator, from Holinshed and others. His themes and plots have a mythic quality that stands above any specific culture and so easily slip from one medium to another and from one cultural setting to another. As well as the Kurosawa films, Lear was the inspiration for the film Broken Arrow Lance, the musical Kiss me Kate came from Taming of the Shrew and most well known of all perhaps, West Side Story, from Romeo and Juliet. His work was also the stimulus for the suite “Such Sweet Thunder” by Duke Ellington.

Appropriation of content then has been the source of much great work. The adoption of artistic elements from a culture and their remaking into something new is a positive thing. Examples have been cited from jazz and film, but there are many others. In music, tango, salsa, Tejano, flamenco and high life are all syntheses from a range of cultures. Surprisingly perhaps the Mexican Tejano music includes elements from the brass band music of German immigrants, while flamenco incorporates Arabic and even Indian influences via Gypsy music. None of these examples cited have taken anything away from their culture of origin, in fact by their creation the sum total of human happiness has been increased.

Cultural and artistic change is inevitable. Without it we would still be picking wild berries and fleeing from predators. Trying to prevent change will be as successful as King Cnut. Everyone loses.

I think I have more to say on this, but this post is already rather long.

While reading a book called Writing about art by Marjorie Munsterberg (also a web site), I came across something I found rather shocking. She quotes a passage by John Ruskin in which he describes a painting by Turner.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night.  The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm.  Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood.  Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam.  They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying.  Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

[Ruskin’s note]*She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard.  The near sea is encoumbered with corpses.

What I found shocking was not Ruskin's verbosity, which is characteristically High Victorian, but Professor Munsterberg's comments on it.

Ruskin drew upon an immense vocabulary, using many words that are unfamiliar today.  Even his Victorian contemporaries regarded his style of writing as exceptional.  It shows the influence of the King James translation of the Bible and, in this particular passage, Shakespeare.  These are references that Ruskin assumed his audience would understand, although any modern reader needs a dictionary and specialized knowledge to follow them. (emphasis added)

I accept that detailed knowledge of Shakespeare is rare these days (although I picked up the Shakespearean reference without too much difficulty), but reading the passage again I though that there was at most one word - incarnadines - that might cause problems and that the long sentences required care in navigation but otherwise the passage was not especially problematic.

Bearing in mind that the book is intended for degree level students (so far as I can determine from the City College of New York web site) are literacy levels of undergraduate students so impoverished these days? The book overall (especially the examples of assignments) seems to me not so much about the language of art and how to use it, but almost remedial level English.

Am I missing something? I do hope so.