I Would Like You to be Pleased with the Idea

November 12, 2021 4:27 AM

After introducing himself, [Jasper] Johns told [Jéan-Marc] Togodgue about a decision he had made that would forever link the 91-year-old, Georgia-born art legend with the 17-year-old student and basketball standout. It would also spark a legal dispute — eventually settled — as well as raise questions about how artists use other people’s works to create their own. from How did this teenager’s drawing of his knee wind up in a Jasper Johns painting at the Whitney? [WP; archive]

The Complicated Story Behind Jasper Johns’s Dispute With a Cameroonian Teen Over a Drawing of a Knee (It Has a Happy Ending) (artnet)
Salisbury Gentleman Jéan-Marc Togodgue '22 [Salisbury School]
All the World in a ‘Slice’ of Art [NYT]

posted by chavenet (7 comments total)

This guy sounds like the richer, more famous version of the folks who want to pay freelancers with "exposure". I'm glad Togodgue had folks looking out for him.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 6:24 AM on November 12, 2021 [8 favorites]

The story is kind of a (not so-)funhouse mirror variation on the book Little Fires Everywhere.

In LFE, a town is roiled by an adoption scandal in which an Asian-American baby is appropriated adopted by a white couple under false pretenses. The hero of the story is an artist with a complicated past, who touches people's lives with her incredibly personal art.

In real life, famous artist appropriates immigrant, less successful artist gets (unsuccessfully) mad about it, town is roiled.
posted by anhedonic at 7:25 AM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Woof. Much as I loath to say it (because IMHO this can and does really get abused), maybe we could take more of a music sampling approach to something like this. The "transformative" artist needs to get permission from the original artists to sample their art, and percentages of ownership get hammered out from there.

Of course, then the orthopedic surgeon is going to try to argue that he's the equivalent of a producer who found the samples. I say he's more like the kid on the couch in the studio control room who rolls the joints. Give him 1%.
posted by queensissy at 9:10 AM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Johns uses everything, from everywhere, and it kind of feels like the work becomes his by his ability to choose and remix sources---what fascinates me about this work is that most of Johns sources for the last thirty years, are not well known. He will use a photograph of a detail of a Rodin sculpture, then flip it or put it backwards and then paint over it; or he will use a life magazine photograph of a soilder, and then do something similar; or he will do an extreme close up of a painting by Munch--there is a cottage industry to figure out exactly what Johns is curating. What fascinates me, is this is the first signifcant body of work in a very long time (since the early 90s maybe), where the source is explicitly transparent. I sort of give Johns a pass on the sampling and remixing, because they are so deeply transformative, that it becomes impossible to figure out who he is qouting from, but hte transparency here seems a little different. It also seems significant that it is of a body.
posted by PinkMoose at 12:34 PM on November 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

I went to a Jasper Johns (well, a Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch) exhibit at VMFA a couple of years back and his work was much bleaker and darker in person than they seem online.

I'm glad that Togodgue had people who are helping him out.
posted by SuzySmith at 12:36 PM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Johns uses everything, from everywhere

Yes, this.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:24 PM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think Wintermute was based on Johns. At least I'm going to start that rumor, because I want it to be true.
posted by mecran01 at 5:15 PM on November 13, 2021 [1 favorite]