Barneys Vs. Pierson: or The Irony of "Owning" an Appropriated Vocabulary

Tyler and Barry have both been all over this, but I still wanted to flesh out some of the details on the Barneys vs. Jack Pierson scrap (which is really playing itself out in public as Barneys vs. Cheim & Read, but...[image to right, Jack Pierson, Fame, 2005, Plastic, metal, wood, and neon, 160" x 45" x 4" vertical install, image from Cheim and Read website]). As fate would have it, the day before the gallery's letter hit the blogosphere, I had walked by Barney's Co-op store in Soho and caught a glimpse of the fake Piersons there. My first thought, being the naive country bumpkin I am, was "Wow, Barneys has quite an impressive art budget to be able to afford such big Piersons for their boutique...and rare ones at that...I've never seen those before."

A few feet later it did dawn on me (yes, I'm slow like that) that the text was too obvious to be a real Pierson and that the store had likely appropriated the vocabulary in an attempt to lure in art savvy types...or that they just liked the aesthetic.

Now if you haven't seen it, the gist of Pierson's gallery's complaint is as follows:

Around a year or so ago, imitations or forgeries of [Pierson's] works began to appear in Barney’s clothing stores throughout the country saying such things as "fabulous, courageous, and outrageous." They are formally weak plagiarized versions of Jack Pierson’s work and we want you to know that they are not by Jack Pierson. Many people have assumed they are. They are, in fact, made by Simon Doonan, the chief window dresser at Barney’s. Jack Pierson has asked that he remove them but he has refused.

We regret this lack of integrity on the part of Simon Doonan and Barney’s. They obviously have no respect for artists or the art world. [emphasis mine]

And I fully agree with C&R's assessment of the pieces...they stretch out too far and, again, the text is lame...they're lazy knock-offs designed to appeal to folks who know just enough to be flattered that their sophisticated tastes are being catered to (er, yes, I was temporarily fooled...make of that what you will).

Now there's an argument to be made that indeed Barneys is showing a lack of respect for the art world here (i.e., who else would assume the text was "art"?), but what really intrigues me about this episode is the assertion that a visual vocabulary of appropriated lettering is now owned by the artist who assembled it.

Obviously, I immediately recognized the text as Pierson-esque, so in that sense, Jack does own it. But the argument C&R makes (while I viscerally agree) does seem as if it might fall apart in court. When an artist appropriates other vocabularies, images, styles, etc., at what point can he/she claim that new mix as his/her own? When the art world recongizes it as theirs or when the general public recognizes it as theirs or never?

Consider this an open thread.