How 'Piracy' Made One Artist Famous... Pre-Internet

from the it's-not-a-new-thing dept

Blenster points us to this fascinating post by Jonathan Akwue, in which he discusses how a piece of artwork he created a few decades ago actually became "famous," because of a bootleg poster maker who made a ton of unauthorized posters that got around quickly. Here's the image, which you may have seen (I definitely recall seeing it in the past, but had no idea of its background): Akwue talks about the process that resulted in the creation of the poster (that's him in front of it with his son above), and how he was even worried about the potential for bootleg copies of the poster. And, not surprisingly, he was upset when it first was bootlegged. But in retrospect he realizes that the bootlegger was much more efficient at getting his poster distributed and that helped him:

But something else happened. Among a certain set of people I became (almost) famous – or at least my picture did. Stan’s distribution network was far more extensive than I could have imagined. As a result the image cropped up in all sorts of places, from inner-city street corners to suburban offices. A friend spotted it on TV hanging on the wall of an architect’s home in New York. My brother found a reproduction in a street market in Switzerland.

The bootlegged copies didn’t entirely kill the market for the legitimate ones either. As the unauthorized prints were unsigned, the limited edition of 500 was sold to those who were willing to pay extra for a signed copy.

In the end, he compares this to similar cases in the internet era, such as with Adam Mansbach's Go the F**k to Sleep, and realizes that perhaps the bootlegging wasn't so bad:

I only ever met Stan once, in a council flat in Greenwich that served as a base for his bootlegging operations. I have no idea what happened to him, or if he got his comeuppance in the end. But if I did meet him again I’m not sure what I’d say. Perhaps it should be ‘Thanks’.

Filed Under: culture, fame, jonathan akwue, piracy, posters