Bicycle with Mustache 

There are many names and subtle meanings for the various types of artistic license. I have written as many as I could find across this appropriation of Rembrandt's self portrait.

 

All creativity, all culture begins with appropriation. We must steal and mix and bend and break and observe as be break and remake ideas and objects and our ideas of objects. Our creativity is build upon millions of years of biological evolution and thousands of years of cultural evolution. We can use the modern or the primitive, the abstract or realist, the graffitti or calligraphy, and so on because these are our cultural endowment. And to those who say

copyright; we say yes, so we will copy right. Artistic appropriation has a long and legal history.                                   

 

There are so many rules and taboos that would bind and delimit our creativity. Rembrandt went backrupt in later life saying, "Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy." And so in the end, it seems that Rembrandt did not copy himself and others enough. He had become an original, misunderstood, even to this day.  

 

At that point, perhaps, there was not much for him to steal in art. And so he simply tole and further invented his life. Similar, we must each steal our life; it will not be given.

​

TNN 1/4/2019