In one version of this visual piece, I wanted to contemplate multiple levels of irony that can arise when artists try to use politics to advance their career. To make this project meaningful, I'll address ivory trade and the mass slaughter of elephants. The other version is made to be critical to myself as well.

I will touch upon inaccurate accusations in fetishism, improper use of term "cultural appropriation" together with distasteful use of works of individual artists, especially if their artwork in public domain or unattributed, and will offer an example of post-modernistic approach taken to absurdity.

Almost all cultures had violent pasts that led to tragic consequences. Almost all cultures created artifacts, which our modern creations might resemble. I wish modern societies come to a common ground about cultural appropriation to allow more freedom and respect among individuals of all backgrounds. We have right to learn from one another. Ideas are not under copyright* protection for a reason.

We live in a time of accelerating distraction of wildlife, intensified suffering in expanding slaughterhouses, highest concentration of capital and possibly power - these are objective truths. To solve these problems, we need to resist division and to talk about controversial subjects.

 Masks of Irony

Goals and Motivation

I made this piece of digital illustration in defense of one work of the great artist Pablo Picasso and an an African artist whose name was not even mentioned. I want to make a point that stealing their art is wrong.

Layers of Irony

In this rare for me conceptual piece I attempt to represent multiple layers of irony to analyze an installation of a person who is regarded as an artist in USA, where he used works of art created by others:

1. This person made a statement against appropriation and fetishizing of cultural artifacts by blatantly doing these very things in the same act.
2. This person was born in a rich democratic country, in a major cultural center, was able to get a good degree, to travel to other continents, and later received awards available only for the citizens.  There is no information that he helped any artists from the "third-world" from the awards he received.
   Yet, this person used complete works of a young Spaniard, surviving as an immigrant in a cultural center of his time (Paris), and of an unnamed artist from a poorer area, who had now opportunities to exhibit with any impact (Africa).
3. This person has chosen an easy target: a real creator who cannot defend himself anymore because he is dead, and even his art is now legally unprotected.
   Yet, this person himself was partially shielded politically as a member of a prominent minority in his home country, and people in media and liberal academia would not dare to voice any disapproval publicly, especially if they do not belong to the same group.
4. This person has chosen to accuse an artist who understood - one of the first in his cultural environment - the artistic qualities of African ritualistic objects and saw the makers as fellow artists from whom he could learn.
   Yet, this person equated him to all ruthless European colonizers, fighters for slave ownership from the Southern American States, and racist - all of whom regarded African artists as lower humans and did not consider their art worth displaying to artwork produced in their own culture.

Absurdity

To show how absurd it is to blame atrocities of colonialism on an artist instead of the profiting participants whose heirs could be still affluent and influential, I will create a satirical parody.

I will pretend to believe, that this person is responsible for the extinction of the multiple species of elephants on the African continent, and the ongoing illegal ivory trade, killing the survives ones. You ask why? Just because he has both European and African ancestors, and Benin supplied not only slaves to other continents, but also sold elephant tusks and ivory objects.

I do not want to live in society where modern Nigerians would need to apologize for keeping slaves in darkness, or Irish would blame Latin pornstars for mimicking Sheela-na-gig.

Main Topic

Elephants are still dying for "art" and this is my main concern in this work. This work would not worth the time to me without addressing something serious as ivory trade, banned only recently, in July 2016, in the United States. Still, about 30,00 elephants dye every year for ivory demanded by low- and middle class consumers.

My Biggest Difficulty

Working on the visuals was partially pleasant, and least on the state of the composition. But besides the obvious revulsion I had diving into the trading places to find pictures of usable pre-ban ivory objects, I had the main difficulty with realization of how much nonsense interpretations of post-modernistic brought into the academic live.

My research coincided with reading multiple artist statements by graduates of most prestigious schools that sounded like this: ...my work utilizes a visual vocabulary that juxtaposes differing perspectives to provoke conversations...

Francis Wheen, who finds it problematic when postmodernist theories go beyond evidence-based critical thinking, could have called it mumbo-jumbo. I laughed.

But still, as a reward, I became more appreciative of articles starting like this:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

Richard Dawkins, Postmodernism disrobed, Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143

Versions

Eyes Behind the Mask

My Eyes and Skiff Earrings

I have considered using my own eyes, even though the work looses the edginess and a bit of relevance. I could not find any connections between ivory and my white Middle and East European ancestors. Some of them were Scythes, hence the earrings, and some of whom were slaves to Mongols, and some might have been destroyed by Russian empire.

But I have one memory about ivory: in my early twenties, I bought an incomplete set of tiny elephant figures in an antique store, and realized only later that they were made out of some kind of bone. I was very upset. Only later someone told me it was just a white marble.  Still, to represent my possible participation, I made those six elephants into my tears on the image below.

In this form, the images says: there is an ongoing slaughter going on, consistent with the exterminating histories of our societies, and we are made busy with nonsensical, pretensions, distracting matters without applying critical thinking.

I am of mixed ethnicity too, so I can partially understand Wilson's internal conflict. But antagonistic  actions without proper research combined with improprieties do not help anybody, and just muddy the waters.

Eyes of the Museum Decorator

 In the second version, I used a modified and simplified liking of the derivative installationist. He is not recognizable this way, and I shaded one of his eyes to symbolize his mixed heritage.

Choice of Stile and Material

My Choice of Topic

During a lecture on arts, fetishizing of African culture was illustrated with a photograph of an installation by an US artist I did not know, who put an African mask on a reproduction of a Picasso's painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

The artist in question was Fred Wilson, born in a borough of New York City. The exhibition was Mining The Museum, 1992, Maryland Historical Society. 7 Years later, he received a MacArthur Foundation * “genius grant” in 1999 for extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction" reserved only for citizens or residents of the United States - with no strings attached, as an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. These stipends are $30,000-$75,000 a year, for five years: $150- 360K, which would have almost double purchasing power today.

So, this 38-year-old person appropriated works of two artists: 26-year old Picasso, who was trying to survive as an immigrant in Paris, and the maker of the artistic but irrelevant mask. And then he managed to make everyone believe that Picasso himself, the revolutionary co-founder of cubism who was amazed by the approach of African artists, was the one appropriating. Wilson put him next to the headless black statures and Koo-Klux-Klan clothing in the museum! 

Let me reiterate, Wilson simply attached a creation of one artist onto a creation of another, and added a video, which he did not produced, of the people to whom he did not belonged. While Picasso, inspired by an exhibition of African artifacts, which he alone back then saw as art and created his own way of representing a face on canvas, which he integrated it in his own complex original artwork, Wilson just made use of the reproduction and the object itself, claiming the authority to do so.

This individual made others believe that he can unlock some special meanings and elicit essential thoughts by combining anything that satisfies him. It worked: his installation was paid by the museum: $25,000 to arrange already existing things.

I get everything that satisfies my soul, from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them. <...>

I try to unlock the meaning of objects by juxtaposing and eliciting a conversation between them that creates an unexpected, but essential, thought.

Fred Wilson

First, I decided to generalize the idea of a person who makes his name in arts using hard work of artists, and was not going to mention Wilson. He seemed not to be excessively proud of this piece of installation long ago. Then, I found out that the "work" was sold. Specifically, to our local Strauss Family Foundation in San Diego*. They exhibited it over and over again as Art Type: Original. And no one pointed out, how inappropriate this all was - I might be the first, to my horror.

I also found a recent video where Wilson talks about art, saying nothing at all, and the footage prominently features this combination in question, which, by the way, he named Picasso/Who Rules?. The only criticism of his work I could easily find online was from the community of Indianapolis, who shut down Wilson's project, despite his mumbling something about juxtaposition in another lazy attempt to copy something. But Wilson won anyway: $51,000 of $325,000 commission was paid. Plus, the sculpture was awarded $50,000 from the private Joyce Foundation.

Questions I Have

I have a few questions:

1. Did Wilson think that being of African, Native American, European and Amerindian or African-American and Carib descent gives him the right to use other people's creations? Works of European artists because their skin tint is closer to that of the colonizers, and of African artists - because his own shade of skin color is similar? Or was it just because the copyright was expired?
2. Why did he choose a famous work of a widely regarded artist, instead of making something himself, based of the nastiest colonizers known? For example:
   
   1. Carl Peters, founder of the Society for German Colonization who was accused of arbitrary cruelty against the natives resulted in his dismissal from state service in 1897.
   2. Leopold II, king of Belgium (1835–1909), under whom people of Congo were abused and maimed by the Belgian colonial power.
   3. Francisco Félix de Sousa was a major slave trader and merchant who traded in palm oil, gold and slaves. He migrated from Brazil to Benin. He had had at least 80 children with women in his harem and continued to market slaves after the trade was abolished in most jurisdictions. He is still treated like a hero in Benin. Ouidah, the capital, has now monuments to de Souza across this city.
   4. Kings of Dahomey (Benin), who decided whom to sell as slaves from their captives and later citizens.
   5. Or many others, plus uncountable people who made big profits from colonization.
3.  Could someone from one European country be able to combine works by an artist from a neighboring country and a folk art piece from a village of European expats on another continent, put them together and declare it an original, without any cultural repercussion and criticism?
   Or for example, would it make any sense if I took a work of a Tatar (or Mongol) artist from 20-s century. combined it with a pysanka from Western Ukraine, and presented it as my own art, just because I want to make a point of a historical fact that i 15th-17th centuries, Crimean Tatar bands exported  millions slaves from Ukraine and that museums do not highlight it enough? Under what circumstances could it be appropriate?

In 1688, Tatars captured a record number of 60,000 Ukrainians.

Junius Rodriguez, The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 1997

Opinion

In my opinion, Willson should have never disrespected other's artists work this way to advance his career, and people around him should have prevented him from shamelessly using a complete copy of a famous painting and an entire original three-dimensional work as dominant parts of his installment. He has no moral right to claim these two pieces, and most likely the video, as his own creation.

The key question in the use of symbols or regalia associated with another identity group is not: What are my rights of ownership? Rather it's: Are my actions disrespectful?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times

 The topic of cultural appropriation can make some people to form absurd believes. In one of the recent debates I had, two people took it quite far, claiming that if someone leaves their country or people of origin, they automatically loose all the rights on their culture. So, if you have left your tribe, don't dare to dress like them anymore, or open a restaurant using your family recipes - they belong to the tribe.

I hope it is obvious to most readers, that only few minority cultures could survive this way, and historical migration of humans would be practically impossible. The non-native American culture would not exist, at all. And even Native Americans would be forced to live in tribes if they wanted to be fully themselves. Stripped of the land by violence and legal manipulation, they could not even take any advantage of the objects of the dominant culture they need to survive in: no t-shirts of fast food, for sure.

As others, I hope this is just a fad we all will overcome in a while.

My Choice of Literary Device

Irony, Sarcasm, Satire, Parody

As a primary rhetorical devise, I am going to use irony and its variations. Irony was the first think I perceived about the "artwork" in question, and I had an immediate sarcastic response. I believe that such tasteless art installations deserve satirical ridicule.

Irony - a sense that how things expected to be is very different from how they are.

Sarcasm - irony, in which words are used to communicate the opposite of their surface meaning.

Satire - use of humor, irony, and sarcasm to expose the perceived flaws.

Parody - imitation by means of satiric or ironic imitation.

I also use reduction to absurdity logical argument. Using the subject's of parody own methods on himself, I will show how absurd it is to accuse someone of bad deeds of his countrymen or ancestors, or just people with whom one shares a continent or elements of culture. Specifically, I am nonsensically make my subject guilty of ivory trade, just because some of his ancestors originated from the same continent with Benin, that produced lots of ivory objects. 

In logic, reductio ad absurdum  - a form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.


My Choice of Topic

Elephant Tusks Ivory

People kill elephants for their tasks to sell it as ivory. The fact that humans buy ivory objects till this day is an atrocity, and shame for whole humanity.

To stop the poacher, the trader must also be stopped. And to stop the trader, the final buyer must be convinced not to buy ivory. - Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president, 1989

Ivory - the hard, white material from the tusks and teeth of elephants, hippopotami, walruses, warthogs, sperm whales and narwhals, as well as now extinct mammoths and mastodons.

The international community banned the ivory trade in 1989, and for a while, it worked, stemming the drastic decline of the elephant population, which had dropped from 1.3 million to around 600,000 over the prior decade. But since 2007, large-scale poaching has resumed, and the elephant population has fallen as low as 419,000.

The reason? “Legal” ivory found a way back onto the global market. African countries were granted special permission to auction stockpiles of seized tusks worth millions of dollars.

Mark Strauss, National Geographic, 2015

Everyone who kill for ivory, trade it, use it as material, buy it and accept it as a gift, should rethink their choices, under the pressure of the rest of society if needed.

There are two living elephant species, the Asian elephant and the African elephant. <...> Ivory was traded widely from the 15th through the 19th centuries and was prized as a luxury item not only in Africa but throughout Europe and other parts of the world. <...> Today, elephants are hunted at rates higher than in which they can naturally reproduce. <...> Currently the country with the highest demand for ivory is China, followed by Japan, Thailand, and the United States.

The greatest threat, by far to elephants today however, is poaching (illegal killing), spurred by the global demand for ivory. Unlike deer that shed and regrow their antlers yearly, elephants do not shed their tusks; they must be killed (or severely injured) to harvest their ivory.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates there are approximately 415,000 African elephants in the wild today, compared to three to five million during the 19th century. During the 1980s African elephant populations decreased by almost 50 percent.

Smithsonian National Museum of African Art

My Visual Choices

Ancient or Antique Masks and Art Objects

 I have chosen to use ancient and antique masks and art objects created in different parts of the world. I wanted to illustrate two things:

1. Masks were created all over the world, they have multiple similarities, but they also differ if artistic approach in depiction of faces and emotions.
2.  One can find similarities in almost any depicted in art face to a mask of some kind - humans look very similar to each other, and we have reach histories of representational arts.

Artifacts and Sources

1.  Background: a photograph from the National Museum of Namibia - this tusks (ivory) came from forest elephants from 17 distinct herds, and was discovered on a sank Portuguese trading ship. Members of only four of these elephant family lineages are alive today.
2. Central: Sutton Hoo Helmet, Anglo-Saxon, about 7th century, treasures from the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, Brewminate;
3. Central top: Queen Mother Iyoba, ivory,  Edo peoples, 16th century; the Benin pendant ivory mask, Benin Empire; looted by the British during the Benin Expedition of 1897.
4. Central sides: Female bust on tusk, ivory, certificate FR1304102802-K.
5. Central lower sides: Earrings, gold, Scyths, Kul-Oba, 350-s BCE.
6. Top left: a traditional African mask, Wooden Devil, Maasai;
7. Top left-center: mask  Alutiiq-Sugpiaq, Native American, The Metropolitan Museum of Art;
8. Left: mask from Judean hills, pre-pottery Neolithic, 9,000 years old, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, (photo: Elie Posner);
9. Bottom left: Carthaginian grotesque terracotta mask, island of Sicily, circa 550–475 BC, The British Museum;
10. Top right-center: Native American mask of the Northwest Coast, Museum of Natural and Cultural History;
11. Top right: African traditional woman's mask, Senegal;
12. Right: jaguar mask, Filiberto Lopez Ortiz, Mixtec;
13. Right bottom: Baule style Ram mask, Akan peoples, Ivory Coast, Photograph: Tim Hamill;
14. Right center-bottom: Ancient African mask, Baulè people, 1930-s, Catawiki;
15. Tears: Antique carved ivory elephant figures, ivory, from various auctions.

Benin and the Slave Trade

For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States.

The trade largely stopped by the end of the 19th century, but Benin never fully confronted what had happened. The kingdoms that captured and sold slaves still exist today as tribal networks, and so do the groups that were raided. The descendants of slave merchants, like the de Souza family, remain among the nation’s most influential people, with a large degree of control over how Benin’s history is portrayed. <...>

Unlike some African countries, Benin has publicly acknowledged — in broad terms — its role in the slave trade. In 1992, the country held an international conference sponsored by UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency, that looked at where and how slaves were sold. In 1999, President Mathieu Kérékou visited a Baltimore church and fell to his knees during an apology to African Americans for Africa’s role in the slave trade.

The Institute of the Black World 21st Century, 2018

Kings of Benin made slave sale decisions for the fellow Africans the did not decapitate.

The kings of Dahomey (who had a minimum of 41 wives, as it’s a sacred number), were very much involved in the slave trade, it thrived in the region of Dahomey for almost three hundred years, beginning in 1472 with a trade agreement with Portuguese merchants, most notably Francisco de Sousa <...> The kings decided who should be enslaved and chose especially any prisoners from other tribes. Though court protocols, which demanded that a proportion of war captives from the kingdom's many battles be decapitated, decreased the number of enslaved people exported from the area.

Sue Rogers, Why Was Benin Known As the Slave Coast?, 2020

Ivory was one of the main art materials in Benin.

Artists of the Benin Kingdom were well known for working in many materials, particularly brass, wood, and ivory. - National Geographic, The Kingdom of Benin prospered from the 1200s to the 1800s C.E. in western Africa, in what is now Nigeria, 2020

Slavery in Benin continued well into 20-st century.

From "pre-European" times, Benin was one of the mightiest powers on the eastern Slave Coast.  The Portuguese probably reached Benin in 1472, but established strong relations with the kingdom only in 1485/86. <...>

From the late 16th to the late 17th century, Benin never sold its own citizens, but only female captives (including Igbo, Sobo, Ijaw, and others) captured in war or purchased from neighboring peoples.  From the mid-17th  to 18th centuries, however, slaves became the principal trade “goods” acquired by Europeans, and foreign male prisoners and eventually citizens of Benin itself were also sold abroad.  In the heyday of the slave trade, Benin supplied 3,000 slaves a year.  <...>

 The slave trade from Benin continued until the late 19th century, long after the official abolition of the overseas slave trade, and slavery existed within Biniland till the 1920s.  Most significantly, the course of Benin’s socio-cultural development was firmly established before the Europeans arrived.  Unlike some West African societies such as Ouidah and Calabar, Benin’s rise and decline were not determined primarily by the slave trade. <...>

Benin acquired captives mainly through slave raids on its neighbors, but European demand also stimulated trade with inland peoples. <...> The slave trade led to the depopulation of the inland areas from which people were taken away for sale.  It also led to a depreciation in the value attached to human life and freedom in Benin, as demonstrated by the enslavement and sale of free-born Bini and by an increase in human sacrifices – phenomena which continued till the end of the 19th century, despite the decline of the overseas slave trade.

Benin. In T. Falola, A. Warnock (eds.). Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 2007. P. 56-58 [accessed Feb 14 2022]

 Footnotes

Copyright of Ideas

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

U.S. Copyright Act, Section 102

Artists can independently make artworks of the same object matter, and each artwork is protected by copyright, and neither of them violating the copyright in the other one.

Common property and creations with no known authorship are not protected ether.

Foundations

* MacArthur Foundation: one of the reasons MacArthur originally set up this private foundation was to avoid taxes. Now, It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and gives ~ $260 million annually (less than 4%).

* Strauss Family Foundation, La Jolla, CA, Tax-exempt since March 1998, EIN: 33-0757653. Classification (NTEE), private independent foundation, nonprofit Tax Code designation: 501(c)(3).  Their expenses are consistently less than 10 % than millions in assets, multiple family members on the board. They have several family members on the board. I was not able to find out, whether they serve as volunteers.