A Fancy Word For Stealing

A Fancy Word For Stealing

Recently I saw the movie, The Words. The movie addresses plagiarism, which is the word for appropriating or copying the work of another.  Plagiarism doesn't just happen in the arts, but it is considered a very serious offense for an artist or writer.  The practice of plagiarism is unfortunately common because it is a very difficult offense to prove. I know several artists who have been knocked off by another artist but the only artist I know of who had the resources to legally pursue an offender (a former employee) is Dale Chihuly. He took the offender to court and won. 

A few years back one of my collectors called me and drew my attention to an image in a book of a piece of jewelry obviously influenced by my work.  In the late 1990s, I did a series of necklaces using small copper arms.  The arms were made by pulling a mold off of a plastic doll, casting the mold in wax and electro forming over the wax. One of my necklaces that used the little arms, below left, was published on the cover of American Craft Magazine, a periodical with a large, national readership.  For two months, the cropped image of my necklace was seen on thousands of magazine racks  around the country. The image on the right below shows the entire necklace entitled, Casting Pearls Before Swine.  

 

In all of the necklaces where I used the copper electro formed arms, the little hands were holding something and the necklace was inspired by a story. Below is the knock off neckpiece, using the exact same process, electro forming, and molded from the exact same doll entitled, Choked Offerings, by  someone named Carolina Cabellero.  Maybe Carolina was a student and didn't know better. My solution to the problem was to stop using the doll arm imagery.

  In The Words, the character played by Jeremy Irons hunts down the person who stole his book and confronts him. I got a lot of vicarious pleasure from watching the thief squirm.