Let's Talk Art

Let's do an experiment. Let's forget that Spaminator deals with exploitation and instead let's do something creative. Let's look at some art.

I drew this picture of my friend while she was waiting for the bus.

It was pretty difficult to draw her like that without her noticing but I managed to get a sketch in between the 53 and 67 express routes. We were trying to get to the Starbucks on 5th street. Long wait for the bus that just didn't show up.

I was practicing my expressionist classical technique using a charcoal 2B pencil and my hemp paper sketchbook.

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Cool story right? Wrong.

There is no friend, there is no bus, and there is definitely no sketch.

This 'art' is traced. It took 5 minutes (timed) to trace and complete. 5 minutes.

Here is the original, kindly donated by @midlet, the real artist, for this experiment.

The heist went something like this: log in to Instagram, find suitable art to trace. About a minute of searching.

The original took a couple of hours to produce by a talented artist.

The fake took 5 minutes by someone who knows enough to make "sketch" marks with a pencil.

The person who traced this didn't have a sketch book but they did have a random pencil and a piece of computer paper. They also had a computer monitor to trace through. The style is different. Good luck tracking the original down. But it's still a 5 minute trace.

Meanwhile, the original artist, Midlet, has 17-18 years of professional art education and experience. That's almost two decades. The original art is real. The traced art is as fake as the story.

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Hive is unfortunately full of art theft. Often, its in the open. Even more often, its excused. Next time you curate a tracer, stop and think of the real artist and remember, theft of art is plagiarism. And plagiarism is fraud.