NEH Enduring Questions Course on Conceptions of Authenticity and Originality

FAIN: AQ-51006-14

Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)
Stephanie Christine Porras (Project Director: September 2013 to October 2016)

The development of an undergraduate honors colloquium on conceptions of authenticity and originality as debated in literature, music, philosophy, art, and the sciences.

The development of an undergraduate honors colloquium on conceptions of authenticity and originality as debated in literature, music, philosophy, art, and the sciences. Stephanie Porras, assistant professor of art history at Tulane University, develops a course that draws on legal, ethical, and technological issues alongside historical analysis and philosophical debate to explore the question, What is a copy? The first unit, Technology of the Copy, considers the history of reproduction from the invention of print, photography, digital duplication, and three-dimensional molds to gene sequencing. Readings include Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Paul Craddock's Scientific Investigation of Copies, Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy, Erasmus on printed books, Rainer Maria Rilke on Auguste Rodin's bronzes, and Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins." The second unit, Copy/Original, explores philosophical views on copying, cognition, and being. Readings include extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Leibniz, Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Marcus Boon. These theoretical perspectives are then integrated into discussions of aesthetic theory, anthropology, and psychology, thus providing a rich array of conceptual and critical vocabulary for students. Additional readings include Coleridge's On Poesy or Art; Freud's Totem and Taboo; Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel; and Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity. The third unit, Copies and Authorship, focuses on debates about innovation, originality, and artistic ownership. Topics include Dürer's ideas about copy and invention, sixth-century Chinese art theory, Brahms' defense of his first symphony, Arthur Danto on Warhol, and Gus van Sant's remake of Psycho. Readings include Forrest and Koos's Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice; Jacques Derrida's Copy, Archive, Signature; Marvin Carlson's The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine; and David Evans's Appropriation. The final unit, Appropriation, Depropriation and Theft, focuses on ethical, legal, and political ramifications of the copy. Students stage mock trials of recent high profile cases in plagiarism, forgery, and patent litigation. They read sections from Richard Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism, Siva Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs, and Howard Brody's Future of Bioethics. Films screened for the course include Banksy's 2010 Exit Through the Gift Shop, the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and its remake The Departed, and the documentary Good Copy, Bad Copy. Students create a course wiki and write a detailed analysis of a copy that they own.

Associated Products

What is a copy? website (Web Resource)
Title: What is a copy? website
Author: Stephanie Porras
Author: Elizabeth Mauermann
Author: Wiley Aker
Author: Megan Brown
Author: Olivia Gillingham
Author: Jenna Levine
Author: Gioia Spatafora
Author: Renata Voci
Author: Katherine Winford
Author: Emily Hogrefe Riboro
Abstract: A website containing online exhibitions produced by my seminar "What is a copy?" taught in the Fall 2015 at Tulane University. Students collected metadata, built records and curated online exhibitions of copies found in their rooms, encountered in readings and in their own research. The exhibitions incorporate reflections on readings done in the seminar and each student was responsible for populating and building an online exhibition on a copy or a copying practice for their final project.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.whatisacopy.com/omeka/
Primary URL Description: Website homepage
Secondary URL: http://www.whatisacopy.com/omeka/exhibits
Secondary URL Description: This page takes you directly to the list of exhibitions built by the seminar.

Copies, cannibals and conquerors: Maarten de Vos’s The Big Fish eat the Small (Article)
Title: Copies, cannibals and conquerors: Maarten de Vos’s The Big Fish eat the Small
Author: Stephanie Porras
Abstract: This article focuses on a single print by the Flemish artist Maarten de Vos, The Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a pastiche of earlier prints. The engraving's central figures copy Pieter Bruegel the Elder's imitation of Bosch for print publisher Hieronymus Cock, while the images of American Indians as cannibals derive from woodcuts. The print is discussed as commentating on materialism and acquisition as well as Antwerp's hegemony in trade, aligning the Spanish conquest of America with the ongoing battle for control in the Low Countries.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22145966-06401010
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website and download available to subscribers.
Secondary URL: http://www.academia.edu/10549324/Copies_cannibals_and_conquerors_Maarten_de_Voss_The_Big_Fish_Eat_the_Small
Secondary URL Description: The document as uploaded to my academia.edu page, available to other members of academia.edu.
Access Model: Subscription only, also placed on academia.edu
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art)
Publisher: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (Boston and Leiden: Brill)

Original Copies: Art and the Practice of Copying (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Original Copies: Art and the Practice of Copying
Author: Stephanie Porras
Author: Lena Bader
Author: Brigid von Preussen
Author: Rebecca Jayne Wade
Author: Adina Tamar Kamien-Kazhdan
Author: Giulia Paoletti
Abstract: Technologies of copying – printing, casting, digital duplication – have always engendered debates about artistic authorship and invention. Copying can be viewed as a debasement and as creative praxis. Albrecht Dürer complained about copyists but also advised young artists learning to draw to “copy the work of good masters until you attain a free hand.” Copying can also produce originality. Andy Warhol’s copies of Brillo Boxes expose this paradox, asking (in Arthur Danto’s words): “What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one is not?” This session brought together papers addressing techniques and functions of artworks that copy other objects (drawings, prints, casts, rubbings, photographs) produced from the early modern period to today, as well as the legal, ethical, philosophical and ontological issues embedded in copying in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The session encouraged a far-reaching dialogue about the problematic status of the copy in the history of art.
Date: 02/11/2015
Primary URL: http://conference2015.collegeart.org/programs/original-copies-art-and-the-practice-of-copying/
Primary URL Description: College Art Associatioin 2015 Conference online guide
Conference Name: College Art Association Annual Conference 2015

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