The last few days, I have been following a story about yet another up-and-coming young artist-designer who couldn’t resist the temptation to take the work of other artist-designers and call it her own. This time it isn’t a case of one small thing here and one small thing there. It looks very much like her entire university portfolio, therefore the majority of her body of work thus far, is comprised of the work of someone else … as are things she won awards for supposedly designing.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how much this disgusts me. Here I sit, doing my various arts and crafts, trying my best not to even do things in the same style as someone else, and there are so many others out there who just willfully steal what they want and call it their own. It’s true, to some extent, that this has always happened, but people (artists and non-artists alike) used to be universally appalled when the person was found out. That is no longer the case. A great many people today, not understanding such things as copyright, trademark, intellectual property, and plagiarism, see little problem with taking something that doesn’t belong to them, which they did not create, and using it however they see fit. It happens with text as well, and in many other fields of creative endeavor. It’s becoming a culture … a selfish, greedy, and unethical culture. A lazy culture.

And so ends this morning’s mini-rant on yet another young artist-designer who might have had some talent of her own (she did get into a nice art school) choosing instead to waste her days and time tracing preexisting works instead of doing the hard work … making her own art as good or better than what she chose to steal.