Where does appropriation collide?

In philosophy, appropriation is the act by which a person makes a previously unowned resource their own private property. John Locke's 1689 Two Treatises of Government argued, in its chapter on property, that a person appropriates something from the common store by mixing their own labour with it, so that gathering acorns or tilling a plot of ground turns a shared resource into individual property. In this meaning the referent is the first acquisition of ownership by a single person, and it is not a legal wrong against someone's identity, a strategy of reusing existing images as art, or the adoption of one group's cultural elements by another.[1]

Unit

One act of taking an unowned thing into private ownership through labour

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued philosophically through conditions such as labour-mixing and the proviso that enough and as good is left for others, not by empirical measurement

In tort law, appropriation is the unauthorised use of another person's name, likeness, or identity for the user's own benefit, most often commercial. William Prosser's 1960 article Privacy in the California Law Review sorted the scattered privacy case law into four separate wrongs and named appropriation as one of them: the taking of the plaintiff's name or likeness for the defendant's advantage. His four-part scheme was later absorbed into American tort doctrine and into the related right of publicity. The referent here is a civil wrong committed against a person's identity, and it is not the acquisition of property by labour, the reuse of images as art, or the adoption of another group's culture.[2]

Unit

One instance of using a person's identity without consent for gain

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established in litigation by showing the use of an identifiable person's name or likeness, without consent, for the defendant's benefit

In art criticism, appropriation is the deliberate reuse of existing images, objects, or styles as the substance of a new work, so that copying rather than original invention becomes the artistic act. Douglas Crimp's 1980 essay The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism in October described how artists such as Sherrie Levine rephotographed existing pictures to question authorship and originality, giving the practice its critical name. The strategy has a longer lineage in Marcel Duchamp's early twentieth-century readymades, but it was the late-1970s Pictures Generation that made appropriation a named method. The referent is a way of making art out of pre-existing material, unrelated to acquiring property, a privacy wrong, or cultural borrowing.[3]

Unit

One artwork built from pre-existing images or objects

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by critics through the visible reuse of a recognisable prior image or object within the new work

In communication and cultural studies, cultural appropriation is the use of one culture's symbols, artefacts, genres, or practices by members of another culture. Richard Rogers's 2006 article From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation in Communication Theory reviewed the scattered uses of the term and reframed it as a range of relations, from mutual exchange to exchange shaped by unequal power. In this meaning the referent is the movement of cultural elements across group boundaries, studied for how and under what conditions it occurs, and it differs from acquiring property, a privacy wrong, or reusing images in art.[4]

Unit

One instance of cultural elements crossing from one group to another

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed qualitatively by tracing which elements move between cultures and the power relations surrounding that movement