Talking Squares

Ah the old Ceci n'est pas une pipe   argument, you say. No, I say. Obviously it's a picture, not a real living three-dimensional duck in your bedroom or office. But it's not a picture of a duck. Or a pipe.

It is a scan of a drawing of a sculpture of, well that's all I know. I was going to say a sculpture of a duck, but maybe the sculpture was based on, say a duck decoy for hunting, itself fashioned from a petraglyph, or from memory, or from a scanned-in drawing even. What if the egg never came, never mind came first?

Semantics to you, but in this age of the web and the disclosure it necessitates (because you get found out much quicker), do I disclose that my drummer from the Dominican Republic never actually drummed? I'm not referring to my painting being based on a sketch - which it was - but to the fact that the sketch was of a wooden statuette (and not the moving kind), albeit from the Dominican Republic. And that's why I sometimes have paintings called such as Dog On a Mantlepiece

Then again, aren't artists meant to pilfer, plagiarise, amend, and recompose - whilst not disclosing?

Or in short, who cares?