Rebecca Black, Friday vs. The Beatles, A Day in the Life. Thanks to I Love Charts for posting my submission. This is a better-formatted version of my earlier brain dropping, although I’m certainly not the first one to notice the similarity in the two songs’ lyrics.

blakegopnik:

Daily Pic (afternoon edition): When I woke up to my New York Times yesterday, the cover of “T,” its style magazine, caught my eye: It had a photo of the actress Salma Hayek’s face, lit by a burning match she was holding in her teeth. I like looking at Hayek as much as anyone, but it wasn’t her beauty I found arresting. It was the fact that the portrait seemed a take-off on a 2003 image by New York artist Josephine Meckseper.

I know, because that photo was hanging on her studio wall when I interviewed her for her first mass-media profile, in the Washington Post in 2004, and we ran the photo big with the piece.

Yesterday, I assumed that the Times photo was a deliberate homage. Today, I’m hearing that Meckseper hadn’t known about the Hayek image until it appeared.

More on this, at TheDailyBeast.com, as I collect the facts.

… and now those facts have started to come in, and are almost stranger than fiction.

Sally Singer, T magazine’s editor, reached by phone as she got off a plane in Paris, said that “I had no knowledge of Meckseper’s image, nor did Cass” – meaning Cass Bird, the cover’s photographer. That’s perfectly credible, given that Meckseper’s fame may not echo much beyond fine-art circles. Meckseper’s New York dealer, Elizabeth Dee, said that “the entire art world sees this [magazine cover] as a Josephine Meckseper adaptation.” She cites the moment in 2006 when Meckseper’s match-lit image was on banners and posters all over London, advertising the “U.S.A. Today” show at the Royal Academy.  Dee is clearly right about the art world  – look at my own immediate reaction – but that doesn’t mean anyone outside artistic circles would have known the image.

Singer said that if Meckseper had been an influence, they would certainly have given her credit. And anyway, she went on, there was a direct source for T’s cover image, and it wasn’t Meckseper’s photo: It was an image by the great 1960s fashion photographer Melvin Sokolsky, also of a model with a lit match in her mouth. “It’s interesting that a young artist would also riff on Sokolsky,” she said, turning the tables on Meckseper. But when asked why Sokolsky, then, didn’t get any kind of credit for the image in T, Singer got angry and defensive, repeating the mantras “I think the shoot speaks for itself” and “It’s an arresting and beautiful image of Selma Hayek.” She also made the far-fetched claim that it was clear that the cover referenced older fashion photos, because some are mentioned in the text of the story. And then she reversed herself again, saying that her readers would not, in fact, have read the cover as a Sokolsky homage: “I think they’ll read it as an arresting image of Selma Hayek.”

There was a precedent at T that Singer could have followed, although it’s from before her time at the magazine: In 2009, the winter travel issue ran a photograph by Camilla Akrans that was a similarly close knockoff of an older picture by Art Kane – who was given credit as its source.

There’s no copyright issue, here. You can’t sue over the overall look of an image or a model’s pose. (Well, you could sue, but you might very well lose.) Artists have always riffed on each other’s work, but when the borrowing’s very close, these days it is common to give credit – to avoid just this kind of kerfuffle.

But in this case the question remains, who should be crediting whom? Or maybe an image of a lady with a match in her mouth is something any clever artist might think of.

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the Art Beast page at thedailybeast.com.