Abstract Painting: Rich in Content

Written by Staff Writer for PaintingTechnique.Org

Abstract painting should contain subject matter that will hold the attention of the beholder and should evoke an emotional response. Abstract art evokes many different types of reactions in people that include derisive remarks such as even a ten year old could have done that. To this the artist may retort that it requires some degree of mental ability to appreciate abstract paintings.

One needs to comprehend the elements as well as color and textures used in the abstract painting and also understand how all these elements interact with one another. Viewers of abstract paintings should try to figure out what the painting represents or looks like instead of finding something that ought to emerge out of the painting Also worth considering is whether the title is appropriate to what the painting is all about..

Thought Provoking Work of Art, But Frequently Depicting Beauty as Well

The abstract painting artist should worry about making the painting look beautiful as well as making the intentions of the abstract painting convey something special. The abstract painting should also be able to get the beholder to view the abstract painting and extract a meaning from it and also try to get the anticipated interpretation of the painting conform to the title.

It may not be widely known but abstract painting is not an invention of the twentieth century, as one would imagine. Early Jewish as well Islamic religion prohibited depicting human beings. This resulted in Jewish as well as Islamic cultures developing a different standard of decorative arts and calligraphy is one example of this.

Abstract painting artists have been influenced by theosophy that concerns itself with thought forms used to illustrate the psychic forces that are a result of emotions, music and other events.

Abstract painting artists place emphasis on visual sensations in their abstract paintings frequently through included harmonious arrangements of colors.

Abstract painting is a form of art in which the objects in the real world are not depicted and instead use is made of color and form in non-representational ways. Abstract paintings may elucidate real forms in simplified or reduced ways that keep only the illusion of the original subject and are often claimed to set in color something of the immutable and intrinsic aspects of the depicted object.

Ancient Art, Served on a Present-Day Platter

Monica Almeida

The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The Latin American collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is back on view after three years’ absence. And the reinstallation opens with a piquant flourish in a display of ancient

Entrance to the newly installed “Latin American Art: Ancient to Contemporary” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The artist, Jorge Pardo, who was born in Cuba, is well known for blurring the lines between art, architecture and design. Several years ago he turned the lobby of the Dia building on West 22nd Street in Manhattan into an all-over grid of brightly colored tiles: it was like a bathhouse conceived by Mondrian. The Mountain Bar, a music club he opened in this city’s gallery-packed Chinatown, is distinctive for its blood-red walls and a hanging garden of sculptural lamps.

In his design for the Los Angeles museum’s Mesoamerican collection, he has outdone himself in buzzy inventiveness. He has also, to some degree, done in the art consigned to his visual care.

For the new setting, Mr. Pardo, 45, has covered the lower walls of three galleries with units of stacked fiberboard sheets. The horizontal sheets, thinly cut, alternate with empty spaces of the same size to create a continuous light-dark stripe pattern running through the rooms. The sheets have in addition been shaped with curves and undulations, so the cavelike walls swell organically outward and recede into niches that become display cases. A few free-standing stacks suggest biomorphic sculptural forms that are also pedestals for other sculptures.

Finally, Mr. Pardo has accessorized the space with complicated colors (yellowish burgundy, electric green), zany little chandeliers and thick curtains of a taffeta-type fabric. All have counterparts in his bar design.

As an introduction to the rest of the more straightforwardly presented Latin American collection, Mr. Pardo’s extravaganza does what it is supposed to do: pull you in the door. The stripes and bulges grab and hold the eye. The colors and curtains are like cartoon versions of the faux-period embellishments we’re used to in museums. Here those conventions assume a goofy, festive air, which makes you realize how tacky the originals can be.

The trouble is that the pre- Columbian art gets lost in the décor. The museum’s collection, though relatively new, is very fine. It has superb holdings in ceramics from West Mexico and individual objects from across the Mesoamerican world that would shine in any North American institution. Virginia Fields, the museum’s curator of pre-Columbian art, memorably showcased the collection in “Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship” a few years ago, and has taken an intriguing thematic approach to it here.

But the logic of her arrangement becomes hard to follow because the art itself is hard to see. The stripes and curves distract from objects; the colors suddenly change their look. The green in particular leaches visually into terra-cotta sculptures, giving them a liverish cast. And why this green anyway? To evoke a primal jungle setting à la Quai Branly in Paris? If so, bad idea.

These days, design is a mainstream art-world hobbyhorse and political correctness is seriously uncool. (It always has been; people are just more relaxed about dissing it now.) So we’re probably not supposed to ask questions like: How come self-aggrandizing designs like Mr. Pardo’s, which obscure rather than enhance objects and their meanings, end up being applied to non-Western objects but only rarely to their Western counterparts?

Would the museum hang, say, Rembrandt or Degas or its stunningly yawnsome Broad collection in Mr. Pardo’s clamorous setting? If the answer is yes, great. By all means do it. Truly break some museological ground. But if the answer is no, or if there’s even a hesitation, the problem becomes obvious.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, like other museums, has begun to invite artists to design and organize shows. This is a fantastic idea, and the results can be inspired. John Baldessari’s “Magritte and Contemporary Art” there was; so was Kara Walker’s “After the Deluge” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. With Mr. Pardo the case is both less and more complicated. He was asked only to provide a visual context, not to choose what it would hold. This may help explain why his installation seems detached from the art it is meant to serve and overwhelms it, producing the equivalent of a Mesoamerican group show inside, and a subsidiary to, a contemporary solo exhibition.

None of this amounts to a crisis. It’s just revealing about where we are now on the politically correct front, and it’s part of one museum’s learning curve. I like Mr. Pardo’s vivacious sensibility; I just think it is misapplied here. And there are many models available for how it might have been done otherwise. The last few decades have seen a revolution in Western institutional approaches to presenting non-Western cultures. The Museum for African Art in New York has led the way. So has the Fowler Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the city’s major and undersung cultural resources.

The Fowler’s recent “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diaspora,” organized by Henry John Drewal, was an object lesson in how exhibition design can be visually magnetic, object-centered and idea-clarifying; how it can deliver both a big thrill and a hard think. The Los Angeles museum is aware of this gold mine of a resource — it recently invited a Fowler curator, Mary Nooter Roberts, to create its first African art display. Perhaps it will encourage its future artist-designers to pay the Fowler a visit. Artists, more than any art lovers on earth, will love what they see.

The art of naked vs. nude

By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic
Is Carla Bruni naked or nude? • This photograph of her unclothed body has been widely circulated through the media and the Internet since it was sold to an anonymous collector at a Christie’s auction on April 10 for what was considered the wildly inflated sum of $91,000, after Christie’s estimated its worth between $3,000 and $4,000.

Naked versus nude may seem like a small, irrelevant distinction in a debate over the propriety of the photograph’s sale. But those two words represent important and very different ways not only in how we look at an image but how we judge its value and the value of those involved in its creation. And a recent shift has occurred in how we might perceive and judge the photograph of Carla Bruni.

It was taken in 1993 by Michel Comte, a respected commercial photographer, when Bruni was a top model. Many months ago, it was a minor player in the sale of 135 photographs owned by the distinguished German collector Gert Elfering, not in the same league as, say, those by Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, both of whom were also represented and whose photographs were valued in the $100,000 range. Christie’s assessment of the Bruni-Comte photograph seemed spot-on because Comte is still living, he isn’t in the highest ranks of photographers and the Bruni photo isn’t from a special or limited-edition. And several months ago Bruni, 40, was just an ex-model with a fairly successful singing career and a string of famous lovers (e.g. Mick Jagger). Then in February she married Nicholas Sarkozy, president of France.

You can guess what happened next.

After the Bruni-Sarkozy wedding, Christie’s suddenly elevated the image to the small group of special photographs used to promote the auction. Bidding at the event went through the roof with the anonymous collector finally snagging the print for $91,000. And Madame Sarkozy’s birthday suit was posted far more frequently on Web sites than the little gray suits from Dior she wore on a state visit to Britain that same week.

She and her husband reportedly feel victimized and exploited by the sale. Knee-jerk reaction would concur.

But let’s look at her response through the prism of art history. The naked/nude question is a subcategory of — and inevitably leads to — the Big Question: What Is Art?

Bruni’s photograph has made it a more potent question not based on the photograph’s merits or even who she was in 1993. Its value now seems based on who she has become, a personage rather than a person, someone with the potential to exert influence, even power, on an international, political level.

Here’s what the late Lord Kenneth Clark, one of the most respected art historians of the 20th century and maybe of all time, said about naked versus nude in his classic book from the 1950s, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form:

“To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled, defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body.”

The bottom line for Clark was that nude is art and naked is not: “… in the greatest age of painting (the Renaissance), the nude inspired the greatest works.”

Nude confers power; naked implies helplessness. In an ironic coda for Bruni, the elevation that has given her access to a power base has also been the agent of its potential loss.

If we believe she is naked, we agree with her that she has been victimized and exploited; if she is nude, we view her as the fortunate subject of a work of art whose physical form is celebrated and glorified. And, it’s important to remember, that in 1993 she was at the top of her game and had collaborated often with Comte for fashion magazines such as Vogue. She was no desperate naif persuaded to remove her clothes by a cheesy adventurer.

The Medicis, an Italian renaissance family who had their own broad power base, were unequivocal about the woman Botticelli painted for them in The Birth of Venus (c. 1482-1486) which you see here in a pose similar to Bruni’s. It’s believed to be a homage to Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, the greatest beauty of her day who was loved by Giuliano de Medici. Like Bruni, she wears no clothes. Unlike Bruni, Simonetta — and her rich and famous boyfriend — would have considered the portrait and public interest in it honorable things.

“Look at my woman!” it proclaims. “Isn’t she gorgeous!”

President Sarkozy has made, at the time of this writing, no comment about his wife’s portrait.

Lord Clark, in discussing naked and nude, did not take very seriously the ascension of photography as an art form in the latter part of the 20th century and the role it would play in the genre of nude portraiture. As we all know, a photograph today can be manipulated every bit as much as a painting. But it has the illusion of unadulterated reality which affects our sensibilities about it, especially in this instance, with an immediacy and intimate directness. A photograph can convey a feeling of voyeurism far more often than a painting or sculpture. That and its potential to be endlessly reproduced often distinguish it in people’s minds from paintings and sculpture.

Nor did Clark reckon with the pervasive influence of popular contemporary culture. I can’t think of any women who look more “balanced, prosperous or confident” than Playboy centerfolds and the gals who happily pull up their shirts on their Web sites. And the highly paid models who remove their clothes for respected photographers.

And while I would disagree with those who claim a Hustler photograph as art, I would argue their right to have different definitions of art from mine, just as I would defend others at the opposite end of the spectrum in their right to believe that no representation of the unclothed body is art, that Botticelli’s unclothed Venus is as naked as Venus the Stripper on MySpace.

More common is the middle ground of those who would be enchanted by Botticelli and appalled by Helmut Newton’s provocative, subtly sado-masochistic photographs that have been published in every high-end magazine in the world.

As a point of reference, Newton’s Tied-Up Torso, a photograph of a bare-chested woman in semi-bondage get-up, went for $109,000 at the auction.

I am, of course, using a few words out of context from Clark’s lengthy discussion of a classic art genre to make a point about how personal our ideas are about the question, what is art?

This auction was not about prurience or aberrant tastes. It contained some true photographic masterworks, some of them nudes, along with landscapes, portraits and still lifes.

Examples from the auction and what they sold for:

• Irving Penn’s portrait of a nude Gisele Bundchen, $193,000

• Avedon’s Bridget Bardot (face only), $181,000

• Horst’s unidentified model wearing a Mainbocher corset, $133,000

• Penn’s portrait of Picasso (fully clothed), $133,000

• Richard Avedon’s semi-nude of Lauren Hutton, $127,000

• Penn’s nude of Kate Moss, $97,000

• Herb Ritts’ nude of Alek Wek (probably the most revealing nude in the group), $25,000

• Albert Watson’s nude of Kate Moss, $21,250

• David Bailey’s portrait of John Lennon and Paul McCartney (fully clothed), $16,250

• Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s documentary photograph of the moon’s surface from their Apollo craft, $6,250

• Garry Fabian Miller’s seascape, $6,250

• Michel Comte’s portrait of Jeff Koons (fully clothed) $3,250

• Comte’s nude of Carla Bruni, $91,000.

I expect you’re seeing a pattern. Except for the last example, which is the anomaly.

It’s an undistinguished photograph of a pretty girl in an awkward, postmodern pose, taken after a shoot for Italian Vogue according to Comte, the kind of outtake common with models and photographers who are comfortable with each other. It looks quickly and casually made with none of the care taken to pose and compose an image that you see in many other photographs from the auction. And, according to a description by Christie’s, it is unsigned and has no reference to the number of prints Comte has made of the image, unlike almost all other high-priced photographs in the auction which are part of very small, beautifully made limited editions. It was in the lowest category of Christie’s estimates for those reasons.

When my editors and I talked about this story, I argued hard for inclusion of the complete photograph of Carla Bruni. They decided against it (the naked/nude thing again).

Now I believe they were right.

I can only hope Anonymous Collector bought it for the best reason in the world, because he loved it.

I’m skeptical.

I can imagine a scenario in which the French president and first lady go on some state visit and encounter Anonymous Collector who will say to her, “Oh, Carla, how nice to see you in clothes!”

I can also image a scenario in 10, 20 or 30 years, when Carla Bruni is no longer a personage and Anonymous Collector will realize that this was not investment art.

If the photograph had sold for $4,000, Carla Bruni would be nude.

At $91,000, Carla Bruni is naked.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293
or lennie@sptimes.com.

Nike’s New Community of Artists

Posted by: Helen Walters

Everyone’s been talking about the Nike Plus community of runners and athletes for years now. It was a really smart use of technology which displayed its creators’ grasp of how to tune into social networks in an appropriate and useful fashion. Now Nike’s at it again, with the 1/1 program.

This is more of a stretch — an attempt to build a community of artists around the Nike brand and the theme of football (soccer). People join the 1/1 community and submit a football-themed piece of artwork which is then displayed in the online gallery (which has a bit of an annoyingly complex interface, but bear with it). 11 winners will be shown at a real-world exhibition in Basel, alongside the work of 11 professional creatives. One will be used on a limited edition pair of shoes.

The whole thing is being curated by the uber-hot fashion/design/creative site, ShowStudio, pioneered by photographer Nick Knight, which has been at the forefront of multimedia experimentation for many years now. They picked the 11 pros, including the designer, Dominic Wilcox, whose stunning case for a pair of Nike shoes and sculpture (both made from toy plastic football figures) are shown above and after the jump.

It’s a smart move for Nike, whose brand has worked hard to align with the creative community. In this instance, the community aspect of the program is hosted on Myspace, so no need to build a costly backend system. And while the quality of the resulting artwork will surely be mixed, it’s a really fun, loose and open project. Meantime, check out another of Wilcox’s pieces here…

Beginning to Draw

By Artacademy.com

Acquiring a solid foundational skill-set for drawing takes about three to six months of dedicated study and practice.

In your initial study the most important skill to be developed is the ability to strike the arabesque with a consistent accuracy of shape and proportion.

Everything else builds upon and is a refinement of this one all-important skill.

The critical matrix of skills that the beginner artist needs to acquire is the ability to accurately assess proportion and shape and the understanding of rendering plastic form (which is the illusion of 3-dimensionality in realist drawing).

Accurately assessing and drawing an object’s outside shape is called striking the arabesque.

Other terms for this are contour, mise en trait, and outline. I prefer the term arabesque as it implies a dynamic gestural rhythm imparting a sense of life into one’s drawing.

Acquiring the ability to consistently strike an accurate arabesque is the singular foundation upon which your drawing and painting skills are subsequently built and honed.

For the beginner this is the first important skill to be learned.

This all-important skill is easily learned by working through a series of deceptively simple exercises that quickly build up your powers of observation and spatial awareness.

The next drawing lesson for the beginner is to learn how to accurately gauge the internal proportions of their subject. This is establishing, or fixing, the placement of the major land-marks. In portrait drawing this would be the features (eyes, nose, hairline, etc.).

Once the beginner has a working competency in striking the arabesque and fixing the landmarks in their drawing the subsequent skill to be developed is rendering tone. Rendering tone, more commonly known as shading, is what creates the illusion of 3-dimensional reality in your drawing.

Rendering tone convincingly requires the drawing skills of blocking in, cross-hatching, edging (soft & hard), understanding the effects of light, lifting out and stumping in.

This illusion of 3-dimensional reality is called plasticity. Plasticity is defined as giving form to an object.

The artist lacking these skills will quickly realize their importance as they continue to struggle with their drawing over and over again.

Do you find yourself struggling with the same issues in every drawing? Is the proportion in your drawing always a bit off, or the shape doesn’t look quite right. Is your shading (tone) scratchy and unconvincing? These drawing problems are the same for every beginner.

The critical foundational skills of accurately striking the arabesque and convincingly rendering tone can be acquired – when properly taught.

And this is the important distinction.

As a beginner your initial focus should be on acquiring the drawing skill of striking the arabesque. This is a two-part process: first, you need to learn how to accurately adjudge proportion; second, assessing shape is the next step.

Possessing the singular skill of accurately striking an arabesque is the most important lesson the beginner can acquire. It is this skill that most people equate with drawing ‘talent’. Yet striking an arabesque is easily learned.

Setting up my art studio

By Anna on seebedraw.blogspot.com

As I recently moved, I have spent much time thinking about how to set up an art studio in my new home. The following list contains a few of the things I considered:

1. What work areas do I need? I really needed three distinct work areas, for art, office, and gallery/storage of completed work. With some planning, even a small space can be configured to contain three different work areas. However, in my previous studio I had only one work area, which was problematic.
2. What do I first see when I enter the studio? I spent a few weeks moving furniture around and mocking up space with cardboard boxes before I arrived at a satisfactory solution. First, I positioned the office area close to the door, which gave the office too much visibility. Since I wanted the art to be the main focus, I ended up moving the office area to the opposite corner and instead position the art and gallery areas closer to the door. Now, every time I pass by my studio, I see the art work area and can’t wait to create!
3. Will I accept visitors or not? If you do, you may want a space to display your art right as they enter.
4. Do I prefer creative simplicity or creative clutter? Having lived in a small and cluttered space for the past several years, I yearned for a spacious studio in white, with few colors or decorations. I accomplished this by keeping only the essentials in my studio, and by using cabinets, drawer units, and closets to keep things away from my line of sight.
5. What color scheme inspires me the most? For me, a restful white! I see this as a blank sheet of paper, ready for art to happen! Some of my friends take the opposite approach, and prefer bright colors or patterns as starting-points for their imagination.
6. What is behind my desk? There are many options: a wall behind the desk for pinning up inspirational images, a blank wall, a window, or a free-standing desk without a wall behind it. I ended up with a bit of each!
7. Where do I want the light to come from? I knew that I wanted the art area positioned with natural daylight coming from the left, not only because I am righthanded, but also since I prefer setting up my subject matters daylit from the left. The only way to accomplish this was to position one table at a 90 degree angle to the wall. This table now functions as a divider between my two work areas, the office and art/gallery.
8. When do I work in my studio? Depending on work hours, the studio may be used at different times. This relates to the previous question, as a west-facing window may be fine to face in the morning, but may cause heat and glare in the afternoon and evening.
9. Do I need space for growth? At this point, my gallery area is almost empty and there is also plenty of free space on shelves and in cabinets. To be able to grow, space is definitely needed!

A final tip: I ended up mocking up my space using large cardboard moving boxes. This turned out to be very helpful as a two-dimensional plan drawing rarely conveys the three-dimensional experience of a space.

The artist next door

Projo.com

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 6, 2008

A new survey highlights the growing importance of artists to the U.S. economy. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly 2 million Americans are now employed as artists. As workforces go, that’s about double the size of the Army.

It is no easy life. On average, artists earn less than other professionals with the same level of education. (The median income for dancers is a measly $20,000 a year.) About 13 percent say they hold a second job. Yet the arts pour cash into the economy while enriching the culture. In fact, “the creative economy” has become a new buzz phrase, as state and local governments seek to capitalize on cultural activity. Artists are often credited with reviving decrepit neighborhoods. They also seem to lure a more skilled, creative class to areas where they work.

Perhaps because of the Rhode Island School of Design’s high profile, the Ocean State is commonly thought to be teeming with artists. Well, that’s been exaggerated. The largest numbers of artists are in California and New York. On a per-capita basis, New York has the most, and California is second. Massachusetts comes in 3rd, with Rhode Island placing a fairly distant 12th. (The rankings come from Census figures for 2000.)

It is notoriously difficult to classify (and hence count) artists. A report from the advocacy group Americans for the Arts found 13,000 Rhode Islanders employed in arts-related businesses last year, using data gathered by Dun & Bradstreet. The NEA numbers tend to be smaller. Disappointingly, the agency found that the number of Rhode Island artists had dropped 5.7 percent between 2000 and the years 2003-05, from 8,240 to just 7,770.

As regions go, New England is a strong leader in the arts, particularly in design, a broad category that embraces fashion, floral and interior design, among other things. In design, Rhode Island ranks third per capita, behind Massachusetts (first) and Connecticut (second). But the Ocean State is not even in the top 15 when it comes to fine artists, art directors and animators, three other design sub-categories.

The strong showing by Massachusetts is probably no accident. A new commitment to the arts seems to have gathered force. The Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, just announced it had reached the $500 million fund-raising goal tied to its planned expansion. No other arts organization in the state has ever come close.

In addition, early last month, Governor Patrick announced a new state position, “creative-economy” director, to be filled by Jason S. Schupbach. His job is to encourage creative enterprises and thereby promote economic development.

Rhode Island should generally avoid directly supporting chosen industries. But officials should keep a close eye on how the arts affect the state’s economy, as well as on any lessons to be learned from the Bay State. Rhode Islanders already value the arts; if called upon, they are bound to be creative in keeping them afloat.

The Image Is Familiar; the Pitch Isn’t

Spencer Tunick

A 2005 photograph by Spencer Tunick.

By MIA FINEMAN

The New York Times

Published: July 13, 2008

IN February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show.

The 30-second spot featured a rapid-fire montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters — including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman and Betty Rubble — picking up the telephone and saying “Hello.” It ended with a shot of the soon-to-be-released iPhone.

Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it.

“I was very surprised,” he said recently by phone from London. Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video “Telephones,” which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay’s signature works, has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States.

About a year before, Mr. Marclay said, Apple had approached the Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents his work in New York, about using “Telephones” in an advertisement.

“I told them I didn’t want to do it,” he said. His main concern, he said, was that “advertisers on that scale have so much power and visibility” and that “everyone would think of my video as the Apple iPhone ad.”

Mr. Marclay said he spoke with a lawyer after learning of the commercial but decided not to pursue legal action. “When people with that much power and money copy you, there’s not much you can do,” he said.

In any case he did not want a controversy to draw attention to his own appropriations of scenes from other sources — mostly Hollywood movies — without permission from the copyright holders.

“I don’t consider what I do stealing,” Mr. Marclay said. “I’m quoting cultural references that everyone is familiar with. I make art that reflects the culture I live in.” And unlike advertisers, he said, “I’m not trying to sell phones.”

Contacted by telephone and e-mail, neither Apple nor its advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, would comment on the iPhone ad for this article.

Artists have been appropriating images from Madison Avenue for decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol made silk-screened copies of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans. In the 1980s Richard Prince rephotographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself.

But what happens when the tables are turned? In recent years a number of advertising campaigns have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. And the artists who believe their images and ideas have been appropriated are not happy about it.

Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements. “It does seem like advertising people are pushing the envelope on this,” he said. “They’re being more and more brazen in their borrowing. On the one hand they should be mining the art world for inspiration, and you would expect them to be referencing works that people are familiar with. But more and more they seem to be getting into the territory of blatant rip-offs.”

The law governing the unauthorized use of copyrighted images and ideas, he said, is notoriously murky. “Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it only protects expression. The question is, where do you draw the line? Is the agency being inspired by the idea? Or did they copy the artist’s expression?”

When artists go after advertisers in such cases, the disputes are most often settled out of court. But there have been a few notable cases in which artists successfully sued advertisers for copyright infringement.

In 1987 a federal court granted summary judgment to the artist Saul Steinberg, who claimed that a poster for the Columbia Pictures film “Moscow on the Hudson” copied his famous New Yorker cover “View of the World From 9th Avenue.” (Like Steinberg’s drawing, the poster had a detailed rendering of four Manhattan city blocks in the foreground and a sketchy view of the rest of the world in the background.)

In May 2007 a French judge ordered the fashion designer John Galliano to pay 200,000 euros, or about $270,000, to the photographer William Klein in a dispute over a series of magazine ads that mimicked Mr. Klein’s technique of painting bright strokes of color on enlarged contact sheets.

Recently Mr. Zaretsky was approached by the artist Spencer Tunick, who is known for his photographs of large installations of naked people in public places around the world. Mr. Tunick was concerned about a television commercial for Vaseline shown in Europe and the United States in 2007.

The 60-second spot, called “Sea of Skin,” features large groups of naked men and women posed in artful configurations in various outdoor settings. They stand and sway in a forest, sit on a concrete rooftop, bounce gently in a glacial lake and wave their arms on a city street.

“There was such a close resemblance to my work that it was uncanny,” Mr. Tunick said in an interview. “When I saw the ad, I thought it was definitely inspired by my photographs and videos of installations.”

Was it? Not according to Kevin Roddy, the executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, who developed the commercial for Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever.

“I’m familiar with Spencer’s work,” Mr. Roddy said, “but I can’t say that was an influence at all. Spencer is about masses of people and nudity. We’re about representing the functionality of skin. Sure, it’s hundreds of thousands of bodies, but they’re meant to represent one thing: skin.”

Mr. Tunick said he had not decided whether to pursue legal action.

In some cases artists who see variations on their own images may be victims of their own popular success.

In the late 1990s there were several well-publicized disputes in which young British art stars accused advertisers of pilfering their ideas. The conflicts arose around the time the so-called Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.’s, were featured in “Sensation,” a 1997 London exhibition of contemporary art from the collection of the British advertising mogul Charles Saatchi that later traveled to Berlin and New York.

In 1998 one of those artists, Gillian Wearing, complained that a Volkswagen commercial featuring people holding handwritten signs had copied the style and idea of her series of photographs titled “Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say” (1992-93).

For her series Ms. Wearing photographed people on the street holding paper signs on which they had written brief statements describing their feelings or states of mind. In the best-known image a smirking young man in a business suit holds a sign that reads, “I’m desperate.” Similarly the Volkswagen ad includes a shot of a tough-looking security guard who holds a sign bearing the word “sensitive.” Ms. Wearing did not pursue legal action.

The following year Damien Hirst threatened to sue British Airways over a billboard for its low-cost subsidiary Go that featured a grid of colored dots. Mr. Hirst claimed that the design was based on his paintings of grids of colored dots against white backgrounds. At the time a spokesman for Mr. Hirst told the newspaper The Independent that he had discussed licensing his dot paintings to British Airways, but that the deal had fallen through.

Advertisers have traditionally tapped into the cultural cachet of fine art by commissioning works for hire. From 1950 to 1975 a Chicago company, the Container Corporation of America, commissioned dozens of artists — including Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Willem de Kooning — to create paintings that were reproduced in print ads that ran in upscale magazines like Fortune.

In 1985 Absolut vodka began its famous magazine ad campaign featuring variations on the distinctive shape of its bottle, executed by hundreds of contemporary artists, among them Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Lisa Yuskavage.

But plenty of other artists have staunchly resisted agencies’ requests to license their work.

Mr. Tunick said he had been asked to work on campaigns for Dove, Lipton, Microsoft and Blue Cross Blue Shield, among others. “I think I get two e-mails a week from ad executives or publicists who want to use my work, and I always tell them I’m not an advertising photographer,” he said.

The Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have turned down numerous requests from ad agencies interested in licensing their award-winning 30-minute short film, “Der Lauf der Dinge” (“The Way Things Go”). Produced in 1987, it follows a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction in which everyday objects like string, balloons, buckets and tires are propelled by means of fire, pouring liquids and gravity.

Yet in April 2003 Honda ran a two-minute television commercial, “Cog,” in which various parts of a car — tires, seats, windshield wipers — form a dominolike chain reaction that culminates when an Accord rolls down a ramp as a voice-over (read by Garrison Keillor) intones, “Isn’t it great when things just work?”

At the time Mr. Fischli told Creative Review magazine: “We’ve been getting a lot of mail saying, ‘Oh, you’ve sold the idea to Honda.’ We don’t want people to think this. We made ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ for consumption as art.”

In a strange twist the Honda “Cog” ad, which was developed by Wieden & Kennedy, has inspired several parodies of its own, including commercials for BBC Radio and the British directory assistance service 118. The chain reaction of creative influence, imitation and homage was the focus of a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London during a retrospective of Mr. Fischli and Mr. Weiss’s work there in 2006.

In an age when sampling and appropriation have become widespread practices in contemporary art and in the culture at large, some find it paradoxical that artists are now guarding their own creations more vigilantly.

Michael Lobel, a professor of 20th-century art at Purchase College who has written about Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Prince, said the easy availability of digital images on the Web had helped foster this defensiveness.

“There’s a broader consciousness among artists about owning their work and keeping tight control over its distribution,” he said. “The more available images have become, the more of a countermovement there is to clamp down on them.”

Mr. Lobel said that while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. “Culture is about ongoing borrowing,” he said. “It’s about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses.”

The cycle of influence goes round and round: Ad agencies borrow from artists who borrow from advertising. Isn’t it great when things just work?