Beau Bo D’Or

4 Responses to “Gordon Brown Lets Down The ‘Little People’”

1. 1 mark reed
   Apr 18th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

   At least you apologised. I don’t see the rip off merchants selling bootleg Banksy tshirts, hooded tops, and art prints from Camden to Brighton apologising.

2. 2 Beau Bo D'Or
   Apr 18th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

   I assume from this you believe I’m a rip-off merchant.
   Whether or not this is the case, it’s probably best to clarify my use of the image :

   The original image used here (in fact both) have been paid for by myself. I have an account with an image library which I use for any commercial work.
   Paying for these images cost two-thirds of my fee for this photomontage.
   The media that I have and had agreements would not accept anything without having the rights cleared.
   In addition to this, I’d point out that Banksy, Kennard and others use images from other sources in either their own work or as a base from which their own work is derived.(Reservoir Dogs, Vettriano, Vietnam, Blair taking a photo of himself.)
   In no way am I putting myself anywhere near the bottom rung of the ladder which these guys have climbed.
   However, I believe that everyone has the right to use other imagery to create derivative works commercially or non-commercially.
   In this case, it was a commercial job but I have done the right thing by the original photographers through the picture agency I use.
   Although the original artist may not get a cut, with all due respect to Banksy et al, I don’t see the creators of the original artwork on which they have sometimes based their (wonderful) derivative works getting a cut. (Before Banksy became big box-office, I don’t believe he paid anyone for the use of their brickwork and concrete canvases.)
   But I do acknowledge that for non-commercial stuff, I rarely use paid-for images.
   You will see that I attempted to keep the word Banksy out of the original post so the search engines would not pick it up.
   This is not me hiding the image - I’ve used Banksy imagery before and I could see how the image search engines were picking up derivative works thereby diluting the effectiveness of a search - there is a site somewhere using a mock-up (thinking it genuine) I created called West Banksy - A Banksy image I superimposed on the Israeli/Palestine wall. This was done long before Banksy went to Palestine.
   To avoid confusion and affecting Google rankings, I therefore decided to avoid using the name in the main post or put my ‘apologies’ or acknowledgement on the image.
   I suppose this exchange will undo all this.

3. 3 mark reed
   Apr 19th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

   Oh, I absolutely do not think of you as a rip-off merchant. I suspect I should have made my comment a little less ambigious. Sorry about that confusion.

4. 4 Beau Bo D'Or
   Apr 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

   Maybe I was a bit too hasty Mark.
   However, at least I have now managed to explain on this blog my views on derivative artwork for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

   Cheers

Leave a Reply