The Collective

Persuasive Writing

Today, in our afternoon session we had a group discussion. Talking about copyright and we each gave our own opinions. We were shown a video, from the news where an artist, called Richard Prince had taken images from someone’s personal Instagram and used her photographs without permission in his exhibition called ‘New Portraits’. He sold her photo for as much as $90,000 without the girl’s knowledge, consent or offering her any kind of compensation. We were then asked to create a piece of persuasive writing, where we had to express our opinion in our writing.

'Having looked at Richard Prince's work, who sells on other people's work from Instagram, without their permission, I think it is wrong. Personally I feel that taking full credit for somebody else's work is not acceptable. The way I think of it, is if I was stuck in this position, having my work posted all over the internet where someone else was taking full credit for it and making an income from it, I would be devastated. I understand within the terms and conditions on Instagram it states that once uploaded, it is no longer your property. However I feel it is unfair on the original artist. Although, perhaps if Prince had asked permission in the first place and the original artist had given consent then that is a whole different situation and I would be willing to consider and change my opinion.'