50-ways-to leave-your-love

This page is a work of art. This page contains a variety of images that were taken from various social media accounts and were repurposes, recombines, rearranged, and reused in a considerably different context. What makes this page a work of art is not only the decade long practice of the here featured artist, who had connected images to a larger piece in previous work, it also follows the idea and purpose of the Fair Use Doctrine. This doctrine allows for limited and reasonable uses as long as the application does not interfere with owners’ rights or impede their right to do with the work as they wish. This Fair Use approach had been applied by fellow artists since the times in the early 20th century, when the first collages, created from snippets, elements, excerpts of various contemporary media, had been used in popular artwork. This process has been widely accepted as a common artistic practice for over a century. Later it had been exercised in the same manner on the internet. In the context of this artwork the combination of images, acquired not even from the original sources (the original copyright owners), but from random users of social media, does not limit the claims of the creators, but utilises these images as independent elements in a derived work of art through the process of accumulation, composition and assemblage. Placing various visual components (images) next to each other is creating a new interpretation and a new way to read these parts as pieces of a fresh, unfamiliar, and peculiar meaning. The selection and relationship of images in a so-far unseen array is disconnection the images from their previous denotations and is turning them into the raw material of a distinctly unique new connotation. Thus the entire page is a new piece of art, following a long tradition of appropriation in artist practice.