Postmodernism, in a vague sense, attempted to break down the structures and narratives of modernity. The movement took on art, film, literature, architecture and nearly every other form of culture in the western world. The so-called ‘Pictures’ generation, a group of artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were no exception to this trend. Their method of deconstruction was to simply take photographs of the photographs they perceived to embody the grand narratives of modernity. In doing this they ‘re-appropriated’ these photographs, changing their initial meaning. Through this method, a photograph of the wife of a depression era Alabama share-cropper, was re-appropriated as a feminist critique by prominent, ‘Pictures’ generation artist Sherrie Levine in 1981. While the image did not change, the meaning was transformed.

In a typically postmodern way, this re-appropriation of a depression era photograph, challenged notions of originality, authorship and intellectual property. In essence, it raised the question of who owns a photograph of a photograph. Obviously there is something more to the photograph than just the physical object; as such there is undeniably some abstract intellectual quality related to the photo which would exist in reproductions. However the question is, who owns this abstract quality and can it even be owned? This of course raises the question of whether the original photographer owns their own photo. After all, the photograph is of a real subject who surely owns their own image.

This notion of re-appropration can be seen in the work of Scottish artist Katie Paterson. After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art, Paterson started working on her project, Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky. The art project took an iron meteorite from Argentina, melted it down, and then recast it, in its original shape. This subtly transformed the meteorite into a piece of art. Again, the real subject is transformed into art through the appropriation by the artist; however, in the case of the ‘Pictures generation,’ this is taken a step further when the subject itself is a photograph of a subject. However, in each case the ‘owner’ of the art is the appropriator. This would suggest that the value in art is related to the creative process rather than the material reality.

This abstract notion of ownership goes even further: the Indian-born British contemporary artist, Anish Kapoor claims ownership over a whole colour. Vantablack, supposedly the darkest shade of black ever created, is legally owned by Kapoor who prevents others from using it. Vantablack, developed by British company Nanosystems is the extreme logical conclusion of notions of intellectual property and thus should maybe lead us to question them.