Originality has never had it easy. Under constant threat from those incapable of an original thought, genuine creativity struggles to survive. The recent controversy over historical inaccuracies in books at the newly opened public library in Coimbatore, which came to light following a visit by writer Perumal Murugan, is a case in point. The questionable methods adopted in procuring books for public libraries had already been exposed in 2024. Books by renowned Tamil writers, long deceased, have often been republished with fabricated titles, different covers, and new publication dates.
Such unethical practices have plagued the artworld, too. For an artist who spends endless hours in the studio, oblivious to the passage of time, painstakingly working on every brushstroke, discovering that months of labour have been reproduced without permission can be devastating. While originality demands patience and imagination, copying requires little more than shamelessness. The threat of plagiarism hangs over creators like a persistent shadow, and more often than not, nothing is done about it unless the aggrieved artist is prepared to embark on an exhausting legal battle.
Pop art icon Andy Warhol revolutionised the artworld, but there is a less celebrated side to his artistic legacy — his own brush with plagiarism. One of his most iconic works, Flowers (1964), began as a silkscreen reproduction of a photograph of hibiscus flowers and eventually blossomed into an entire series. How can reproducing one’s own work amount to plagiarism, you may ask? The catch was that the original photograph belonged to photographer Patricia Caulfield. Andy had lifted it from a magazine and used it without seeking her permission. Patricia sued him, and the dispute was eventually settled. Yet, the controversy has done little to diminish the fame of Flowers. Andy faced repeated accusations of copyright infringement. While appropriation of mass-media imagery was central to Pop Art, his practice also raised uncomfortable questions about the boundary between artistic appropriation and uncredited borrowing.
India, too, has a history of blatant artistic appropriation. When Raja Ravi Varma established his lithographic press to make affordable prints of his paintings, other printing presses soon began clandestinely reproducing his works. With copyright protection and its enforcement still in their infancy, Ravi Varma reportedly suffered considerable financial losses as others profited from his creations.
In today’s world, the threats to originality are far more complex. The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made protecting creative work an even more daunting task. Generative AI models are trained on vast collections of images of copyrighted artworks scraped from the internet, without the artists’ consent. All a user has to do is type in a prompt and, voila! An image appears, mimicking the style of an artist, living or dead, without all the hours that went into developing that distinctive artistic language.
Major retail brands, too, have repeatedly come under fire for appropriating designs created by independent artists and traditional artisans, often leaving the original creators struggling for recognition and compensation.
Social media may help expose such exploitation, but it rarely guarantees justice. While visual plagiarism continues unchecked, perhaps the greatest irony of our times is that creating something original takes years of dedication and stealing it takes merely a click.