International Plagiarism

My students know that I have zero tolerance for plagiarism. There is no legitimate excuse for taking the words, work or ideas of another person and passing them off as your own. If someone's work supports or inspires your own, then you simply need to give the original writer, artist or thinker credit for their work.

Recently a perfect and somewhat hard to believe example of plagiarism surfaced in the art world. I say "hard to believe" because it is bewildering that the artist doing the copying thought he would actually go undetected. It is similar to the confusion I feel each time I uncover plagiarism in a student's paper. You know that they know better (the rules and laws of academic honesty have been clearly explained), but they still try it anyway.

In this case reported by the BBC, a leading Japanese artist, Yoshihiko Wada, was discovered to have been copying the paintings of Italian artist Alberto Sughi. Wada even received a prestigious award for his painting from the Japanese Ministry of Culture before the many examples of plagiarism were discovered. Wada claimed that he and Sughi had worked "in collaboration", but in reality Wada had only visited the Italian artist's "studio five times and photographed his work from different angles."

Sughi seems to be very pragmatic about the events and stated in an article on absolutearts.com:

Recently I have had proposals to take part in major exhibitions in Japan – I, however, would prefer to exhibit my work when this scandal has died down. My painting, I hope, deserves cultural attention, and not merely curiosity spawned by a scandal of this magnitude.