Indeed, some artworks involving non-tangible cultural appropriation may result in superficial essentializing, exoticizing, or Orientalizing representations, or simply use cultural diversity as a profitable currency. 11 The opponents of cultural appropriation would argue that such depictions are not only aesthetically flawed, but also morally wrong, because they perpetuate stereotypes or false images of that culture, and may also deprive insiders of the right, ability, and agency to represent themselves ( Burns Coleman 2001).

This may lead to a misrepresentation, meaning a distorted, flawed, incomplete, or inauthentic depiction of the insider’s culture. According to such arguments, an outsider may not be adequately trained in the style or aesthetic procedures they are appropriating-what Young ( 2008) terms the aesthetic handicap thesis-or cannot draw from the appropriated culture because they lack firsthand experience thereof-what Young terms the cultural experience argument, or experience inauthenticity. 10 That being said, I claim that there is considerable confusion surrounding the arguments usually made against non-tangible cultural appropriation, and specifically voice appropriation. I do not deny the possible harm of some types of cultural appropriation, and I agree this subject should be addressed with the utmost sensitivity and gravity. I would like to stress again that my conclusions regarding the ethical implications of cultural appropriation are restricted to voice appropriation. Nonetheless, throughout the years, some spectators, as well as artworld insiders, perceived Frank as real. Rosen did not “age” the pages of Frank’s drawings, and many of the texts about Frank and the publications accompanying her exhibitions included footnotes that revealed her imaginary status. In her performances as Fisher, Ashery did not change her voice or mannerism, because she was not interested in acting, mocking, or masquerading (Ashery quoted in Rowe 2013, p. However, Rosen, as well as Ashery, were not interested in deluding their spectators. 5 As for Frank, in the first group shows in which her works were included, as well as in some later solo shows, and in the various texts Rosen published about her work, she was presented as a real artist, while Rosen was presented as a curator, guest curator, or scholar who discovered her forgotten oeuvre.

Ashery admits she did not initially think of Fisher as an artwork, but rather experimented with his persona as part of her queer lifestyle and cross-dressing practice. Fisher came to life in spontaneous, performative street interventions, in which passersby were not aware of him being an artwork (I will later refer to their reactions). In recent years, cultural appropriation has become a catchphrase, applied in relation to such diverse incidents as the demand to remove from the 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibition and to further destroy Dana Schutz’ painting Open Casket, after the White painter had been accused of appropriating a symbol of African-American resistance-the defaced body of Emmett Till, lynched in Mississippi in 1955 the banning of White Montreal comic Zach Poitras from a comedy club on account of his dreadlocks in 2019 ( Giguere 2019) the stepping down of a celebrated musicology professor at the University of Michigan for screening the film Othello (Stuart Burge, 1965), which included blackfacing, in 2021 ( Schuessler 2021) and most recently, the accusation of fashion chain Ralph Lauren of plagiarism and cultural appropriation by the wife of Mexico’s President, Beatriz Gutiérrez, for selling an item copying indigenous Mexican designs, following which the company published an official apology ( FitGerald 2022).īoth Fisher and Frank initially operated as parafictions.

Rather, the discrepancy between the real artists’ identities and those of their alter egos can lead to accusing both of cultural appropriation, especially in today’s heated discussions regarding its legitimacy, legality, and possible harms, specifically when involving artistic creation. The identities of these four artists are detailed not merely for the sake of biographic facticity. 1963, Rehovot) laboriously constructed the life and work of Justine Frank (1900–1943), a Belgian female artist who was associated with the Surrealist movement in Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s and who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1934. At about the same time, Israeli-American Jewish secular male artist Roee Rosen (b. 1966, Jerusalem), London-based Jewish secular female artist, embodied the figure of Marcus Fisher, a perplexed young Jewish Orthodox man who, like her at the time, studied art and engaged in spontaneous performances. In the early 2000s, two Israeli artists, one in Tel Aviv and the other in London, created imaginary personas.

Fire emblem echoes the creation