Animated collages!

Let’s face it, the first impression once I saw this video was “wow, the collages are moving!”.

Last week a friend of mine introduced me to the new Coldplay video, and I truly liked it. I also recognised several clear mentions to lots of amazing contemporary collagists that I love. I was curious to see if the directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia gave a kind of explanation of what brought them to create this video.

But  nothing.

The day the video was live, there was no trace of credits to these artists, and I was a little bit surprised. Although none of the images were literally “stoled”, there is a clear inspiration to tons of them. After a while some of the artists “mentioned” on the video clearly started to get disappointed, and shared their thoughts through social media. I can understand that was a kind of bitter sweet tribute.

Now, not sure if this paragraph was added after this online debate or not (I truly don’t remember any credits gave to the artists), but here, on the Vimeo account of one of the two directors, there is now an entire list of artists that were taken as inspiration for the creation of the video:

“Inspired by the amazing art of:
Victoria Siemer, Sammy Slabbinck, Karen Lynch, Sarah Eisenlohr, Joe Webb, Jeff Hendrickson, Katie Dutch, Linder Sterling, Kieron “cur3es” Cropper, Beth Hoeckel, Eugenia Loli, Mariano Peccinetti, Shang Chengxiang, Charlie Davoli, Artem Rhads Cheboha, Fran Rodriguez, Felipe Posada, Jay Riggio, Ser Sinestésico, Marina Molares, Merve Ozaslan, Julien Pacaud, Angelo Vazquez, Terry Ringler, Djuno Tomsni, John Stezaker, Richard Hamilton, Hannah Höch, and of course Rene Magritte”.

I don’t believe that this was made to take all the credits, I truly hope so. As far as I am concerned, the first thing that I do if I create something taking inspiration from other artists I will give them credits, that’s all.

After all these words (sorry!), I truly enjoyed the video and I am happy to see that this kind of works caught the attention of a huge public. On the other  hand, I am concerned about how artists have to deal with their rights, and the inevitable risk in some way to have their brilliant ideas “violated”.

What do you think about it?