To give what one does not possess through republishing: inventing new uses and enjoyments. Gift and appropriation in art in the light of the theory of property

Abstract

It is in the light of the theory of property that two types of practices recently appeared in art are analyzed here: gift and appropriation. Oppose to each other (on the one hand, to dispossess myself of my own production for the benefit of another, on the other, to give oneself what we do not possess), these two phenomena are part of the same project of art, and if so, how to articulate their coherence? Do they involve the same artists or are there, on the one hand, “appropriationists” and, on the other, those who make donations? Do these two artists' gestures have a political aim in relation to the question of property, or do they exhaust themselves in their exclusively artistic sense as strategies of creation? It is finally in certain types of pirate and generous republishing that the two movements are united in one and the same project.