~DoubleY

Updated my scraps section. I decided to drop the concept of Condor Heroes' Dragon Girl. Much as I would like to give my own intrepretation (Re-intrepretation, be it of fairytales or superheroes, never goes out of fashion, it seems) of Jing Yong's work. I will probably be running into all sorts of copyright messes, even if it is just a one-time fan work.

And my original intention of the work is most definitely not a one-time off effort.

Word and Image has an intriguing concept on plagiarism in the medieval ages:

"Copying is closing related to spoliation... Charles the Bald could not despoil Aachen, so he copied it.

Like copying, spoliation illustrates the gap between early medieval and comtemporary attitudes towards images. Postmodernism has made it acceptable, even desirable, for visual artists to reuse or rework images; no longer must they strive to be original, as they had to during modernism. Thanks to modern reproductive technologies, when contemporary artists reuse or rework an image, they rework a copy than the original.

Not so in the Middle Ages, when mechanical reproduction was unknown. Medieval craftsmen, like postmodern artists, recognize the visual charge that could come from appropriating a powerful or prestigious image, so they physcially incorporated those images into the new work, destroying the original's original context.

That destruction, anathema to us today as vandalism, was never chastised in the Middle Ages. (DoubleY : Ah, but now we have copyright laws and lawyers. )

The reason is telling: Art then was meant not to be beautiful but to perform some function. (Double Y: I disagree, 90% of art produced now as it is on earth is most probably geared towards commercial purposes, notably to get you to buy that must-have XYZ brand/model of award-winning handphone/detergent/music cd/ear digger of the year.)

Images that have lost their function, for example pagan or outdated Christian ones, were worthless. These outmoded objects could be reanimated, but only if they were put in new settings. In the early Middle Ages, spoliation was a postive act, rather than a negative one."

So now my pretty chick pic is just the Girl and Harp, before I figure out what else to do with her.

Historically, harpists were ranked the highest among musicians, possbily because they were also bards and oral custodians of the clan's history. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth ordered the massacre of all harpers and their harps burned in an attempt to suppress Irish culture. Laws were enacted by the English Crown forbidding the use of Irish language, dress and intermarriage between the English and the Irish.

She'll make a fine rebel bard, the last keeper of stories and myths of her race and culture, no?