As you know by now, Shia LaBeouf has decided to claim his plagiarism was self-inflicted in the name of performance art. He now wants to take his "performance art" to the next level.
The Hollywood Reporter has learned that the
Nymphomaniac actor has reached out to 4 art spaces about putting on an art show. It would be his "apology-tour," which would likely be another chance for the actor to mock plagiarism. One gallery, which remained anonymous, sent
The Hollywood Reporter a proposal Shia emailed to them. The "#IAMSORRY" art show would feature "pliers, whiskey, Belgian chocolates, Transformers toys, printed-out Twitter comments on folded paper and a ukelele." The rest of the email proposal is even more bizarre. Which you can read below.
Update! CBM user, Magnus66, pointed out that Shia's "#IAMSORRY" art show sounded very familiar. So, I did a little digging and discovered that Shia's new art show is just a ripoff of
Marina Abramović's 1974 experiment (click here to view experiment). Do me a favor, wake me up when Shia gets an original thought.
Even his recent explanation was mostly plagiarized, as noted by the
A.V. Club.
Fittingly, much of it is copied verbatim from the 1973 documentary Painters Painting. There’s also the declaration that “All art is either plagarisum [sic] or revolution”—quoted from Paul Gauguin, then transformed through LaBeouf’s mangled misspelling to make it a wholly new work of art. Meanwhile, his second tweet, a lengthy manifesto of his Twitter-based “Performance a#RT” is, lifts whole sections from past performance art manifestos written by the likes of Marilyn Arsem, Scotch Wichmann, and Marina Abramovic—whose “An Artist’s Life,” which LaBeouf steals liberally from, all while lying to himself and others that this is all intentional art, begins with these two creeds: “An artist should not lie to himself or others” and “An artist should not steal ideas from other artists.”
It should also be noted that Kenny Goldsmith, who Shia has referenced and his book
Uncreative Writing, has harshly criticized Shia's "performance art" excuse.
KENNETH GOLDSMITH: I feel he stepped in shit and is now trying to get out of it in an interesting way. Instead of the usual rounds of apologies and promising to do better next time, he’s had a change of mind, one that says, hey, maybe what I did wasn’t so bad if I could frame it properly. So, in the aftermath, he’s scrambled to cite folks who have thought long and hard about how to view cultural materials as shared, rather than proprietary, as befits the digital age. That said, his plagiarizing of those materials and apologies and so forth, have been very sloppy, and as such, not tremendously convincing. Anyone who has worked with shared and borrowed materials for a long time knows that there is a certain degree of craft involved, something LaBeouf has no clue about. Plagiarizing well is hard to do. Had he done it well, he might not have gotten the blowback that he has.