I am writing in support of Michael Beam’s artwork on display in Art Alley. The furor over Mr. Beam’s appropriation of an image well known in the media is based on misunderstanding. Appropriation from a multitude of sources is an entirely common practice in the visual arts in the present moment .

Mr. Beam never claimed credit for inventing the Mauldin image, and has significantly altered the image by overlays of unrelated images from clinical anatomical texts.

One can disagree about the amount of pleasure that is produced in the viewer by such combinations of imagery, but one cannot deny Mr. Beam his First Amendment right to express himself in this manner.

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Might I remind those individuals whose sensibilities have been outraged by Mr. Beam’s work that all artists work from previously existing models either in nature or in their mental life, and for artists working in the late Twentieth Century it is quite ordinary practice to draw from images found in the mass media.

It is amusing, but a cause for concern, that ignorance of norms in the visual arts can produce such a tempest in a teapot.

School of Art and Design, associate professor