"The faux-pas term of the 2000s, intellectual property is nearly impossible to protect. There are only two options left: a police state, or to turn the whole thing off -- to drive tanks into the Ukraine (major server farms such as Tangram are based there) and shut down every single machine. Let's just abandon it now; the idea of intellectual property never helped artists or those on the receiving end anyway, just corporate interests. Richard Prince -- unthinkable today! And the old European business model that grounds the concept doesn't translate well to other cultures. For example, the Chinese language has many words to describe things that are neither copy nor original, some even suggesting that a copy is the more valuable of the two."
- Christian von Borries, Berlin composer, conductor
and filmmaker (in the April issue of Artforum)
"As in the United States and Europe, a handful of contemporary painters in China can command hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for each of their highly creative works... . But the main push by China has been in the broad market for works that retail for $500 or less, with painters who work from postcards or images on the Internet or, in Mr. Zhang's case, a large, dog-eared copy of an art book in English on van Gogh."
- New York Times, July 15, 2005
photos: Michael Wolf, The Copy Artists, China, 2006
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