CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/20/2024

The elusive practice of bootlegging, alive and well in the creative fields

Featured spreads are from new release Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice, NYC-based graphic designer Ben Schwartz’s playful, 432-page investigation of the practice of bootlegging in the creative world. From Virgil Abloh’s Off-White logo (borrowed from the Glasgow International Airport) to Dwayne Johnson's "The Rock" stunt double, Jeff Koons’ 2008–2012 “Balloon Venus” (borrowing from the “Venus of Willendorf,” c. 25,000 BP) or even nature’s own Caligo Owl Butterfly, Schwartz drops a lens on the ambiguous practice of borrowing, quoting, sampling, copying—or stealing, depending on how you look at it—via in-depth discussions with 21 creative practitioners, including BLESS, Experimental Jetset, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar and Christopher Schulz), Hassan Rahim, SHIRT and Oana Stanescu, among others. “By its very nature, a bootleg defies definition,” Schwartz writes. “It travels in black markets and hides in unmarked record sleeves; it communicates in the errors of cheap production and escapes into the loopholes of property law. It cares little for the stability a definition might offer. To define a bootleg would be to contain it. It creates order where mess is much more welcome. Definitions, language, and names clarify, but they also tend to pin things down. A bootleg’s survival is dependent on its ambiguity. Maybe we can talk about a bootleg while resisting the urge to define it. Maybe we can open it up, explore its edges, extend them outward, or destroy them altogether.”