“Good artist borrows, great artist steals” is a statement that is commonly believed to have been coined by Picasso. A more thorough search reveals though that T.S. Eliot had already alleged another almost identical statement: “Talent imitates, genius steals”. Picasso stole Eliot’s line and thereby proved his genius. This very ironic example seems to be an ideal preamble for the highly provocative speculations on authorship, originality, appropriation, and plagiarism, which this paper aims to address.
During the past five decades Vito Acconci has experimented with different types of art and style, starting from poetry and moving forward with performance, video, architecture and landscape design. The diversity of his interests and capabilities is manifested in his works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, where word and action are balancing in repetitive videos and performances.