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« Back when girls were girls and men were men | Main | Sweet, savage, sustainable plagiarism: Part 3 »

January 23, 2008

Sweet, savage, sustainable plagiarism: Part 2

The coming story to which I alluded last weekend arrived in this morning's Willamette Week, which named a certain Portland restaurateur as its "Rogue of the Week" for instances of plagiarism on his website. (As the story notes, it's just the latest series of examples in an embarrassing pattern, and neither the chef nor his PR firm would comment.)

WW's contributing restaurant writer, the fine and fearless Heidi Yorkshire, was the first to call BS on this particular rogue in the pages of WW, and in retrospect, her November review of the restaurant drips with organic, sustainable irony. It begins:

Any honest chef will tell you that some of his best ideas were purloined from other people’s restaurants. A truly original dish is damn rare, and almost all restaurants these days are variations on one formula or another, or hybrids of several. Of course, the good chef will take a good idea and find a way to improve on it or make it into a creation of his own. As Pablo Picasso supposedly said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

And if Picasso was around in our Google age, he might well have said: "Bad artists cut-and-paste. Great artists steal."

01:10 PM in Funny, Journalism, Oregon, Plagiarism |

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