{"id":88,"date":"2005-02-28T14:13:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-28T21:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/?p=88"},"modified":"2023-06-06T10:26:31","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T17:26:31","slug":"che-irish-tall-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/che-irish-tall-tale.html","title":{"rendered":"Che: An Irish Tall Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a perfect example of why “news” distributed by mainstream sources should always<\/em> be taken with a grain of salt. The Press Association, \u201cthe UK leader in news and sports information,” distributed a news release on Feb. 22nd that was picked up by a number of news websites, like the Manchester Evening News<\/a>. The story concerns a painting of singer Sinead O’Connor created by artist Jim Fitzpatrick. The Press Association story, titled Naked Sinead portrait goes on sale<\/em>, reported that Fitzpatrick’s painting, Strange Days<\/em> (portraying Sinead reclining on a purple sheet and wearing only a necklace and stockings), was sold at Dublin’s Whyte’s Auctioneers for 15,000 Euros.<\/p>\n

The inaccurate part of the story as reported by The Press Association and picked up by various news outlets is as follows; “The painting is by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, the creator of the iconic monochrome picture of revolutionary Che Guevara.” That statement is entirely incorrect. The man responsible for the famous image of Che the communist ideolog was famed Cuban photographer, Alberto Korda<\/a> (1928-2001). No doubt The Press Association\u2019s erroneous information can be attributed to a lack of fact checking.<\/p>\n

The news agency assumed Jim Fitzpatrick to be telling the truth when on his website he asserted that his earliest work was \u201cthe legendary Che Guevara poster of 1968 published just before his death in Bolivia.\u201d Aside from the fact that Che was killed in 1967<\/em>, Korda\u2019s photo had already been translated into poster form internationally as early as 1967. By 1968 there were so many<\/em> artists making Che posters based on Korda\u2019s photo that Fitzpatrick is very lucky indeed to have made the \u201clegendary\u201d one. Fitzpatrick would be closer to the truth if he stated he was the first in Ireland<\/em> to make a poster of Che, but it still would have been from Korda\u2019s photo.<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick offhandedly remarked on his website that his poster was \u201cbased on a photograph by a then unknown Cuban photographer,\u201d but the time had long since past when Korda was unknown. Fitzpatrick asks that viewers of his online art \u201cremember to acknowledge my copyright at all times,\u201d an entitlement he didn’t extend to the internationally famous Alberto Korda. I wrote a polite letter to The Press Association informing them of their error, but they did not reply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a perfect example of why “news” distributed by mainstream sources should always be taken with a grain of salt. The Press Association, \u201cthe UK leader in news and sports information,” distributed a news release on Feb. 22nd that was picked up by a number of news websites, like the Manchester Evening News. The story concerns a painting of singer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}