Bob Dylan: Art plagiarist?

• The wonderful river scene in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was lifted word for word from another source. The Sermon on the Mount has an Egyptian source. Joni Mitchell's self portrait lifts the style very plagiaristically from Van GOGH'S earless self portrait. Photorealism (not what Dylan did) is a slide photo projected onto a canvas and basically coloured in. Nobody says that is plagiarism. Why? Because the artist took the slide photo him/herself and basically plagiarises reality cheatingly from a snapshot they themselves took. But isn't that worse than what Dylan did in the Asia series? Dylan has actually hand painted a scene he saw in a photo. So what? Whats the difference between seeing a chair four feet away and painting it and seeing the chair in a photo and painting it? Bob doesn't claim to be a great painter and he is right. He is not- its a hobby for him. But he is a great song writer. Basically his genre is the blues- which is an art form of appropriating and changing other blues songs. EVERY blues singer from Robert Johnson to Mississippi John Hurt has done this. Whole generations of songwriters have totally ripped off Bob's style and highly original phrasing- also his mystique and persona (surely a form of intellectual property). Dylan was highly influenced by other songs, but his very greatest and most iconic tracks are pretty much untraceable (eg Ballad of a Thin Man, Sad eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Like a Rolling Stone). To accuse the most ripped off songwriter in history of being a plagiarist is quite mean spirited, especially when he has been quite open about being "influenced" and derivative. See the sleeve notes of Freewheelin". By the way the photographers (button clickers who got lucky) whom Dylan used as very transparent inspiration for his hobby, will benefit greatly fame and recognition-wise from Dylan 's fame. The civil war poet Timrod was never heard of until Dylan used him in Modern Times. The author of the Japanese Yakuza book was grateful and thrilled that Bob Dylan had publicised his book. Lay off the old fellow. He is an old man who has given us so much- give him a break!

• Dylan's penchant for plagiarism has come up before.  His 2001 album "Love and Theft" was widely reported to have lifted lines from a fairly obscure Japanese book called "Confessions of a Yakuza".

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