Is Imitation A Form Of Flattery?
written by Robbie Saenz de Viteri
I’m in a dance company and I don’t dance at all. I write and create live performances with Monica Bill Barnes. If you’re reading this, you probably know her, but I’m happy to catch you up if you don’t. Monica is a choreographer and dancer whose personality sits somewhere in the narrow venn diagram overlap of Martha Graham and Buster Keaton. We’ve been creating work together for something like ten years. It’s hard to say because it’s hard to know when a creative process starts. It’s been long enough that sometimes we are asked to talk to students and say things about our work. Something funny tends to happen when we do this – they write down what we are saying. Monica will play one of her hits, like “Choreography really amounts to a bunch of moves. It’s the intention that goes into the moves that make them a dance.” Then I see dancers nodding, writing, even snapping in their desks, furniture that they don’t really seem to know how to sit in.
It’s a part of our work. We share. We give insight into our ideas to the people who are learning how to have their own. It’s part of where we even got our ideas in the first place. We sat down in those same desks and wrote down the things that artists were sharing with us. Later, we’ll read things that students have written or see videos of their projects that look so much like our work and it can feel weird. If you’ve ever known someone who starts dressing like you do, you know imitation can feel creepy, the way a parrot can feel creepy. A parrot can say the things you say but doesn’t mean them the way you do. They’re students though, so we mostly feel honored. But what happens when they’re not students? What happens when you find your parrot is at The Louvre?
A few weeks ago, a friend messaged me to tell me he didn’t realize that Monica and I took one of our projects (The Museum Workout) to The Louvre. We’ve been on a busy spate of touring, everywhere from Montana to Singapore over the last couple of months. It’s the most touring we’ve done since 2020. So my friend thought he missed an update from us. I replied he was wrong; we didn’t have a project at The Louvre. Then he sent me a NYTimes cultural dispatch from Paris and I learned that he was maybe right. We do have a project at The Louvre, it’s just not ours anymore.
The dispatch described “an hourlong dance-and-exercise circuit through the building, which museum officials call ‘Courez au Louvre’— meaning both run to and run in the Louvre.” As I read the description, looked through photos and videos, and imagined the voice of Luc Bouniol-Laffont the Director of Performing Arts who is quoted in the article and credited for the idea, I heard a parrot, squawking.
In 2017 we made a participatory dance piece called The Museum Workout at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was commissioned by MetLiveArts. We made it in collaboration with Maira Kalman, an artist and writer. It was a guided tour of The Met, led by Monica Bill Barnes and her dance partner at that time, Anna Bass. They wore sequin dresses and sneakers. Audiences ran behind them, mirroring their movement as they looped two miles through the museum. They paused in front of a dozen of the 1.5 million artworks The Met has in its possession to perform exercise dances in sync, with their focus fixed on the artwork in front of them. While they did squats or lunges in front of Houdon’s bust of Ben Franklin or Sargent’s Madame X, I played audio clips from a conversation with Maira Kalman about what she’s doing when she goes to museums. She’s an artist, but she’s not there to sketch or research or look for color inspiration. She goes to the museum to fall in love.
The Museum Workout, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, Photo Paula Lobo
The original run of 16 performances in January of 2017 were quickly extended for the entire year. It was the most visibly successful thing we’ve ever made, covered in every outlet from Fox News to Good Morning America to profiles in the New Yorker, multiple articles and videos in the NYTimes, even a photo shoot for Vogue. We subsequently toured the performance, creating versions of it for museums as nearby as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and far away as the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Search the terms “museum” and “workout” together and you’ll see for yourself. But, to get back to my friend’s message, we’ve not brought it to The Louvre.
When Monica and I read about Courez Au Louvre, we were dizzy from the similarities, like we walked into a hall of mirrors. The Louvre commissioned a choreographer, just like us. It happens before the museum is open, just like ours. They reference disco movement, like we did. Soon, the similarities revealed more than resemblances, some elements were carbon copies. They begin their program with Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, the same way we began ours in Melbourne. They end their piece in shavasana staring up at the glass ceiling of The Louvre, ours ended in shavasana under the glass ceiling of the Engelhard Court at The Met. Even the writers covering Courez Au Louvre were hitting replay on some of the same themes that writers hit on seven years ago. In 2017, a reporter wrote about the “pleasure derived from the illicitness… like having done jumping jacks before the marble statue of a nude Perseus.” And in 2024 at Courez Au Louvre, the NYT journalist “giggles” when her pointing dance pose lands at “the stone penis of Apollo.”
Dizziness took a turn when I started asking around about how this happened. Via a publicist from The Louvre and communication with Catherine Porter who wrote the NYTimes dispatch, Mr. Bouniol-Laffont shared he was “inspired by” The Museum Workout and acknowledged “the huge success of The Met’s program.” He called The Met for advice on how to create a version for The Louvre. According to The Met, they advised he get in touch with us. I asked if he had considered that. He dismissed the idea saying, “For obvious practical, financial and also environmental reasons we could only achieve this project with a Paris based choreographer and a Paris based company.” We were a problem, so we were left behind as our idea was traded across the Atlantic.
We’re not in love with our originality. A grant panel rejected us from funding The Museum Workout by explaining (as is often the case in our work) that it wasn’t enough of a dance. They went one step further in the rejection and reminded us that we didn’t invent the jumping jack. I want to be clear that Courez Au Louvre is not the same as our piece. They’re not even the first to replicate it. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis did a version too, though they at least cited The Met’s program as their inspiration. Notice I said, “The Met’s program,” not ours. In 2016 The Met’s curator for performance commissioned us to make a piece for the museum. They often have performances in their galleries. We counter offered The Museum Workout, a much larger, harder to pull off idea that created some intentional friction against the staid culture of the museum itself. The Met didn’t bring the idea to us. We pitched it, developed it, and auditioned it for them for a year before they said yes. Now, some of the ideas, images, themes, movements, and organizing principles of our work continue without our names. The NYTimes article makes no mention of our performance at The Met in 2017 and turned down each of my three entreaties to make an amendment. 61,000 people liked the NYT Instagram post of the Courez Au Louvre article and have no idea who we are. We’ve been erased and replaced by the big bold capital letters of the institutions. But how many people have eaten a cronut and have no idea who Dominique Ansel is?
The Museum Workout, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, Photo Paula Lobo
From a legal perspective, we could not make a case that The Louvre has done something wrong, but that doesn’t mean what they’ve done is right. When I look at the Courez Au Louvre pictures, I see a kind of fast fashion version of our work. They replicated what they saw from the outside. But the experience of The Museum Workout was not just a cool, controversial exercise class. There was a narrative element (which The Louvre has not reproduced) that made The Museum Workout a physical metaphor for why museums exist at all. The Louvre’s version feels different in the same way that Starry Night looks different when you see it on a coaster. The difference is that Van Gogh is famous enough that everyone knows that’s his work. More importantly, I don’t know if the Van Gogh estate collects a royalty every time a coaster is sold in the gift shop, but I feel confident they’re not worrying about how to afford a pre-k program for their two-year-old next year or whether they can bring in another person to help care for their aging parent one more day a week.
The Museum Workout, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, Photo Paula Lobo
Why did it feel OK to reproduce our ideas without us? To give him the most credit possible, maybe Mr. Bouniol-Laffont didn’t think our performance amounted to art. We didn’t invent the jumping jack, so it felt ok. That’s one of the hardest things about your work being copied, it makes you wonder what you’re worth. Our ideas are our livelihood. Maybe there are plenty of wealthy artists for whom that is not true, but we are solidly middle class. We work to keep working.
You’ve heard—It’s an incredibly hard time for the arts. But I’m worried that story is overly focused on the institutions. As budgets are slashed, programs cut, staffs downsized, our arts institutions look like ships with slack sails, becalmed and desperate to catch some wind. We are a microscopic performing arts company with about 0.15 of a percent of The Louvre’s operating budget. We can’t downsize, if we did, we’d disappear. And yet, artists, the people who make things, are the ones who give the big ships their wind.
There’s a famous Oscar Wilde quote that people in the arts love – “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...” Few people hold on to the second part of that quote though – “…that mediocrity pays to greatness.” I’m not confident enough to say The Museum Workout amounted to greatness, but it has an imitation running through The Louvre right now. Maybe the best part of that quote though – there’s no clear record of Oscar Wilde saying it at all.
What is flattery anyway? Insincere praise, employed to further one’s self interests. Maybe imitation is a low-risk way to fast track your success. And the economics behind imitation should matter. If you’re writing your first poems from the common room of your dorm and you can’t resist spacing your lines like ee cummings, it’s ok. But if you have the resources of a great institution behind you, maybe you owe more to the people who inspire you.
I’m from New Jersey. I grew up working on the boardwalk, with prize hawkers and psychics and claw machines all trying to pull a fast one on you. I worked on Point Pleasant Beach. Almost every weekend of every summer, The Nerds came to play. The Nerds are a band, but they’re not just any band. The Nerds are the greatest cover band in the world. They cover it all – R&B, hair bands, funk, punk, classic rock, even Englebert Humperdinck. Seeing The Nerds is euphoric. They play the absolute hell out of other artists’ songs. Seeing The Nerds is also honest. They never pretend they’re playing originals. You leave their show sweaty, head ringing, singing “Sweet Caroline” and even if you don’t know Neil Diamond, you know someone else wrote the song.
Maybe that’s the best-case scenario for The Museum Workout now as iterations of our idea pop up around the globe without us. We can’t stop you, but at least admit that you’re playing a cover. If you did that, there’s a chance we might even end up feeling flattered, just like Oscar Wilde said.
The Museum Workout, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017 Photo Paula Lobo
PS…
A friend who shall remain anonymous sent this when she heard about the story. We are trying to be our best selves right now and we appreciate that she helped express another reaction we could have too.