“Cultural appropriation belongs in the wastebasket.”

Interesting article on cultural appropriation and intellectual property in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, by the NYU Professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

In this article Appiah opines on exploitation and whether a rich American pop star should compensate poorer artists who taught him a certain type of music. He concludes,

The harder task will be to give up the ideology of cultural ownership, to resist the temptation to cast every practice as a piece of intellectual property and every affront as a property crime. The rhetoric of ownership is alluring and potent, but when we’re describing the quicksilver  complexities of culture, it just isn’t appropriate.

Article here (available with subscription).