Visual Arts webcasts

Kia ora and welcome.

This webcast is intended to provide guidance and advice on the authenticity requirements for internally assessed Visual Arts standards.

This webcast covers:

• using appropriated material
• understanding Copyright and Intellectual Property,
• tracking and acknowledging other sources, and
• utilising sourced imagery and digital processes.

Appropriation is a long-accepted strategy in Visual Arts for satire, parody, and social commentary.  

Guidance for students when re-contexualising material in line with their creative intention is necessary.  

Cultural appropriation involves iconography, taonga, and artifacts with deep associated meaning or tikanga. In some visual arts contexts, cultural appropriation is valid and meaningful.

Guidance from kaiako is advised to avoid cultural misappropriation or tokenism.

Misuse of copyrighted images has increased with internet accessibility. Visual Arts students need basic knowledge of laws that protect the Intellectual Property of creatives, including the commercial restrictions around publishing trademarks beyond the classroom.

Schools should endeavour to protect students’ Intellectual Property, especially when publishing their work digitally. Educational permissions information is available at Copyright Licensing New Zealand.

Sources for all materials should be clearly attributed to ensure authenticity using simple documentation practices, including:

• labels that indicate student-generated, original imagery
• artists’ names or titles of artworks
• any URLs for imagery sourced online.

Deliberately copying elements of an artist’s work can be useful to show knowledge of conventions. In these examples, annotations acknowledge the use of artists’ compositional conventions, appropriated text, and explain how artists’ motifs and stylistic devices have influenced student work.

Inadvertent plagiarism can result from omitting attributions.

Kaiako can pre-empt this by outlining good research practices at the start of activities, including tracking templates to record URLs, and encouraging the labelling of artworks and use of quotation marks.

Acknowledging verbal information from experts is also important. 

Student generated source imagery is best practice where possible.  

Self-generated photographs and drawings allow students to fully control and modify their source imagery.  

Collaging from found images is common practice to enable inaccessible subject matter to be utilised.

Using stock photos is an accepted practice in some visual arts fields, such as Graphic Design, where progressive modifications allow the student’s design capability to be assessed, not the stock image itself.

Visual arts study differs from the commercial sector where copyright, royalties, and caveats apply to stock images.  

Open-source imagery should be used where possible, and clearly attributed.

Metadata and reverse image searches that have been useful for authentication may no longer suffice.

Current best practices include:  

• explicit instruction about how generative AI and digital techniques may be used
• regular checkpoints throughout the creative process, and
• thorough documentation for authenticity purposes.  

Fully documenting digital techniques and AI generated imagery is strongly recommended, such as snapshots of digital processes, cataloguing component parts, and annotating work pre- and post-digital manipulation.

For more guidance and examples of authenticity practices, see the links on the NZQA website. There are also helpful resources on the Copyright Licensing New Zealand site as well as the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand.