Tatau, BBC Cultural Appropriation and creative licence

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To paraphrase one of my favorite TV/movie writers, "an artist's job is not to tell the truth; it's to capture your attention for as long as we're supposed to capture it. If we stumble into truth, we've gotten lucky."

An artist's job is whatever they decide it is; for some, it may well be to convey a specific message.
 

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An artist's job is whatever they decide it is; for some, it may well be to convey a specific message.

And in order to do that, they have to capture your attention first. :p

That's leaving aside the fact that creative expression - as a generality - is one of the most opaque mediums for communicating a message, let alone a specific one. Hence why nobody can agree on why the Mona Lisa is smiling.

EDIT: More seriously though, an artist's job is simply to create art, the same way a cooper's job is to create barrels, etc. Whatever content or message they intend for their art to carry, it first needs to get people to pay attention to it long enough to receive it in the first place.
 
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Should they be "allowed" to do so? Just out of curiosity, who will they have to answer to - and what powers to alter/censor the work in question will that person or organization have - if the answer to that question is "no"?

(I suspect that most people will say that the answer is "the public," but if that's the case then it's no different than the status quo, which means that no changes or alterations to the current dynamic are needed.)

There have been some debates about 'Cultural Indigenous Property' most notably Article 31 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples:
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their ... visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.

In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights

It also touches on things like the Rules of Appellation and the name Champagne, and even the elgin Marbles, but few countries have viable laws on how such cultural intellectual property can be effectively protected.

generally though I find myelf tending to agree with Neonchameleons assessment above, its mostly annoying in this case so not something to invoke legal proceedings over.

Because cultural appropriation as I see it basically exists in two tiers.

The first is exoticism, which is really annoying. It's basically a case of people not doing their homework and getting things wrong. Clumsy and annoying storytelling, and deserves to get called out as such. That, I believe, is what is going on here (and as a rule the real version of things are always deeper than the fictional ones).

In case 1 the message is "We want to use you as background but don't care enough to do it right." Annoying, but it's mostly thoughtlessness.

oh and rebuking a girl for plating her hair is just stupid
 
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Pretty much any time a show or a film tackles any specialised subject, anyone in the audience who is well-acquainted with that subject will find some seriously cringe-worthy misconceptions and misrepresentations when they watch it. Does that mean that shows shouldn't look at such subjects, or should be obliged to do more research? On the one hand, the majority of the audience will probably just enjoy the episode and neither notice nor care about the inaccuracies. On the other hand, they may also take some of those misconceptions with them when they leave, which can be rather unhelpful.

Bolded is me regarding Oriental Adventures, and the impetus for me creating the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG).

Right now, I'm working on building an alternate American Old West setting for Pathfinder, called Gothic Western, and though I am treading carefully, I want to incorporate native American culture, and have already created Cheyenne Dog Soldiers (as a ranger archetype), and have detailed inclusions of Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Lakota/Sioux, Apache, Comanche, Hopi and Navajo as tribes of the setting with aspects of their religions and cultures incorporated in the story line. I know other publishers' failures regarding representing native American cultures in past publications, so as stated, treading carefully.
 

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