By MIA FINEMAN

In February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show.
The 30-second spot featured a rapid montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters - including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart and Dustin Hoffman - picking up the telephone and saying “Hello.” It ended with a shot of the iPhone.
Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it.
“I was very surprised,” he said recently by phone from London.
Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video “Telephones,” which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay’s signature works, has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States.
Mr. Marclay said he spoke with a lawyer after learning of the commercial but decided not to pursue legal action. “When people with that much power and money copy you, there’s not much you can do,” he said.
Contacted by telephone and e-mail, neither Apple nor its advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, would comment on the iPhone ad for this article.
Artists have been appropriating images from the advertising world for decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol made silk-screened copies of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans. In the 1980s Richard Prince rephotographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself.
But what happens when the situation is reversed?
Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements. “It does seem like advertising people are pushing the envelope on this,” he said. “They’re being more and more brazen in their borrowing. ”
Recently Mr. Zaretsky was approached by the artist Spencer Tunick, who is known for his photographs of large installations of naked people in public places around the world. Mr. Tunick was concerned about a television commercial for Vaseline shown in Europe and the United States in 2007.
The 60-second commercial, called “Sea of Skin,” features large groups of naked men and women posed in artful configurations in various outdoor settings.
“There was such a close resemblance to my work that it was uncanny,” Mr. Tunick said in an interview. “When I saw the ad, I thought it was definitely inspired by my photographs and videos of installations.”
Was it- Not according to Kevin Roddy, the executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, who developed the commercial for Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever.
“I’m familiar with Spencer’s work,” Mr. Roddy said, “but I can’t say that was an influence at all. Spencer is about masses of people and nudity. We’re about representing the functionality of skin. Sure, it’s hundreds of thousands of bodies, but they’re meant to represent one thing: skin.
Mr. Tunick said he had not decided whether to pursue legal action.
In an age when sampling and appropriation have become widespread practices in contemporary art and in the culture at large, some find it paradoxical that artists are now guarding their own creations more vigilantly.
Michael Lobel, a professor of 20th-century art at Purchase College, about 30 kilometers north of Manhattan, said the easy availability of digital images on the Web had helped foster this defensiveness.
“There’s a broader consciousness among artists about owning their work and keeping tight control over its distribution,” he said.
Mr. Lobel said that while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. “Culture is about ongoing borrowing,” he said. “It’s about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses.”