In an art context, appropriation refers to the use of pre-existing or previously defined images or objects, without significant changes in the concept or physical form. Artists have appropriated aspects of visual culture since Cubists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque first began incorporating newspaper images into their paintings. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose “Readymade” works redefined the very foundations of art making, first challenged notions of appropriation with his work Fountain (1917), a reoriented porcelain urinal, which Duchamp signed and exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists. One of the underlying principles of artistic appropriation involves the recognition of the “borrowed” material as copy or reference—bringing new context to a symbol, object or image. This recontextualization is apparent in works such as Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can series (1961), which appropriated an everyday food object into a Pop art icon.

In addition to Warhol artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg began to incorporate a great deal of appropriation into their practices, pulling material from popular culture, television, and the average household. In the 1980s, American artists such as Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons brought appropriation to a new level, influenced by the writings of German philosopher Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. In a contemporary context, appropriation remains an actively evolving practice of many artists including Richard Prince, Luc Tuymans, Claes Oldenburg, John Baldessari, Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger, with new tactics and means found in work across all disciplines.