Earlier this year when Bob Dylan was accused of kowtowing to the Chinese government's demand that he not sing songs that would incite fans in Beijing and Shanghai to revolution, I defended him.

Last year, when Joni Mitchell insisted he was a plagiarist and "not authentic at all" and that "everything about Bob is a deception," I had to put all of his magpie ways into some historical perspective.

In 2009 when Mr. Dylan was picked up for possible vagrancy by a New Jersey cop while walking through a residential neighborhood in the rain, there was a good case to be made that the officer was guilty of being a cultural philistine for failing to recognize him.

That same year, when everyone dumped on Mr. Dylan's Christmas album, I argued that the roughness of his voice on such classics as "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Little Drummer Boy" reconnects us to the stark richness of the American Christmas song tradition.

When it comes to Bob Dylan and his various controversies, sometimes I feel a little like Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolfe character in "Pulp Fiction," efficiently disposing of the body of the teenager accidentally shot by John Travolta's Vinny Vega character.

This week, a variation of the "Dylan is a plagiarist" meme erupted for the umpteenth time in the mainstream media. "The Asia Series," 18 colorful paintings inspired by Mr. Dylan's recent tour of China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, are on display at Manhattan's prestigious Gagosian Gallery.

"The Asia Series" was originally billed by the gallery as "firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape." From this description, one would assume that as long as Mr. Dylan avoided getting arrested in Seoul the way he got picked up for vagrancy, the scenes he sketched or photographed while rambling around Asia provided the basis for his paintings.

As it turns out, several of the paintings are identical in content and composition to work by such classic photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leon Busy and Dmitri Kessel. Unless Mr. Dylan saw identical scenes and people during his swing through Asia, his paintings were directly inspired by the work of other artists.

Some of the images Mr. Dylan based his paintings on are in the public domain, some are not. There wouldn't be any controversy if he had given proper credit to these dead photographers instead of allowing the gallery to give the impression that the paintings were inspired by the tour.

Ironically, the discrepancy between the gallery's original description of the show and what it actually is was first pointed out by enthusiasts and bloggers who pore over Mr. Dylan's output with the tenacity of Talmudic scholars.

Instead of assuming he was trying to pull a fast one, it might be helpful to remember that five decades ago, Mr. Dylan, a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota's north country, arrived in snowy New York with a shtick straight out of the Oklahoma dust bowl.

In those days, Mr. Dylan was indistinguishable from Woody Guthrie in his mannerism and his musical delivery. Though wholly derivative, the seeds of an explosive originality were present in each drawl and Chaplinesque gesture.

Could it be that Mr. Dylan's "borrowing" of other artist's images is a continuation of this folk-inspired tradition in another medium? Those interested in emulating the masters can be found in museums all over the world doing the same thing. They're called copyists. They're part of a tradition stretching back to the Renaissance.

Mr. Dylan's painting style is deeply influenced by the heavy impasto brush strokes, compositions and color schemes of Vincent van Gogh. Mr. Dylan adapted that artist's powerful sense of color to the black-and-white photos of Asian people and scenes he "referenced." It is a hybrid of influences, not theft per se.

The Gagosian Gallery has amended its description of the show to the following: "While the composition of some of Bob Dylan's paintings is based on a variety of sources, including archival, historic images, the paintings' vibrancy and freshness come from the colors and textures found in everyday scenes he observed during his travels."

Still, we'll never be able to listen to his classic song "When I Paint My Masterpiece" the same way again.