Re: Warhol Against the Supreme Court and Beyond - You Lose Chump - PAY UP!

On Sun, 21 May 2023 22:26:56 +0200 (CEST), Alvin Bragg
<[email protected]> wrote:

>On 07 Dec 2021, "13% = 6x the crimes!" <[email protected]> posted
>some news:[email protected]: 
>
>> Mighty Wannabe wrote
>> 
>>> Picking Prince was the first mistake.  That gay fool was always a
>>> piece of shit loser. 
>
>The original photograph of Prince, taken by Lynn Goldsmith in 1981, is a 
>standard magazine-profile shot. In black-and-white, the musician returns 
>the camera’s open gaze. Andy Warhol’s version, made in 1984, is a wholly 
>new and original thing. First, Warhol changed mediums, employing silk 
>screen. Second, he added colors — colors that are singular in art history. 
>He also made several duplications of Goldsmith’s image in what would 
>become known as his “Prince Series.” Each of Warhol’s Princes is quite 
>different from the others, as if a very slow cinematic change were taking 
>place, as well as from the source that inspired them.
>
>The Supreme Court disagrees. In a lopsided 7-2 decision, the Court ruled 
>this week that Warhol’s Prince is not transformative enough to count as 
>“fair use” of Goldsmith’s Prince. The ruling inspired a passionate dissent 
>from Justice Elena Kagan, who warned that the Court’s narrowing of “fair 
>use” laws “will stifle creativity of every sort. It will impede new art 
>and music and literature. It will thwart the expression of new ideas and 
>the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer.” Justice 
>Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, dryly noted that all the Court 
>is asking the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to do is pay 
>Goldsmith “a fraction” of the proceeds from the licensing of the “Prince 
>Series”; it isn’t banning such appropriations outright. Still, Kagan had a 
>point when she declared, “It is not just that the majority does not 
>realize how much Warhol added; it is that the majority does not care.”
>
>Even a cursory glance at the “Prince Series” is enough to establish that 
>Warhol transformed Goldsmith’s work. Just look at those highly polarized, 
>Day-Glo colors. Before Warhol, no one had thought to combine them this 
>way. Now, these color combinations are in the ads we watch and the designs 
>we purchase. This was a revolutionary formal leap. Even the cropping 
>radically alters the image, with Prince’s disembodied head floating 
>against a bright backdrop as if he were a cutout. The original image 
>exists in a totally different universe, in humdrum reality.
>
>For Warhol, Goldsmith’s photograph was material as malleable as clay, 
>which itself is a comment on the images that form the visual landscape of 
>our lives. Anyone who has taken “Art History 101,” as Kagan notes, knows 
>this. And everyone does it. The Court seems oblivious to one of the great 
>imaginative engines of art of the past 150 years, planting itself, as 
>Kagan writes, “in the ‘I could paint that’ school of art criticism.” Think 
>of Elaine Sturtevant and Robert Rauschenberg. Think of all those artists 
>who use photographs as inspiration or jumping-off points, combining them, 
>drawing or painting on them, sculpting them. Jeff Koons turned a 
>photographic image into a gaudily painted wooden string of puppies.
>
>But he too had to share the profits for using the original found 
>photograph. And here’s the interesting wrinkle about the Court’s decision: 
>The art world may be on its side.
>
>Remember Richard Prince’s series “New Portraits,” created in 2014? Each 
>painting is an inkjet image of someone else’s Instagram page printed on 
>canvases measuring about six feet by four feet. The process involved his 
>adding a comment or two on the page, then taking a screengrab with his 
>iPhone and emailing the file to an assistant. The file was then cropped, 
>printed, and stretched, and presto: It’s art. Richard Prince’s art.
>
>It drove people around the bend with anger. The fact that Prince was an 
>older man using images of younger, often scantily clad women contributed 
>to the outrage. But the group mind came down hard on Prince for 
>appropriating other people’s images without permission. In an Artnet 
>article titled “Richard Prince Sucks,” Paddy Johnson wrote that Prince’s 
>art was “thin offerings for anyone who is in possession of a brain” and 
>that “copy-paste culture is so ubiquitous now that appropriation remains 
>relevant only to those who have piles of money.” My late compadre Peter 
>Schjeldahl wrote that it made him “wish to be dead,” which was “the surest 
>defense against assaults of postmodern attitude.” Anti-appropriation is a 
>common theme these days. Artists, photographers, and influencers are now 
>claiming strident ownership of their images, even when those images are 
>embedded voluntarily into social networks.
>
>The renewed obsession with copyright and proprietary notions about art 
>comes at a time of deep artistic insecurity. Copyright is all but dead in 
>practice, with AI creating images daily based on tens of millions of 
>“remembered” images. The idea of originality is changing, expanding, and 
>there’s no way to put all these genies back into the bottle. In the face 
>of this existential challenge from computers, the creative industries 
>could allow human interpretation and adaptation to flourish instead of 
>fearfully putting rings around what they’ve already made. Goldsmith told 
>Hyperallergic, “This is a great day for photographers and others who make 
>their living from licensing their art.” She added, “I hope this SCOTUS 
>ruling is a lesson.” I’m afraid it is, just not the one Goldsmith thinks.
>
><https://www.vulture.com/2023/05/warhol-against-the-supreme-court-and-beyond.html>.

Warhol should have taken his own photo.  Modifying someone else's work in this way is not
fair use.  Had it been a public domain photo or an extraordinarily famous image that had
become a cultural icon (like Monroe standing on the subway grate), he might have got away
with it.

Swill
--
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