Art Litigation: Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Case Settles

Story on the Jeff Koons balloon dog controversy settling here, bookends will be sold, but without Koon's name.   This is an example of an artist exerting control over the right of attribution.

Bookends look like this:

NY Times article here   SF Chronicle here


 Purchase Copyright Litigation Handbook 2010 by Raymond J. Dowd from West here  

Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Copyright Infringement

A good article in the Wall Street Journal here, with good images for comparison, on the claim of photographer Patrick Cariou that artist Richard Prince had ripped him off. It's not the first time that a photographer has been upset over Prince's actions. Someone sent me a NY Times article on the original photographer who did the Marlboro Man campaigns that Prince copied.

Now I know Cariou's name - Prince has made him and his work more famous, and the two will probably make more money in their respective careers following the tiff than before, no matter what the end result.

The WSJ article discusses cases involving Jeff Koons, the puppies case and the more recent Niagara case (image here). I met Jeff Koons last night for the first time at the National Arts Club where he was being presented with a medal.

We discussed his litigations, and he said that they have really changed his work.

In a visual online world where "free speech" for a visual artist may include defacing the work of another, we are going to see a lot of boundaries changing. What's fair today may not be fair tomorrow.

Appropriation Art and Wikipedia

In preparing for a presentation I gave last week at the National Arts Club on "Copyright and Creativity" I found some great wikipedia entries that were very helpful. The wikipedia entry for Appropriation (art) is found here. Also the Art Intervention entry is found here.

Both movements involve using, modifiying, stealing or vandalizing someone else's artwork. Sometimes litigation ensues.

I have inserted Marcel Duchamps' L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), where he puts a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa.

Contemporary artists continue to annoy, harass, steal, disrupt and dismay us. Decades later, their works will be valued and celebrated. My favorite is http://www.whitneybiennial.com/. The artist Miltos Manetas stole the Whitney's name and a very good domain name and used it to build a version of the Whitney's 2002 Biennial that included his web-based artworks. He told the press that he was going to surround the Biennial with U-haul trucks with screens showing web-based art that he likes. He never did, but he created a huge uproar.

The social or artistic value of a work that borrows so heavily from another's work is not always apparent. For example, the "appropriation artist" Richard Prince photographed Marlboro advertisements, took out the wording of the advertisement, and blew up the photographs without any other modifications. Pure copyright infringement? One of his photographs reached a world record for photography when it auctioned in 2005 for over $1.2 million.

The artist Jeff Koons (who recently won a case against a photographer whose image he placed in a painted collage) has similarly caused scandal, litigation, and has eventually reaped tremendous financial rewards for reinterpretations - or outright taking - of works under copyright.