The guy(s) with the biggest bucks wins.
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Correct title:
“Supreme Court to decide on Andy Warhol’s Prince Prints”
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And whether Warhol did or didn’t know about the contract, it can be argued, doesn’t excuse the Warhol Estate from liability. Prudence should dictate behavior. Just because the stretch of road you just pulled onto doesn’t have a speed limit sign posted right there doesn’t grant you license to drive as fast as your car can drive. Or something like that. The photograph has an originator.
Focusing on the matter of the contract would spare the world of copyright an unnecessary headache. As if it doesn’t already have one.
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The Hero Initiative is a great org.
Some comic artist’s original works are finally going for fine-art prices (though not yet the high end fine art prices). Sadly many of the works commanding such prices are either after the artist has passed, or after the work had been sold years ago.
And while I do completely feel for Russ, and feel he should have had some compensation - much of the Pop Art movement was an attempt to elevate not just pop culture, but pedestrian design to fine art. Those old war comics were considered disposable commercial art at the time. Throw away entertainment.
Warhol’s re-creation and remixes of sundry items such as cans of soup or boxes of soap still had a person designing them.
Oldenburg’s giant sculptures of everyday objects were still based on objects designed by someone.
The various collage artists used cut ups of magazine photos and ads.
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But when the “device” of your recreation and remixing becomes a lazy trope, and you’re messing with something that isn’t already a part of pop culture, you end up killing the goose that laid golden eggs and looking like a lame rip-off artist instead of an artist.
Art isn’t supposed to be arbitrary. It’s supposed to have intent.
That isn’t necessarily true. Design that are mostly for utilitarian purpose or functional is still art. Art that is purely decorative or aesthetically pleasing is still art.
The whole modern art movement (which Pop Art was part of) was the exploration of “What is art?”, and the answer was more ore less, “Anything can be art.”
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Within the design for utilitarian or function lies an intention. Decoration has intention. Even juxtaposing mundane objects for the sake of a polemic has intention (Dadaism?).
I get the “anything can be art” concept. You know: Reception Theory and the audience’s involvement transforming an object of art. But can everything be art–especially from the side of production? Considering the sides of production and reception and their inherent limits, there surely has to be moments when an object utterly fails to rise to the level of Art in any eye or out of any effort. And sometimes even a great artist can do hack work.
This is the area I dread SCOTUS tackling, due to the “stickiness” of how all this can play into copyright law.
Didn’t Brazil’s Gilberto Gil do work in this area during his tenure at the UN?
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