In April 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of artist Richard Prince, who was found in 2011 to have illegally used photos from a book to create a series of collages and paintings. The original decision sided with the author of the book from which Prince used to create works exhibited in 2008 and generated more than $10 million in sales.
Prince argued that his appropriation of the photos should be allowed under the fair -use exceptions to federal copyright protections, which permit limited borrowing of protected material for purposes like commentary, criticism, news reporting and scholarship. The judge ruled that for it to apply, a new work of art must be transformative — that it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original work.” Many warned the ruling could have a chilling effect on art that relies on appropriation, a controversial but longstanding postmodern artistic strategy.
The appeals court, which heard the case last May, ruled that Judge Batts’s interpretation was incorrect and that “the law does not require that a secondary use comment on the original artist or work,” but only that a reasonable observer find the work to be transformative. The appeals court wrote that a majority of Mr. Prince’s work manifested “an entirely different aesthetic” from the author’s pictures.
But five other works were so minimally altered by Mr. Prince that they might not be considered fair use by a reasonable observer; they were sent back to the lower court for a determination.
This article discusses the transformative test discussed in the chapter. Though the chapter referred to this appropriation directly to celebrities, this article depicts a different side of artistic appropriation. Instead of a celebrity, the author and his original pictures were protected by the FA against a right-of-publicity suit in the original decision. The artist’s artistic expression about the original photos were not protected because they encroached on the author’s right of publicity. In the appeal decision, the FA protected the artist’s work because they passed the transformative test. The FA protects work that adds new elements to an original piece to transform it. Transformation produces a different meaning. Artists must create something unique and recognizably his own. The artist did so in many of his works and were therefore protected by the FA. The pieces that were not transformed enough to produce new meaning and show that it was uniquely his, did not pass the transformative test and were sent to a lower court for a decision.
Image: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/3/23/1300903561729/Richard-Prince-Canal-Zone-007.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment