Is Sharon Moody a Prince?
Several readers who’ve been following my posts on the paintings of Sharon Moody have pointed me toward a recent New York Times article titled “Apropos Appropriation” by Randy Kennedy. Kennedy, reporting on a lawsuit that arose over appropriation by artist Richard Prince, wrote:
In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince-whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others-broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. …
The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used-or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. …
Over the last couple of decades part of the equation for deciding whether fair use is indeed fair is how much the thing copied has been transformed. In other words, even if we are long past making anything completely new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes declared a couple of millenniums ago, copying should be allowed only to the degree to which it adds to or builds on what came before.
What those who sent me the article from which I plucked the excerpt above want to know (and please do go read the whole thing) is whether I believed Moody’s actions bore any similarities to what Prince had done. And my initial thought on reading the article was that-even though I found it a fascinating piece-I didn’t really care.
Why? Because the article was mostly about the legal steps one artist or copyright holder can take when he, she, or it feels unfair borrowing has been going on, remedies either to prevent the borrowing from happening or to recoup some of the profit that was partially, to a greater or lesser extent, earned due to the power of the original work.
While there may or may not be similarities between Moody and Prince when it comes to the appropriation issue, the debate over where to draw that legal line, as opposed to an artistic one, was never my major concern. Instead, what riled me up was what I saw as the ethical and moral issue of how one artist should treat another.
Which is why it’s a different paragraph in Kennedy’s story that speaks more to my concerns. Near the end of the piece, he writes:
At a debate about the Prince case at the New York City Bar Association last month Virginia Rutledge, an art lawyer and former general counsel for Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that advocates for more open copyright standards, said she believed that the problem facing the art world was as much a “cultural attribution crisis” as a legal crisis and that the problem could be at least partly addressed by cultivating a stronger climate of simple acknowledgement and credit.
And that final sentiment is truly what it’s all about.
Since one of the co-owners of the gallery displaying Moody’s work wrote last week that, “Anyone who attends the exhibition of her work will read that she has already acknowledged the artists who illustrated the comics on which her art is based,” perhaps the problem has indeed been addressed. I look forward to seeing the full extent of that acknowledgement when I pay a visit to the exhibition before it closes on January 15.
Originally published at Scott Edelman. You can comment here or there.