Richard Prince wins his appeal in a definitive legal battle for “Fair Use”

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) 1989

According to the Hollywood Reporter, today an LA judge made a critical ruling for the legal future of, well, Art as we know it.

In March 2011, federal judge Deborah A. Batts ruled that Richard Prince had violated the law by using another photographer’s work as the basis of his own. In the art world, this technique is called “appropriation” and is the one of the most popular forms of image critique existing today. In the legal world, it would seem this same technique is called a “crime.”

In December, 2011, a New York Times article explored the case in some detailing, exploring the implications and limits of “fair use,” the copyright exemption that allows one artist to reference another as long as that reference is “transformative.” The ruling would set a legal precedent for dealing with appropriation, which means works at stake ranged from Prince to undisputed masterpieces like Christian Marclay‘s The Clock. 

Richard Prince, Graduation

In the case of Prince – an artist who made his name appropriating images of  cigarette ad cowboys – the Gagosian-backed artist had reworked images from Patrick Cariou‘s 2000 book, Yes Rasta.  One might assume this kind of attention from an established Art Star would be flattering for the photographer, until one does the math: used copies of Yes, Rasta are floating around Amazon.com for $40 or so; Prince’s updates were fetching up to $2.5 million.

Granted, Prince’s price-tag owes more to the Gagosian-Machine, than to the artist’s interventions, which amount to adding an electric guitar or pasting heads on squatted, squiggly, De Kooning-esque bodies. The earlier decision had actually rested on whether this counted as “transformative,” a defense that was hard to build when the artist himself was noncommittal about assigning any “meaning” to what really reads like a kind of aesthetic hooliganism (When the judge pressed Prince to be more clear, he maintained that his only intent was “to make great art that makes people feel good.” Hence, the electric guitar?) In spite of this, the appeals court found that whether or not Prince intended any specific meaning, it was there. According to Second Circuit Judge Barrington Parker: ”These twenty-five of Prince’s artworks manifest an entirely different aesthetic from Cariou’s photographs. Where Cariou’s serene and deliberately composed portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of Rastafarians and their surrounding environs, Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other hand, are hectic and provocative.”

Here, looking at the artworks and the photographs side-by-side, we conclude that Prince’s images, except for those we discuss separately below, have a different character, give Cariou’s photographs a new expression, and employ new aesthetics with creative and communicative results distinct from Cariou’s. Our conclusion should not be taken to suggest, however, that any cosmetic changes to the photographs would necessarily constitute fair use. A secondary work may modify the original without being transformative. For instance, a derivative work that merely presents the same material but in a new form, such as a book of synopses of televisions shows, is not transformative. [Emphasis Baibakov Art Projects]

The idea of “any cosmetic change” legitimating copyright infringement is a dangerous line to draw (especially in Hollywood, a city which has stretched the definition of “cosmetic” to its limits and then some), as Prince’s lawyer Joshua Schiller noted: “This is not piracy. These are not handbags.”

In the final ruling, 25 of the 30 artworks were cleared as within fair use. The remaining five (including the above, Graduation) will be decided in a district court.

It will be interesting to see the implications unfold.

Read Randy Johnson’s 2011 summary of the case here, and today’s Hollywood Reporter update here.

New York architects rally in support of an iconic former museum

The former building of the American Folk Art Museum, New York

In 2011, New York’s Museum of Modern Art raised some pulses when it announced that it would be acquiring the former building for the American Folk Art Museum, next door to the MoMA’s 53rd street complex. Constructed only 12 years ago, the origami facade has already become a New York icon,  dreamed up by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (the same team responsible for rehousing Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.)

Interior of the former American Folk Art Museum, New York

The American Folk Art Museum – which, intriguingly enough actually owns Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace, the inspiration for Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale exhibition – vacated from the site in 2011, opting for a more affordable space opposite Lincoln Center. The building has remained in limbo, designated to be integrated into MoMA, but architecturally incongruent, and, well, just a little inconvenient. The galleries are designed along verticals that just don’t lend themselves to the types of white box viewing that MoMA has developed as its trademark. What was a long feared possibility became a reality earlier this month, when MoMA announced the building would be razed to make way for another, which could directly connect to the remaining MoMA buildings. In a New York Times piece, MoMA Chief Curator of Architecture and Design Barry Bergdoll is quoted as saying: “It’s incredibly painful to see a really significant building go. The conclusion reached makes sense for the future evolution of this complex of buildings and coming up with something that can really show off this collection to its greatest effect.” He later adds: ““It’s a kind of bespoke suit for folk art that has tremendous obstacles. You can’t punch walls in the side and expect it to still be the same space.”

No surprise, the decision has touched up quite a bit of controversy, including an open letter of protest from the Architectural League of New York, signed by industry heavyweights like Richard Meier, Thom Mayne, Steven Holl, Hugh Hardy and Robert A.M. Stern, to name a few. New York Magazine commissioned two pieces expressing opposing viewpoints, with  Justin Davidson calling the decision “a betrayal” (“If a commercial developer were to tear down a small, idiosyncratic, and beautifully wrought museum in order to put up a deluxe glass box, it would be attacked as a venal and philistine act. When a fellow museum does the same thing, it’s even worse — it’s a form of betrayal.”) while the ever-colorful Jerry Saltz contended that it was high time to bid adieu to a building that was “absolutely unusable.”

I understand the bitter reaction of architects and architecture critics to the news, but they should know that virtually every person in the art world believes that the Williams-Tsien building is a terrible place to look at art — and that it is just one of a spate of new museum buildings that put architecture before art since Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Architects: When you design an art museum, do whatever you like to the outside of your building. But please, create enough well-proportioned interior space to show art in. Art first; all else will follow.

For its part, the Folk Art Museum released a statement of its own, thanking the MoMA for purchasing the building to begin with and thus providing the funds to allow the Folk Art Museum to continue. As they remind readers: “The building is not the Museum! The Museum is not the building!“

Rhizome’s Seven-on-Seven pairs Social Media Entrepreneurs with Artists, in the pursuit of Big Ideas

Installation view of Paul Pfeiffer, The Morning After the Deluge, 2003, Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow, 2009.

On April 4, 2013, the New York Times’ reporter Alice Gregory turned in a curious piece entitled “Does Anyone Here Speak Art and Tech?” Her driving aim was to find out why there was not more social media money circulating in the artworld. The piece opens:

Chelsea is a Manhattan neighborhood long associated with warehouselike spaces filled with contemporary art, icy gallerinas who ignore all but the most well-heeled customers, and schmoozy Thursday nights, where the sidewalks of the West 20s are crowded with visitors smoking and drinking room-temperature white wine as they make their way from one show opening to another.

Just blocks away, at the origami-like IAC headquarters housing OKCupid, Vimeo and Ask.com, the nondescript East Coast office of Google at 76 Ninth Avenue and the home of Betaworks at 416 West 13th Street, are packs of newly minted millionaires, coding, developing apps and inventing the technology we all use daily (and occasionally playing foosball).

But though software engineers and art dealers may pass one another on the High Line, the worlds they inhabit could not be less alike; parallel universes that rarely intersect. And considering their net worths, technology innovators and the venture capitalists who back them are not collecting much art, according to people in both the tech and art worlds.

“If these are our next Rockefellers, Carnegies, Fricks, whatever you want to say in terms of our wealthy American elite, then why aren’t they supporting culture?” Art advisor Sima Familant is quoted asking. “If these people are the new wealthy, and they’re not supporting institutions and the arts, then we’re going to have a really big problem at some point.”

Gregory outlines ways that this is evolving, but mostly she focuses on the “Clash of Cultures,” lingering on descriptions of social media entrepreneurs feeling excluded from the intricate social workings of the art world, or leaving the Armory Show with a bad taste in their mouths. To cite the words of Jonah Peretti, one of the founders of Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post:

“It’s not like there’s some instruction manual when you show up at Barbara Gladstone that explains all this to you.” Paraphrasing typical complaints some in tech have with the gallery system, he said: “Why are they making it hard for me to buy art? I want to write a big check to this person, and they’re treating me in this way that I don’t quite understand, like they don’t really want my money.”

Rather mysteriously, Gregory does not mention any of the online platforms recently launched to bridge just these gaps, such as Artsy or Artspace, which was all over the headlines that same week for acquiring the  VIP Art (the online marketplace formerly known as the VIP Art Fair.) While Full Disclaimer, Baibakov Art Projects’ Maria Baibakova is now strategic director of Artspace, this acquisition signals that the art world is actively engaged in exploring its digital possibilities, which includes mapping out the ways one can encounter art online. In February of last year, Artforum‘s Brian Droitcour wrote a humorous account of his experience with the VIP Art Fair 2.0, including selecting his avatar (intended to allow viewers to gauge the scale of a work.) “The shadow of Ms. VIP II stretches and shrinks beneath the sun of very important art,” he concludes, after urging online platforms to go beyond just emulating existing gallery models. [Read his full report here.]

One such forum for establishing such new models is Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum “dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” Founded in 1996, the platform is constantly evolving. For instance, recent projects include hosting an internet-art-of-the-month club, The Download, or partnering with Tumblr for the Internet Art Grant, a new initiative that supports innovative uses of Tumblr.)

Tumblr’s David Karp and Ryan Trecartin at the 2012 Seven on Seven Conference

One the key highlights of Rhizome‘s programming is the Seven-on-Seven conference, which will be held for the fourth time this Saturday, April 20, 2013. The event pairs seven artists with seven “influential technologists,” creating teams of two which it then “and challenges them to develop something new—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day.”

This year’s keynote speaker is Evgeny Morozov, author of  The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here.. The conference’s line-up pairs Jill Magid with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley;  Fatima Al Qadiri with App.net’s Dalton Caldwell; Matthew Ritchie with turntable.fm’s Billy Chasen; Cameron Martin with LA Makerspace’s Tara Tiger Brown; Jeremy Bailey with Ouya’s Julie Uhrman; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer with Obama for America’s Harper Reed; and Paul Pfeiffer with Giphy’s Alex Chung.

Having admired or even worked with some of these artists before (Pfeiffer’s 2009 solo show at Baibakov Art Projects, “Perspective Machine,“ remains one of our favorites. To find out why, watch a video tour of that exhibition here), we are very excited to see what ideas come out of the conference.

For more information about Seven-on-Seven, or to purchase tickets, click here.

You can read Gregory’s full article here.

Russia’s National Center for Contemporary Art honors its own with the Innovation Prize

Installation view of Kutlag Ataman, Küba, 2004. Ural Biennial, Ekaterinburg, 2012.

While the recent death of street artist Pasha 183 has made headlines, this week the Russian art world saw a quieter international reception for two awards ceremonies, split between its two cultural capitals (Your time is coming, Ekaterinburg…) The first was the St Petersburg-based Kuryokhin Prize, which was awarded in honor of Pop Mekhanika composer Sergey Kuryokhin (You can find a primer here, but his most beloved quotes include the assertion that “Lenin was a Mushroom,” and “I want to be Mozart and Michael Jackson at the same time.”)

Victor Alimpiev, still from Vot, 2012

As the Kuryokhin Prize tends to recognize the kind of creativity not always featured in the Moscow market, some of the laureates are not as familiar to an international audience. For instance, the top award went to composer Vladimir Rannev‘s opera “Two Acts” and Best Work of Art went to St Petersburg duo Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, who have recently moved from large-scale abstract paintings to technology-driven total installations. Meanwhile, the award for media went to Victor Alimpiev, whose name should ring more than a few bells, even before he was announced as part of Massimiliano Gioni’s upcoming exhibition at Venice.

Installation view of Ivan Plusch, Process of Passing, 2012. Part of the Ural Biennial.

The second award ceremony took place today in Moscow. The Innovation Prize is state-funded by the National Center for Contemporary Art (yes, the organization that pulled off bringing the Ural Biennale to Siberian mines, but has been struggling to build its tower in Moscow.) We provided a run-down on the shortlist in February (which, as we’re not the first to point out, contains a disturbingly high percentage of NCCA-funded projects, including more than a few from the Ural Biennial [Editor's Note: For those who missed the biennial the first time around, you can read a first-hand account here.] Not that these nominations weren’t deserved, just maybe a bit problematic to only award one’s self.)

Regardless, we are happy to congratulate Ural Biennial curator Iara Boubnova, for her win for Best Curatorial Project, particularly as, as we mentioned earlier, normally a project like this would be shuffled into the “Regional” category. That award, we should add, went to Ilya Dolgov‘s project in Voronezh, a southwestern city that rarely makes it on the map, art-world-wise.

Other honorees included Elena Petrovskaya, who won for Theory, Criticism and Art History for her recent collection of essays examining intersections of art and “society,” in its various constructions; Ivan Plusch - featured in Baibakov Art Projects’ inaugural exhibition, “invasion : evasion” – was honored for his superb installation, The Process of Passing, part of a side-project of the Ural Biennial; and the PROVMYZA Group, who took the top prize for Work of the Year for their staging of the opera Mirage.

Congratulations to all the laureates and nominees!

Pasha 183′s tragic passing draws attention to Russian street art

Pasha 183, In Anticipation of New Years, 2011

Less than a week after it was announced that Vladik Monroe was found dead in Bali, the Russian art world also learned of the April 1 death of another of its cult heroes: the street artist known as Pasha 183. Only 29 at the time, Pasha was rumored to have hung himself, though so far these reports have not been confirmed. In any event, it is a true tragedy for the young scene.

Born and raised in Moscow, Pasha quickly cultivated a following through his talent for visual punning and skillful deployment of Soviet imagery, such as the much beloved Alenka, of chocolate bar wrapper fame. He emphasized the performative act to his process, often creating and circulating videos of the work being made, in direct defiance to laws against street art. Take for example this work, “Volume“:

You can see more of his work on his own portfolio page, 183art.ru, or on this Russian-language tribute page, published by Code Red Magazine.

Banksy, Pasha 183 RIP, 2013

Pasha 183 may have bristled at comparisons to Banksy – according to a BBC interview, he felt “strange to be compared to a rich celebrity artist living at the other end of Europe”- but this week the latter artist has responded with a work entitled Pasha 183 RIP, which depicts an eternal flame coming out of a can of spray paint.

Meanwhile, in the wake of public outpouring for the artist’s passing, Moscow Ministry of Culture head Sergey Kapkov announced that this summer, as part of the campaign “Best City in the World” (good luck with that…), over 150 of the city’s walls, fences and buildings – 100 of which are public housing complexes – would be given over to street artists, in an effort to encourage the development of street art. It’s a curious move, given that most of these artists work in secrecy specifically to protect their identity from prosecution, but let’s hope that Kapkov has only the best intentions for this project.

No Joke: Roskomnadzor starts selectively blocking social networks in Russia

The mock-up for the Guggenheim’s April Fools’ announcement of a building expansion.

Amidst all the internet shenanigans unleashed as part of April Fools (while yes, it can get tedious wading through all the spoofs, particular props to the Guggenheim, for their announcement of an expansion to the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building, and for Artinfo, whose daily round-up included joke news items like  ”$5 Garage Sale Purchase Turns Out to Be Tino Sehgal Performance Piece Worth $3M” and “Sotheby’s Announces Full-Service Art Custodianship” ensuring that “collectors will never actually have to look at their art again”), there was one item of news that was, unfortunately, no joke.

While Russian internet has been buzzing about this the last week or so, a story in the March 31, 2013, New York Times confirmed that Russia has begun to selectively crack down on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, as part of the child protection law that went into effect November, despite causing an uproar when it was proposed last summer.

According to this law,  Roskomnadzor (an acronym begging for its Bond movie cameo, but “short” for the Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications) now has the power to block websites or providers with content deemed dangerous for children. While this applies to images of child abuse, it also can be used against websites that may promote drug use or suicide. This may seem sensible enough on paper, but if we just recall the gross abuses of the “homosexual propaganda” law, the implications are harrowing. According to Andrew Kramer’s article:

But opposition leaders have railed against the law as a crack in the doorway to broader Internet censorship. They say they worry that social networks, which have been used to arrange protests against President Vladimir V. Putin, will be stifled.

The child protection law, they say, builds a system for government officials to demand that companies selectively block individual postings, so that contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia’s image abroad and anger Internet users at home.

Kramer assures us that, “So far at least, the Russians have been mostly singling out not political content but genuinely distressing material posted by Russian-speaking users,” before also citing similar content-blocking agreements in countries including Turkey, France and Germany.

We have already heard reports of Baudelaire and Walt Whitman being yanked from bookstore shelves for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. We’ve been cautious about perpetuating these, as it seems nothing catches fire faster than censorship stories (or so hopes Marat Guelman, who has brought his exhibition “Icons” – picketed in Krasnodar - to St Petersburg’s Tkachi Museum – but more on this later.) Still, we are keeping a watchful eye and welcome any firsthand reports from Russia.

Find Kramer’s full article here.

Nikolay Bakharev another feature of Massimiliano Gioni’s “Encyclopedic Palace”

Nikolay Bakharev, Untitled. Image courtesy of Regina Gallery.

On March 15, the Art Newspaper published the story “Curators have mixed reactions to the artist roster for Venice Biennale” - exactly the kind of piece one might expect before a show laden with so many expectations of its own. Amid some lavish praise from curators-in-the-news Jens Hoffmann and Paul Schimmel (whose embattled history with MOCA seems to have taken a turn now that he is reported to be on the verge of accepting a job at top gallery Hauser+Wirth), one anonymous “leading European curator” encouraged readers to “Do the maths:  non-European and American artists appear to number 21 out of 154 artists in total, which is about 14%.” (Even this curator couched his statement with “Gioni, however, has a keen eye and precise curatorial hand, so I am quite sure it will be a beautiful show,” leaving us confused about how “mixed” these reactions really are. )

Still, for a show that inspires to Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace – a compendium of universal knowledge –  the fact that Europeans/Americans make up 86% (or 133 out of 154) of the artist roster (as it was published) seems depressingly representative of the art world as a whole (rather than, say,  an imaginative framework for exploring outside those bounds.)

Nikolay Bakharev, Untitled

This morning, Artguide‘s Masha Kravtsova broke the news that the published list of artists is by no means final. While we mentioned earlier that two Russians – Victor Alimpiev and Evgeny Kozlov - were included within the main exhibition, it now seems we can add one more to the list: Siberian photographer Nikolay Bakharev, whose quirky, kinky,  nudes-in-Soviet-interiors were included in Gioni’s 2011 exhibition Ostalgia.

The inclusion of another Russian – a Siberian no less – sounds like maybe Gioni has an eye on improving his numbers. In any case, we look forward to watching this Palace expand (and finally catching a firsthand glimpse when the Venice Biennale opens June 1, 2013.)