A Thief By Any Other Name Can Still Be Sued

Chumpchanger has rarely--well, never before--had a chance to venture into art criticism, an area I've touched in another blogs, Deadletter.net, but thought would never make it into a blog devoted to economics and finance. Fortunately, I was wrong. Last week, the worlds of intellectual property law and art theory had an unusual collision, when the photographer Patrick Cariou sued the much better known artist Richard Prince for appropriating his work.

If a finance blog can have a least favorite artist, Prince would be Chumpchanger's. Of major artists working today, there are some whose work is less pleasant to look at, but none who are as perniciously vacuous as Prince. The ostensible subject of his paintings is the problematization of authorship, an end to which Prince has routinely repurposed old Marlboro advertisements and stale jokes, which in his hands get turned into multi-million dollar oil paintings. Other, smarter artists--Damien Hirst's jewel encrusted skull comes to mind as a great example, but even Jeff Koons counts here--have executed plenty of preposterous works that are essentially colossal jokes at the expense of the art market. But they have a sense of humor. Prince's paintings on the other hand, are a rehash in visual form of debates in art theory that were already tired twenty years ago.

I won't make a judgement here on Cariou's photography; you can click the link and see it for yourself. I will say, though, that at the very least it's photo-journalism that took some meaningful thought. That sets Cariou apart from Prince, and that means that when it comes to intellectual property, Cariou's interests and those of Chumpchanger are quite closely aligned. Intellectual property law have at times been misused by those who seek to keep ideas out of the hands of the public. But if it might need fixes at the margin, the general thrust of it is to make sure that people whose work involves setting down ideas, whether in the form of writing, visual arts, or technological invention, get compensated for it and keep doing it. It boggles the mind that anyone would believe that any intellectual purpose is achieved when Prince steals the work of a less well know, far less highly paid artist, turns it into his own bricollage, and sells it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The market value of ideas is already undergoing a significant erosion. The one thing to be optimistic about here is that while the absence of any real ideas may not be a big deal in the art market, it'll be a real liability when Prince's lawyers try to come up with some reason why a court should view what Prince does as anything better than naked theft.