Time.news – The US Supreme Court is grappling with an unusual, decidedly pop court case. At the heart of the controversy is the series of 16 screen-printed portraits of the legendary singer Prince, made in 1984 by the king of Pop Art, Andy Warhol.
After 38 years she is the photographer Lynn Goldsmith, author of the 1981 snapshot of Prince, to ask the Warhol Foundation for copyright payment, invoking copyright infringement. This was reported by the France Info site, specifying that the nine essays of the Court will have to rule on the matter by 30 June 2023.
Specifically, they will have to evaluate whether a work of art is to be considered “transformative” when it conveys a message different from the source or for being visually different.
A sentence that will be long awaited and full of consequences for both the world of art and jurisprudence, still divided on the answer to be given in the event of a copyright dispute.
© harms / Afp
Prince
In this case, the central question concerns the possibility for Warhol, the iconic artist who died in 1987, to use the photo of Prince taken by Goldsmith without having to pay the royalties.
The photographer, known for having immortalized some of the most famous rock stars in the world, asks the Warhol Foundation for payment, which has so far rejected her application. The black and white portrait of Prince, a young emerging singer with very thin features, signed by Goldsmith in 1981, was proposed to the weekly Newsweek.
In the 1984 album ‘Purple Rain’ catapulted him to the rank of international star. Vanity Fair magazine then asks Warhol to create a portrait of him, in line with those of Marilyn Monroe and Mao, for the cover dedicated to Prince. In exchange for $ 400, Goldsmith authorizes the magazine to use one of his photographs for the exclusive use of the article entitled “Purple Fame”, accompanied by a portrait of Prince, purple skin on an orange background, obviously signed by Warhol.
No problem so far. The controversy was sparked by the artist’s decision to use the same photograph to further create a series of 16 portraits of the musician, whom he admired for his talent and androgynous style, all in different shades. The famous photographer only discovered its existence in 2016, when Prince died, when Vanity Fair publishes an illustration of the ‘Kid of Minneapolis’ that takes the same shot, this time all orange.
Goldsmith then gets in touch with the Andy Warhol Foundation, which manages the collection and which had received $ 10,250 for that publication.
The foundation immediately took legal action to have its exclusive rights to the series recognized, and the photographer fought back. In the first instance, a judge ruled in favor of the Foundation, assessing that Andy Warhol had actually transformed the message of the work. For him, Goldsmith showed Prince as a “vulnerable, uncomfortable” personwhile Warhol’s portraits highlighted his status as an “icon, larger than life, timeless”.
However an appeals court invalidated his reasoning, holding that judges cannot play the role of “art critics and analyze the intentions and messages of the works”, having to be content with evaluating the visual similarities between the works.
According to her decision, since Warhol did not make any substantial additions or changes, the photographer should be paid. Against the ruling, the Foundation then turned to the Supreme Court. Goldsmith hopes that the highest US jurisdiction will recognize Warhol’s work as “non-transformative, therefore illegal”, thus claiming the payment of the intellectual property right also for the new screen prints, including the one published in 2016, upon Prince’s death.
After a series of contradictory decisions by different courts, the final sentence is now up to the Supreme Court, thus called to clarify the intellectual property right in the field of works of art known as transformative, i.e. those that modify or transform a first work to make an original creation.