I’m envisioning a performance piece for TverCA, the “new contemporary art centre” in Russia, to commemorate that phase of the infamous Katyn Massacre perpetrated therein April 1940. For ten hours at a stretch, with the occasional break, the performer places a cantaloupe on a shelf attached to the log wall, puts the barrel of the pistol against it, and fires a single shot — maintaining NKVD executioner Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin’s implacable pace of one every 3 minutes. Bottles of vodka are passed around at the end of each session, as was Blokhin’s custom. […]
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These images became public-domain material the moment the macaque generated them. Caters licensed the rights to exclusive use of them from Slater, but then faced a conundrum: How could they exercise those rights? Only by maintaining strict control over their availability. (For example, if they’d licensed reproduction rights to a T-shirt manufacturer.) As soon as the agency released digital files of the images for distribution via an online publication, the Daily Mail, their public-domain status became activated, so to speak. […] The triumphant return of David W. Streets to the limelight does not bear on the Norsigian-Adams contretemps, but on a brand-new situation: the 1980 garage-sale purchase by one Anton Fury of anonymous negatives of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Streets has, so far, behaved in a more circumspect manner than he did with the arguable “Ansel Adams” negatives. Instead of proposing authorship or pretending to other expertise, as he did with the Norsigian material, Streets is . . . crowdsourcing. […] If you’re reading this, then obviously Jesus Christ did not consider you worthy of ascent to Heaven with Him in the Rapture. You’re doomed, in short, to stay around until the middle of the fall semester. And, as part of your punishment for your sins, you’ll receive these missives from me with updates about the lunacies and shenanigans of your colleagues in our little corner of the universe. […] |
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Bob Dylan: The Painter and the Photograph (1)
Most if not all of Bob Dylan’s “Asia Series” paintings are based on identifiable photographs not of Dylan’s making — none of them recent, but at least some of which remain under copyright protection. I consider it perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable, as a visual artist, to the same strictures his attorneys would hold anyone who produced and marketed an interpretation of his work. In what ways are graphic artists allowed to respond to photographs — and, conversely, disallowed from responding to them — both legally and ethically? […]