Side bar

We once promised we wouldn’t post any more versions of Gordon Walters’s paintings on OTN. But just when we thought we were out they pulled us back in. This time Walters has been tipped on his side to do the donkey work for the cover of a limited edition cassette tape by American musician Keith Fullerton Whitman. In fact it's more than that. The Walters painting has been ripped apart and pushed around like a piece of low-end clip art. The painting this mess is based on is in the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection. Let's hope someone there will chase them up and tick them off.
(thanks for pointing the way S)

So you say

For any New Zealander interested in the visual arts the words I AM will always belong to Colin McCahon. Off-shore this ownership is not so certain. Pharrell Williams who owns the company I Am Other Entertainment has taken recording artist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas to court to try and stop him using the I am phrase. The battle of the Williams (does McCahon’s son William know he his father's I AM lodged in his first name one wonders?) rests on the Peas William inserting periods to create the name will.i.am. If the Entertainment Williams wins this battle (I Am Other Entertainment, LLC v. William Adams, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 13-4547) a quick dive into Google will find him plenty of other I AMs to battle waiting in the wings.
Image: the first 16 I AM hits off Google images

The shipping news

The release of Titanic in 3D returns us to Kate Winslett’s character Rose admiring Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (ok, a reproduction of it). The real painting is of course much, much larger (2.4 x 2.3 meters) which would be a squeeze in a ship’s cabin.

Turns out that when James Cameron wanted to use the Picasso image in the movie the Artists Rights Society and VAGA who look out for Picasso copyright amongst others said no. This group is also the reason that no works by Picassos are included in the Google Art Project. But could they stop Cameron? Not a chance, although he did have to fess up with the fee when pushed later. Now he's being hit up again for the 3D version. Good luck with that. 

Copy cat

Following up on last week’s bull story, a reader pointed us to a New Zealand copyright case that hung on the same issues. In 2007 sculptor John Radford took clothing manufacturer Hallensteins to court for using a photograph of his work Tip in Ponsonby’s Western Park on a t-shirt and breaching his copyright. The court decided that although a 3-D copy of the work would be a breach of copyright, a 2-D reproduction was fine. Auckland law firm Hesketh Henry neatly sum up the New Zealand situation on their website, “For the ordinary person this means you can take photographs of famous (and not so famous), buildings, structures and sculptures in the public domain and be comfortable that, if you use this image on a plate, T-shirt or postcard home, you are entitled to do so.”
Thanks for that B.

Fair and square

Looking at the cover of Instant! Maori, a book by Nick Theobald and Paaora Walker and published by Wadsworth Books, you can get an idea of how blurred copyright is becoming in the visual arts. Who owns what here? Inside this handy phrase book Foodstuffs are thanked for letting the authors use the Mr Four Square icon, but Dick Frizzell, surely the inspiration behind this mash-up, gets no mention. And have Foodstuffs unwittingly let loose the hounds of appropriation by giving this revisionist version of their logo a big tick? Frizzell probably still waits for the phone call from the lawyers of those notorious copyright protectors, the Disney Corporation. We remember there was a playground (or was it a toilet block?) in New Zealand that was forced to remove a Disney-like mural some years ago. Over the years Disney has successfully extended the time limit on their copyright protection in what is often known as Sonny Bono’s Mickey Mouse Law. That pushed items who's copyright lapsed in 1998 out to 2019. Our Mr Four Square obviously thinks he can mix it with whoever comes along. Good on him.

Doppelganger

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities explaining how Egypt would copyright Egyptian art and antiquities.

“The law would apply to full-scale, precise copies of any museum objects or "commercial use" of ancient monuments, including the pyramids or the sphinx.

“I do not regard the Luxor hotel as a copy of an Egyptian pyramid - the hotel's interior bares little relation to the inside of a genuine Egyptian pyramid.”

Images: top the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas looking just like the pyramids. Bottom the interior – not so much.