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The original photograph of Prince, taken by Lynn Goldsmith in 1981, is a standard magazine-profile shot.
In black-and-white, the musician returns the cameras open gaze.
Andy Warhols version, made in 1984, is a wholly new and original thing.
First, Warhol changed mediums, employing silk screen.
Second, he added colors colors that are singular in art history.
He also made several duplications of Goldsmiths image in what would become known as his Prince Series.
The Supreme Court disagrees.
It will impede new art and music and literature.
It will thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge.
It will make our world poorer.
Even a cursory glance at the Prince Series is enough to establish that Warhol transformed Goldsmiths work.
Just look at those highly polarized, Day-Glo colors.
Before Warhol, no one had thought to combine them this way.
Now, these color combinations are in the ads we watch and the designs we purchase.
This was a revolutionary formal leap.
The original image exists in a totally different universe, in humdrum reality.
Anyone who has taken Art History 101, as Kagan notes, knows this.
And everyone does it.
Think of Elaine Sturtevant and Robert Rauschenberg.
But he too had to share the profits for using the original found photograph.
And heres the interesting wrinkle about the Courts decision: The art world may be on its side.
Remember Richard Princes series New Portraits, created in 2014?
The file was then cropped, printed, and stretched, and presto: Its art.
It drove people around the bend with anger.
But the group mind came down hard on Prince for appropriating other peoples images without permission.
Anti-appropriation is a common theme these days.
The renewed obsession with copyright and proprietary notions about art comes at a time of deep artistic insecurity.
She added, I hope this SCOTUS ruling is a lesson.
Im afraid it is, just not the one Goldsmith thinks.
