November 18 at the Portland Art Museum

On Wednesday we will meet at 2 pm at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park (at Jefferson). Be sure to get your Museum Student Pass in advance (PSU ID + $10 gets you a year's worth of museum admission) or pay $2.50 to Pat by November 16.

2:15—Annette Dixon, Curator of Prints and Drawings

3pm—Don Urquhart, Director of Collections Management

3:45—Meet Kate Albert, Kress Foundation Interpretive Fellow, in Kinney classroom to look at China Design Now model and talk about the Education Department.

Kenneth Goldsmith: "If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist"

Related to the discussion on appropriation, copyright, Creative Commons, etc., here's a brief essay by Kenneth Goldsmith (poet, teacher, dj, webmaster) on the issue of access.

The BACK VIEW

Sherrie Levine

far left: Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.)
Sherrie Levine
1991 bronze

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.--Sherrie Levine

Since the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine has made a career out of re-using--or appropriating--famous works of art, often by making new versions of them and placing them in different contexts. Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent male artists from the early 20th century in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the art world at that time. Her sources have included Walker Evans' photographs and Constantin Brancusi's sculptures. Levine's piece, entitled Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A. P.), is inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917).

When Levine's Fountain is compared with Duchamp's sculpture, it is apparent that it is not an exact copy. Most notably, Duchamp's piece was an actual urinal, turned upside-down and unaltered except for his signature. He believed he could transform such mass-produced, everyday objects into artworks merely by proclaiming them so, and called them "readymades." In contrast, Levine's sculpture is a contemporary urinal cast in the sculptor's traditional precious metal, bronze. Polished to a brilliant shine, this piece is no longer a common, store-bought item; it has been transformed by the artist into a unique object. (Text from Walker Art Center)

See the resource list at right for a link to aftersherrielevine.com.

Jeff Koons' String of Puppies

Jeff Koons' sculpture (top left) from the photograph by photographer Art Rogers (bottom left) engendered a copyright suit, Rogers v. Koons. The court held against Koons, finding that "an artist who reproduced a photograph as a three-dimensional sculpture for sale as high-priced art could not claim parody as a defense for copyright infringement, when the photograph itself was not the target of his parody." According to the holding, Koons was not commenting on Rogers' work specifically, and so his copying of that work did not fall under the fair use exception.

Research Assignment for Week 7: Creative Commons

Along with your reading for next Monday (Chapter 5, pp. 204 -220), visit the Creative Commons website, read some of the case studies and answer the following questions in a blog post:

• How does the Creative Commons project alter the way we understand ownership and copyright?
• How does this project affect the subject(s) of a work?
• How would a Creative Commons license have altered the works in our textbook reading (Gone with the Wind, the work of Sherrie Levine and Michael Mandiberg)?
• Does the Creative Commons project afford any protection to the right of publicity (the Bela Lugosi case)?