Judge Batts ruled that Prince’s appropriation of Cariou’s work failed to meet standards of fair use on four specific grounds, which comprised a perhaps unintended esthetic critique of Prince’s overall artistic practice. She noted that Prince had used Cariou’s photographs in toto with minimal alterations, adding that Prince had testified that his work had no specific meaning (crucial to a narrow definition of "fair use" as commentary). The judge also charged Prince and his studio with acting in "bad faith" by requesting copies of Cariou’s book from the photographer’s studio without specifying the intended artistic use and never negotiating any kind of rights agreements with Cariou.

Now, anyone who knows Prince’s work knows that minimal yet overall appropriation in the service of bad faith is what his work and career are all about, yet the judge rejected this meta kind of appropriation, ruling that it did not fall within the definition of fair use. Indeed, Judge Batts implied a kind of slippery slope by observing that Prince had not cut up or sectioned Cariou’s pictures sufficiently, making an observer wonder whether a Mimmo Rotella standard of radical pictorial transformation would be the minimum standard for fair use.

Either way, having a judge as an interpreter of the meaning of art remains Kafkaesque: we can trot out the entire oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and a thousand other artists as violators of Judge Batts’ standard. But what of photographer Cariou? Is he not an artist, as well? There is undeniable schadenfreude in seeing Prince suffer, notably when his “Canal Zone” show was one of his laziest (but wasn’t that the point?) and a best seller at high retail price points. Indeed, Judge Batts decreed that, absent a stay for an appeal from the defendants, Prince’s work from the series and the tools used to make it should be obliterated in some way in the next 10 days, with those paintings already sold forbidden from being (literally) hung on the walls. Presumably, Cariou will have

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- bill 3-25-2011 6:08 pm [add a comment]

Patrick Cariou comes out of photography culture, which is part of mass culture. Photography culture lives and breathes by licensing agreements and royalties, and through copyright. Richard Prince, comes out of a moment when artists were using “appropriation” as a tool to comment on and criticize mass production. His work has always referenced his source material, and hence mass culture itself. Part of the value of his work today, around which much of the case revolves, is based on his reputation as a critic of and commentator on mass culture.