Just as St. Augustine officials struggle to define artisans from junk-a-thons in the Plaza, the definition of art is being argued at the federal level as well. An iconic photograph of President Obama in graphic reduction—his head recast in gray, black, white, and red—has become a visual debate between the Associated Press, who took the original photo, and the artist who re-rendered the image and sold “Hope” posters to the election campaign.
In the beginning, art was not sterilized into galleries, each piece to be viewed individually with little physical context. In the beginning, art was literally a written language, pictographs played out in Egyptian hieroglyphics and other visual communication systems. The question in this debate is to whether the “Hope” poster is significantly transformative from the photograph.
The hand-held camera has enjoyed a hundred years of amateur history in America, and now almost anybody with a cell phone can capture an image instantly, and just about as quickly broadcast it to the world. Not everyone runs around with a copyright tag hanging off every picture the way the Associated Press does, but we’re not professional photographers. It doesn’t take much training to use a cell phone.
If a horse can hold one or two riders, then a wagon certainly adds value to the horse in its passenger capacity, but in this case, it could be the surrey with the infringement on top.
If a picture says a
thousand words, why do we spend so much time typing?
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