If Deborah Roberts was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats. This sentence is a copy of the subtitle of “Gunslinging Bird” by Charles Mingus: "If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats." I assume that Charles Mingus’ heirs own the copyright to those words in that order.
I get a lot of info about art in my inbox every day. Mostly these bits of artistic marketing make almost no particular impression, but a few days ago I got one of these signals from the void that made me pay attention. Sightlines is an online art magazine published in Austin by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin. She wrote an article about how Austin artist Deborah Roberts was suing Alabama artist Lynthia Edwards and her gallery, Richard Beavers Gallery in Brooklyn. Roberts complaint is simple: Edwards stole Roberts’ look and style to such a degree that their work could be confused. Deborah Roberts is the gunslinger, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York is her gun, and Edwards is the copycat. I am not a lawyer, but I have a long interest in intellectual property. So my question is this: can your style be a form of intellectual property?
The thing is that in the history of art, people who have really distinctive styles find themselves being imitated by followers. That’s sort of how new schools of art are founded. Think of Picasso—he invented a style, cubism, that people all over the world copied. I remember seeing early Diego Rivera paintings that could be mistaken for Picasso.
Van Ryzin references another article, “Ethics and Controversy: Reviewing Appropriation in Black Art” by Angela N Carroll, who writes “Copyright laws cannot disallow an artist from copyrighting a style or aesthetic, no matter how notable the artist makes that style.” Carroll advances the notion that a white artist appropriating the style of a black artist is bad, using the example of a blatant ripoff of Jean Michel Basquiat by a French artist Guillaume Vera. And it is hard to see what Lynthia Edwards is doing as much different from Guillaume Vera’s practice, although in this case it is a black artist ripping off another black artist. But I can’t see much of a difference between what Edwards and Vera do from what Diego Rivera and a generation of cubist copycats were doing. The question is, can one’s style be copyrighted or trademarked?
The image above is one of Roberts’s collages from her recent exhibit I’m at the Contemporary Austin, a fantastic exhibit which I believe is currently on tour. In the case of Roberts vs. Edwards, it feels more like a trademark issue. A trademark, according to Investopedia, is “an easily recognizable symbol, phrase, or word that denotes a specific product.” In this case, the product is “artwork by Deborah Roberts”, but her style is neither a symbol, phrase or word. But as Roberts said in an interview with van Ryzin, “Her work is being mistaken as mine.” The fact that Edwards’ art might be mistaken for Roberts’ art seems key. Nonetheless, can the legal system turn artistic influence into theft of a property right?
And in this case, Edwards could make relatively small changes in her artistic practice that would make her work instantly distinguishable from Roberts, but still obviously influenced by Roberts art. So the property right of style (if they exists) must come up with a “how close is it to the original” standard. Is it close enough to cause confusion in the minds of the art-loving public? I have no idea how such a standard could be expressed in laws or court filings.
In short, I fully believe that Edwards and Richard Beavers Gallery are engaging in morally-questionable shenanigans, but I’m not sure if I believe there should be a property right for “style” But I would be interested in hearing opposing arguments.
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