For close to 30 years—up until last week—courts have wrestled with the question of when artists can borrow from previous works by focusing in large part on whether the new work was “transformative”: whether it altered the first with “new expression, meaning or message” (in the words of a 1994 Supreme Court decision). In blockbuster case after blockbuster case involving major artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, lower courts repeatedly asked that question, even if they often reached disparate results.

But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

Paint wielded by Joan Brown seems to have been purpose-built and mission-driven, especially when that mission involved dressing down painting’s most grandiloquent sense of self-regard and putting it to pointed and playful personal use. Many of the works in Brown’s feet-on-the-ground, head-in-the-clouds retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art could have been made as gifts for family and friends—or, better yet, as intimate painterly diary entries to be seen and appreciated by no one aside from the artist herself. Where some painters in her 1960s-’80s milieu aspired to change the world, Brown bent the tools of her trade toward chronicling the world she was in a constant state of building and rebuilding around her.

Related Articles

Brown—whose retrospective closed in San Francisco in March and moved to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it opens May 27—made her name as a budding Bay Area artist whose thick impasto style turned abstraction toward embodiment, sometimes with the air of a wry aside. The earliest works in the SFMOMA show gleamed at the top of layered oil surfaces that suggest a lot of searching underneath (the catalogue describes formative paintings by Brown “so thick they could weigh 100 pounds and take decades to dry”). But as soon as she scaled certain heights that would thrill so many artists making their way, Brown took a bow—and moved on.

Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) is emblematic of her early work for its mix of mystery and a sort of mastery that can be deceiving. The depiction of a carcass hanging in the air nods toward classicism—wall text describing it included an image of Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as inspiration—but its strange coloring makes it an evocative oddity while its deadpan matter-of-factness makes it somehow funny in a way that’s hard to pin down. The same goes for Green Bowl (1964), an austerely geometric still life that marked an audacious turn for Brown away from early success (Thanksgiving Turkey had already been acquired by MoMA in New York, and she was secure with a dealer with whom she would soon part ways after her stylistic twists left him bemused) toward a more idiosyncratic calling that took its own cues.

“Brown’s aim was not to undermine the art world in a way that was consciously subversive; she simply did not care, and part of what makes her so interesting is this disregard for acceptance,” Nancy Lim writes in the catalogue. (Lim, an associate curator, worked under SFMOMA chief curator Janet Bishop in organizing the show, which after its stop at the Carnegie Museum travels to the Orange County Museum of Art next year.)

Following Brown’s circuitous trains of thought thereafter leads to different way stations and destinations for indelible visions that never stayed fixed for long. Even more indicative of her more mature years than Thanksgiving Turkey and Green Bowl are works like Noel in the Kitchen (1963), an early instance of Brown painting her son with a mix of motherly wonder and fascination with the dreamier dimensions of domesticity. The work tells a heartwarming story, with a bare-bottomed toddler reaching mischievously toward a too-tall counter while a pair of dogs stand sentry. But it also flies off into aesthetic revelry, with a checkered floor that shakes up the pictorial space and a curious patch of wall on the side rendered with enough acuity and care to make it class as a painting in its own right.

Despite their authoritative-sounding titles, recent editions of the Museum of Modern Art’s recurring “New Photography” series have grown especially diffuse—too conceptual and too slippery to really make a dent. Here’s the good news: the latest “New Photography” show brings an end to that losing streak. Finally, a “New Photography” with signs of life.

For the first time ever, “New Photography” has a geographic purview. All the photographers included this time have ties to the Nigerian city of Lagos, otherwise known to Yoruba speakers as Èkó. That alone would make it notable, since MoMA has rarely given African art, and in particular African photography, the spotlight.

But the art itself matches the ambitions of the show’s curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who is challenging what it really means for photography to document a city, let alone the people who reside in it. She has made the wise choice to go with just seven artists, a much smaller group than the past two editions of “New Photography.” Doing so allows her to dive deeper into their practices, each of which finds intriguing ways to pay homage to Lagos’s citizenry and history, by means both conceptual and other. Guiding all the artists’ explorations is a fascination with photography itself as a medium—what it does, whom it’s for, and what it can reveal.

Logo Oluwamuyiwa, the strongest of these artists, trains his lens on the streets of Lagos, which he sometimes photographs using oblique angles that distort his images beyond recognition. Oil Wonders II (2018) features an upside-down shot of two standing people, their feet visible at the bottom. Look above them to see a puddle reflecting their upper halves. He literally reorients our view of Lagos, then does it again and again in an array of prints, vinyl wallpapers, and films shown nearby.

Oluwamuyiwa’s lush black-and-white photography finds a neat corollary in the work of Akinbode Akinbiyi, an artist roughly half a century older. Working in a mode that’s likewise devoid of color, Akinbiyi turns his attention to Bar Beach, a seaside locale popular at one time with Lagosians. These photos act as records of what once was, with women lounging, men running, and, in one quaint image, a dog slumbering, seemingly unaware of the bathers around it.

Is Lewis Carroll’s tale really about sex, drugs and colonialism?

We spoke to David Lynch about his work with composer Angelo Badalamenti

Derek Alan Modrok, a 49-year-old Florida resident, admitted to running his car into a tall, blue sculpture of a rabbit titled Thunderbunny by American artist Hunt Slonem, police said earlier this week. The sculpture, which has an estimated value of $300,000, resided in Justin Flippen Park in the city of Wilton Manors, just north of Fort Lauderdale.

Modrok also admitted to vandalized another piece of art, a popsicle statue by Craig Berube-Gray at nearby Rachel Richardson Park, earlier this month. Police arrested Modrok after surveillance footage depicted him in the act.

Slonem, for his part, first heard about the act of vandalism when NBC Miami reached out to him for a quote, and since then he’s been processing the attack. It’s not the first time he’s lost a piece of public art.

“9/11 was worse, I lost an 80-foot mural,” Slonem told ARTnews, somewhat mystified that this kind of violence once again found its way to his work. “I was just shocked. It’s just such a strange thing, the fact that it’s happened before and the fact that it happened again.”

Thunderbunny, at 13 feet-7 inches and made of 6,500 pieces of blue glass, took a year to make and was installed in the park in May 2022 after local gallery Art Gallery 21 worked with the city to loan the sculpture from New River Fine Art in Fort Lauderdale. The sculpture was due to travel to a botanical garden, but those plans have now been stalled. Slonem and the commissioners are reviewing the work to see if repairs are even possible as the work sustained heavy structural damage. Slonem said it would take a couple more days to ascertain what can be done.

Five stars for Under the Skin and Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer's latest

April 26 – May 20, 2023

April 8 – May 20, 2023

'Gloomy and depressing' film is a disappointment

April 22 – May 20, 2023

March 31 – May 20, 2023

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 'compassionate' follow-up to Broker chronicles untidy lives

February 15 – May 20, 2023

March 31 – May 20, 2023

In the star's new film, he is 'subdued to the point where he's barely conscious'

Legendary director Dario Argento looks back at his nightmarish films

Fast X 'takes stupidity and excess to breathtaking new heights'

April 8 – May 20, 2023

April 19 – May 20, 2023