"Justice Kagan wondered if the Warhol case benefited from a 'certain kind of hindsight,' since 'now we know who Andy Warhol was and what he was doing and what his works have been taken to mean'...."

"At the same time, other Justices seemed more comfortable interpreting Warhol’s works. Justice Sotomayor took it for granted that Warhol’s works commented on Prince’s 'superstar status' and 'his consumer sort of life.' The idea that Warhol’s art depicted the flattening of celebrity was repeated so many times over the course of the morning that it flattened out, too. Justice Kagan recognized that Warhol 'took a bunch of photographs and he made them mean something completely different.' Even Chief Justice Roberts repeated, rather uncritically, the foundation’s view that Warhol sent a 'message about the depersonalization of modern culture and celebrity status and the iconic' and showed 'a particular perspective on the Pop era.'"

From "Controversy/In a case litigating Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of Prince, the Supreme Court wades into the uncomfortable territory where art criticism and copyright law collide" by Liza Batkin (NYRB).

"These comments suggest that at least some of the Justices may reject the lower court’s decision against Warhol, which was based on the idea that judges couldn’t, or shouldn’t, make judgments on art. But they also expose an irony at the heart of this case. A win for Warhol would protect an artistic tradition dedicated to exposing the artifice of authorship and the slipperiness, or absence, of meaning. 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,' the artist once said, 'just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.' Warhol also said that his art was 'junk' and that he liked repetition because 'the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel.' But to prove that his prints say something different than the Goldsmith pictures, Warhol’s foundation has distilled from them a single, settled, unsubtle message about celebrity and consumerism."

I wonder what percentage of New York Review of Books readers will recognize the article title — "Controversy" — as the title of a Prince album? 

 

By the way, it's interesting to run across "Ronnie, Talk to Russia" — 40 years after Prince sang it. "Ronnie talk to Russia before its too late/Before they blow up the world/Don't you blow up my world."