#tbt that time Christie's and Sotheby's played Rock Paper Scissors over an Art Sale

The first of our Throwback Thursdays looks to an unbelievable story from 2004, originally reported by Carol Vogel in the New York Times. Whilst not exactly a crime, the playground tactics used by Christie's Impressionist and modern art department director throw into question the laws of chance...

The contest emerged at the behest of Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkhoh Corporation, based outside of Nagoya, Japan.  Unable to decide whether Sotheby's or Christie's should sell the company's art collection - worth over $20 million, Hashiyama concocted a devilish plan: the decision would be determined through the ancient art of rock, paper, scissors.

See snapjudgement's podcast for the full story, available on soundcloud: 

When the two greatest auction houses in the world - Christies and Sothebys -- vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth of art in 2004, little did they know that they would be forced to engage in an ancient form of ritualized combat known as...rock paper scissors After you listen, be sure to check out Carol Vogel’s original New York Times article. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/arts/design/29scis.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all Producer: Joe Rosenberg Sound Design: Leon Morimoto

Oraculo Project blindfolds 100 statues in Brazil

Photo credit: Gabriel Panazio.

The 'Brazilian Banksy' anonymously  placed 100 red blindfolds over the eyes of statues on the streets of Rio de Janiero in a dramatic overnight stunt [Sunday 13th March], which the artist claims is not directly linked to recent protests calling for the dismissal of President Dima Rousseff, but instead 'to protect national figures from Brazil's history from seeing the shameful state of the nation,' as reported by the BBC. 

Ministry of scandal

Russia's Culture Ministry is under investigation, suspected of embezzling funds allocated to heritage restoration, specifically through inflating the costs of these works to steal the public funds.  Detainees include the deputy culture minister Grigory Pirumov.

This adds to the FSB's (the main KGB successor agency, the Federal Security Service) current roster of art crime cases, which include the ongoing accusations regarding Tratyakov State Gallery's art smuggling activities, initially provoked by the alarm bells raised when a man attempted to leave the country with a suspicious souvenir haul which included 5 paintings valued collectively at $38,000, ten times the value claimed at customs.

One of the suggested recipients of the paintings included Alfred Kokh, former Russian official, who - as a critic of Putin - was forced to flee to Germany last year. His response? "Ha ha! What nonsense"

This reminds the Art Police that it was in fact accusations of 'vandalism' of historic monuments (setting fire to a federal Russian security agency) which were used as a charge against 'Russia's most controversial artist' Petr Pavlensky, whose stunts ranged from sewing his mouth shut to nailing his scrotum to the Red Square, leading to his detainment in November 2015, in a case still ongoing.  The torched door of the FSB cost about $800, or 55,000 rubles, to replace.

Update, 30th March: Charges against Russian Performance Artist Pyotr Pavlensky changed from Vandalism to Cultural Heritage Damage.  Pavlensky continues to request that his case be reclassified as terrorism.

Pavlensky during a Pain Performance stunt called 'Segregation,' which was aimed at the psychiatric treatment forced upon Russian 'dissidents.'  The photo was taken shortly after the artist severed his own earlobe.  Photo credit: Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters

Pavlensky in front of the burning FSB doors. Photo Credit: Reuters.

Facebook censors the origin of the world

Quarrels over how little nipple makes Facebook's censors tipple (over) spearheaded by the likes of Lena Dunham and Miley Cyrus reached a new high in this landmark case over the social media site's censoring of Gustave Courbet's L'Origin du Monde. The case was launched due to the suspension of Parisian teacher Mr Durande-Baissas' account after posting a photograph of the painting.  Most recently French court rules that it has jurisdiction over the case, which would not be taken to California as requested by Facebook.

Interestingly, France's own postal service La Poste recently deemed the work "too pornographic" to print on its stamps, proposed in promotion of a Courbet retrospective.

Painted in 1866, it was not until the 1990s that the work was publicly displayed.  It long lay hidden in the attic of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and thus 'epitomised the paradox of a famous painting that is seldom actually seen,' according to the Musee d'Orsay's website, 'now openly displayed, [it] has taken its proper place in the history of modern painting.'  

Perhaps it is time that Facebook's nudity policy were openly displayed and debated.

Jihadi leader faces war crime charges for cultural heritage destruction

In the first trial of its kind, Ahmad al-Faqu al-Mahdi is on trial for ordering the destruction of historic monuments (including shrines, tombs and a 15th Century mosque) in Timbuktu's 'city of 333 saints' in 2012.  

As the Art Newspaper describes, this may set an important precedent, "historically, very few warlords have been brought to justice for destroying cultural sites such as Afghanistan's sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas, which were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.  Politicians and cultural heritage experts have also called on the ICC to investigate Islamic State's demolition of the ancient Syrian site of Palmyra."

A man holds a burnt manuscript in Timbuktu, 31 January 2013. Photo: © UNESCO Bureau of Mali

Not Born This Way: Lady Gaga sued (again) for $31.7 million by ORLAN for plagiarism

Performance artist ORLAN, best known for undergoing plastic surgery procedures to modify her physical appearance in the name of art, reopens her case accusing  Lady Gaga of plagiarism. The case, focusing primarily on Gaga's album aesthetic for Born This Way, has now been transferred from Paris Civil Courts to New York.

Bumpload, 1989. ORLAN. photo credit: Isabelle Gabach, undo.net 

Ok, so they both have bumps on their faces (whether applied surgically or cosmetically), and defy the supposed prerequisites of feminine beauty, but other more complex parallels between their respective 'looks' suggest the legal line between imitation and inspiration may be thinner than we thought.  Beyond the striking resemblance between the sharply geometric other-wordly aesthetics of ORLAN's face, and Gaga's album cover to 'Born This Way,' the artist points to a the singer-artist-writer's more general (unwarranted) appropriation of her artistic vision of 'hybridity.'

See here for more from blouiartinfo's interview with art law superstar, Philippe Dutilleul-Francoeur, who is representing ORLAN in the dispute.

Looking back to 2013, the year the case opened, we see Lady Gaga tweeted a premonition...

#PrinceofAppropriation

Richard Prince appropriated a photographic portrait of a Rastafarian, taken by Donald Graham, in the form of an instragram post printed and displayed in the Gagosian Gallery, as part of the 2014 exhibition New Portraits.  Prince is now being sued by Graham for copyright infringement and violation of intellectual property.

Donald Graham's instagram, 2014, (c)? 

This is not the first time Prince and Gagosian have been accused of pinching photographic prints of Rastafarians. A previous case saw the artist-dealer due come under fire from French photographer Patrick Cariou, also sued for copyright infringement. As artnews describes, Prince’s use of Cariou’s photographs was not seen to imply copyright infringement, seen to qualify for the ‘fair use’ legal defence whereby the copy in some way transforms the original, and doesn’t compete with the original’s target market. In the Graham v. Prince case currently underway, however, the general consensus seems to be that this defence cannot stand.  In fact, if simply placing a social media ‘frame’ around an image is transformation enough to free the copycat artist from legal issues, then a fundamental change in copyright law itself seems to be in action. 

It is, of course, worth bearing in mind that whilst social media t&c (notoriously Facebook) tends to place the rights to any photograph uploaded in the hands of the platform’s owners, the photo was not uploaded to social media by Graham himself.  This understated element adds a dually banal and pertinent facet to Prince’s mode of practice, as an artist who rose to fame partly through the appropriation of the work of other artists.

The #PrinceofAppropriation, who remains adamant that fussing over copyright issues ‘has never interested me,’ gets insta-schooled by Graham as reported by the Guardian.