Jeff Koons and the gray area of intellectual copyrights
A couple of months ago I wrote about La Bolleur, a group of artists who created a series of brightly-colored, large-scale balloon animals I felt verged on a rip-off of Jeff Koons famous “Balloon Animals.” While those pieces didn’t create enough of a buzz to rouse Koons into a battle over intellectual copyrights, no doubt you’ve read about the little bookends that did. Though that lawsuit has ended with the bookends still legally for sale and Koons back where he was when he started, the case has raised plenty of compelling questions like, who, if anyone, owns the rights to popularized images and is Koons just a mean ol’ copyright bully?
Balloon animals existed long before Koons decided to use them as the subject of a major series of sculptures. Does he deserve any ownership over the image for making it big again? Think about other popularized images like a Christmas tree, say, or a Campbell’s Soup can. Andy Warhol has no more ownership over the brand name soup company than he, or any artist, does over a Christmas tree or a light bulb or a corkscrew, for that matter. But what if a company manufactured Campbell’s Soup can coin purses, or coffee mugs or bookends without permission from the Warhol estate? Consider, too, the fact that in the two months since Koons’ lawsuit began and ended, other companies looking to make a buck off of the fuss have manufactured knock-off bookends. Just do a Google search for them and you’ll find them available in many colors from many companies other than the one Koons’ sued. Some even list them as “Modern Pop Art Bookends.” And that kinda sucks. So just where do you draw the line, and is Koons really such a bad guy after all?
