fAlmost all art comes from other art. There are always role models, adopted motifs, quotations, allusions. You take what you like. The aim of the saying that good artists copy great steel is only aesthetically funny. Legally, he does not reassure those who have been stolen from. A case is currently pending at the American Supreme Court, the decision of which could have a profound effect on the art world. The question is to what extent a work has to process motifs that it borrows from other works in order not to violate existing copyrights in these works. In terms of German copyright law: When is it a matter of free use and not just duplication?
Existing copyrights, that is: Euripides, Poussin and Mozart can be robbed without restraint, Beckett, Gursky and Kraftwerk are individually examined. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who is famous in music circles and who shot a series of black-and-white pictures of pop star Prince in 1981, complained. Three years later, Vanity Fair magazine licensed one of them for four hundred dollars and commissioned Andy Warhol to edit it. He severely cropped the image and colored the photograph, colorfully tracing contours on it. Above all, however, he inserted them into a body of work that had arisen through his processing of photographic portraits of Mao Tse-Tung, Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor and which represents a kind of Warhol trademark.
