Posts Tagged ‘Andy Warhol’
From the Plague-On-Both-Their-Houses Department: It’s come to this…
The Andy Warhol banana that graced the cover of the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album has become the subject of litigation between the band and the artist’s estate.
In a nutshell, the estate believes that it holds the copyright, and is licensing the image (for everything from iPad covers to Absolut ads). The band argues that there is no copyright (as the original ran without a notice), but that the image is protected as a trademark of the band– so the estate is infringing. (There’s a more detailed recounting of situation and its background at Final Boss Form.)
One is tempted to launch into a discussion of the case as a symptom of the diseased state of intellectual property law and practice in the U.S.; but your correspondent has already burned pixels doing that, e.g., here, here, and here. Suffice it here to quote the ever-insightful Pop Loser: “This whole story is an excellent metaphor for the world we currently live in and should probably make us all a little bit sad.”
As we re-up our affiliation with Creative Commons and write our Representatives to oppose SOPA, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that “The Noble Experiment”– the national ban on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol that was better known as “Prohibition”– was ratified (the 18th Amendment).
By the time it was repealed in 1933, organized crime had become a major feature of American city life, and the American public had adopted the invented-for-the-occasion word “scofflaw.”
Ku Klux Klan: “Defender of the 18th Amendment” (source)
Overheard amongst the shelves…
Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er… do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.Customer: I read a book in the Eighties. I don’t remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?
Man: Do you have black and white film posters?
Me: Yes, we do, over here.
Man: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
Me: Pardon?
Man: Adolf Hitler.
Me: Well, he wasn’t a film star, was he.
Man: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think.
Me: ………..
More from Jen Campbell, a young writer “currently working in bookselling,” in her “Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.”
As we lower our voices, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962, in his first one-man show (at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles), that Andy Warhol premiered his Campbell’s Soup Can series. It was the debut of Pop Art on the West Coast.
Pardon me, but do you have the time?…
Image via Wikipedia
M. Joseph Young is a writer and game designer who shares your correspondent’s affection for time travel movies. The disciplined Mr. Young has created a site– Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies— that systematically critiques the (sub-)genre.
Time travel has been a staple in Science Fiction since H.G. Wells. Unfortunately, much of what passes for intelligence in this area is poorly considered… For example, it is not possible to return to the past without changing the past in some way; nor is it possible to change the future based on information from the future. Doctor Who realized early on that changes to history were hazardous, and avoided them assiduously. Movies built on a time travel theme frequently become dissatisfying when the thread of time is closely examined. In Millennium, once the era in which the time machine exists is destroyed, aren’t all of those rescued survivors returned to their own times? In The Twelve Monkeys, doesn’t it appear that the disaster which the main character was to prevent would not have happened had he not interfered? In Timecop, would any of that have happened had it not happened? Even the venerable StarTrek has created numerous anomalies which it has failed to resolve. Pasts which are dependent upon futures dependent upon those pasts should make us cringe. However, from time to time something works…
Readers will doubtless be as relieved as your correspondent was to learn that Mr. Young counts Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure among the (relatively) successful… after all, “would any of that had happened if it had not happened?”
As we reset our watches, we might spare a celebratory thought for Andrew Warhola, born on this date in 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. Better known as Andy Warhol, he was a role model for a generation of post-modernist artists; he provoked us think more clearly about the relationship of reference and referent… and he made us (well, most of us anyway) smile.
Self-Portrait, 1986 source: National Gallery of Art
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