Protecting Artists from Piracy— and Poor Taste

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Pick a topic, almost any topic, and chances are Theodore Feder’s staff at Art Resource, the world’s largest photo archive of fine arts, can find an image to help illustrate it.
    Mental illness? To start with, there’s Gericault’s The Woman with Gambling Mania and Paul Steck’s Ophelia.
    Sports? Try Two Wrestlers, a Minoan wall painting.
    Crusades? Have they got crusades.
    Since Feder C’58 founded the company as a young graduate student and art-history instructor at Columbia University in 1968, it has amassed more than three million digital and photographic images in its database (www.artres.com), from royal tapestries to Sistine Chapel putti to Australian aboriginal paintings.
    Art Resource also serves as the official rights and permissions representative for numerous museums, libraries and artist estates, such as London’s Tate Gallery, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
    But in addition to providing access to top-quality art images —for a fee—Feder is involved in protecting the artists themselves from copyright infringement, illicit use or piracy of their works. He founded the Artists Rights Society in 1986 to preserve artists’ interests while also providing “reputable publishers and producers of commercial goods” with a clearinghouse for rights and permissions.
    ARS represents most prominent 20th-century artists and helped lobby Congress to extend U.S. copyright terms from the life of the artist plus 50 years, to the life of the artist plus 70 years.
    With his two jobs Feder frequently finds himself immersed in the intricacies of U.S. copyright law, whether negotiating with museums on which works they may use in an exhibit (Picasso and the War Years at the De Young Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in 1998-99 was one recent example), or monitoring the reproduction of artists’ works on calendars, notecards, and now, the Internet. “It’s a real problem,” Feder says, and it’s nearly impossible to police every Web site. “There’s so much stuff out there. But the fact that the image is carried digitally doesn’t change the underlying copyright.”
    Not least important among Feder’s duties is representing the artists’ estates in their desires to keep commercial use of their work within the boundaries of good taste. “We got a request five or six years ago from a dentifrice and mouthwash company which wanted to use a Jackson Pollack painting in its promotion,” Feder recalls. But using the late artist’s work to sell toiletries, he explains, “was not something that the Pollack [estate] was keen on doing.”

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