Cheering First Amendment News

I tend to follow copyright infringement cases fairly closely when they involve visual artists incorporating something or another into their own works. Artists have been using "found objects" at least since Marcel Duchamp used that urinal as a sculpture, back in 1917. There's nothing new or groundbreaking about the practice. Lately, however, using any public icon in one's work is an extremely risky undertaking. Odds are good one will end up fighting a lawsuit from Some Really Big Corporation and its platoon of legal experts.

Such was the case with Utah "artsurdist" Tom Forsythe, who found Mattel, Inc. suing him from here to breakfast over his photographic lampoons of their plastic goddess, Barbie. Now, say what you will about Barbie (biting hole in tongue) - anything that's been a part of popular culture for four decades had got to expect to find itself being sent-up. A parent corporation might sort of keep things in perspective, you know, in the grand scheme of things...perhaps even display a teeny-weeny corporate sense of humor in the Name of Art. But, no. So it was heartening to hear, courtesy of the Center for Individual Freedom, that Tom got the whole thing thrown out of court. Found objects will now survive as a medium for...well, for a little while longer. Until some case doesn't get thrown out of court, or some wisenheimer claims to hold the intellectual property rights to the color blue.