Rosa Parks and Barbie have wound up on the wrong end of the First Amendment, which gives greater weight to art, music and political speech than to trademark, commercial or publicity rights.
This is why US District Judge Ronald Lew ruled Monday that artist Tom Forsythe's Barbie photos were constitutionally protected parody.
Forsythe's message is the emptiness of the American beauty myth and consumerism. "We consume, digest and use as fuel for our psychic lives icons that can only frustrate us," he says on his Web site.
You can think his Barbie images hilarious or sick, meaningful or sophomoric. But the First Amendment says you can't stop them.
Mattel cannot produce a doll that becomes both an icon and a lightning rod and expect to shield it from an artist who wants to put it in a roasting pan.
Pinheiro's an icon, too. "She represents everything beautiful about the lifestyle in Rio," Carlos Monjardim, president of the Ipanema merchants' group, told the Chicago Tribune during a tribute to Pinheiro last weekend.
``She is The Girl from Ipanema,'' her lawyer, Paulo Mariano, said from Sao Paolo on Wednesday. "The music exists because the girl exists." True. But Pinheiro didn't create the song. She just walked to the beach, oblivious to a couple of middle-aged men ogling her from a bar. She became the girl because the oglers used artistic talent to write lyrics, melody and rhythm that made an otherwise anonymous girl known to the world.
The song was theirs, and now is their heirs. For Pinheiro, Parks and Barbie, their problems are different but the governing principle is the same. When we become the subject of art -- or something that claims to be art -- we lose some degree of ownership over our own identities.
The law has something for its victims, too, if they turn it around. Pinheiro should write a song about the songwriters' heirs.
She could call it, The Scrooges from Ipanema. Parks could photograph the members of OutKast dressed like Klansmen and sell the pictures as art.
And Barbie? Ah, Barbie.
Let's just throw her in the blender.
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