The latest US lawsuit over a work of art is absolute bananas in every sense. An Italian artist who attached a banana to a wall with duct tape and titled it Comedian — reportedly selling several versions for more than US$100,000 — is facing legal action over whether he copied another artist’s work.
Maurizio Cattelan is accused of copyright infringement by Joe Morford, from Glendale, California, who says Comedian is just like his own duct-taped fruit, Banana & Orange, which he made two decades earlier.
“I did this in 2000. But some dude steals my junk and pimps it for 120K+ in 2019. Plagiarism?” Morford wrote on Facebook.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Both artists taped their bananas at an angle.
Morford also taped an orange horizontally to another panel.
While Cattelan’s buyers were paying for instructions on how to install and display a banana, he has reportedly said that, unlike his own banana, the fruit in Banana & Orange is synthetic, so Morford “cannot own the idea of a real banana duct-taped to a wall.”
However, US district judge Robert Scola Jr has ruled that Morford can proceed with his case because “the alleged infringement of Morford’s banana is sufficient, quantitatively and qualitatively, to state a claim.”
Scola acknowledged, while not stating whether he agreed with it, Morford’s argument that Cattelan had access to Banana & Orange as it was on his personal Web site, as well as on YouTube and Facebook, for years.
“Can a banana taped to a wall be art? Must art be beautiful? Creative? Emotive? A banana taped to a wall may not embody human creativity, but it may evoke some feelings, good or bad. In any event, a banana taped to a wall recalls [philosopher] Marshall McLuhan’s definition of art: ‘anything you can get away with,’” Scola wrote in his ruling.
“No one can claim a copyright in ideas, so Morford cannot claim a copyright in the idea of affixing a banana to a vertical plane using duct tape. Nor can Morford claim a copyright in bananas or duct tape,” he said.
However, “while using silver duct tape to affix a banana to a wall may not espouse the highest degree of creativity, its absurd and farcical nature meets the ‘minimal degree of creativity’ needed to qualify as original,” Scola said.
“There are only so many choices an artist can make in colours, positioning and angling when expressing the idea of a banana taped to a wall,” Scola wrote. “In both works, a single piece of silver duct tape runs upward from left to right at an angle, affixing a centered yellow banana, angled downward left to right, against a wall.
“Cattelan’s lawyers protest that the original taped banana was accompanied by a taped orange and Cattelan adds — possibly with a touch of sour grapes? — that the original taped banana was synthetic, not real. Judge Scola rightly sees that while taping real or synthetic fruit to walls singly or in pairs may be of minuscule artistic value, the law is the law. This is a very ripe dispute indeed,” said Michael Daley, director of watchdog ArtWatch UK.
Cattelan is no stranger to controversy. His works include an 18-carat gold toilet titled America. His lawyers declined to comment and Morford could not be reached.
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