The Walker Curates the News: 01.26.15

Josh Reames' contribution to a Tumblr site collecting modified versions of skldfsjkflsdfj's  photo fo Belgian politician skldjfdlf.

Josh Reames’s contribution to a Tumblr site collecting mashups of the photo at the center of Luc Tuymans’s copyright conviction.

Antwerp-born painter Luc Tuymans has been convicted of copyright infringment for using photojournalist Katrijn Van Giel’s photo of rightwing Belgian politician Jean-Marie Dedecker as the basis for a painting. Van Giel sought $57,700 in damages; Tuymans will be fined 10 times that if he shows the offending painting or creates additional “reproductions.” At Hyperallergic, Lewis Bush says the verdict illustrates what’s wrong with European copyright law, while The Guardian’s Adrian Searle looks at Tuymans’s A Belgian Politician (2011) through the lens of the painter’s long career of interrogating images, dubbing the verdict “beyond parody.” Yet parodies abound, of course: a blog at katrijnvangiel.tumblr.com is collecting reader-submitted remixes of Katrijn Van Giel’s original photo.

  • Vladmir Putin’s recent presidential decree, “Foundations of State Cultural Policy,” gives the culture ministry “the authority to refuse funding for future arts projects that do not adhere to the official government ideology,” writes Sophia Kishkovsky. She wonders how the decree—particularly its reference to “false ideas about Russia’s historic backwardness”—might impact Andrey Zvyaginstev’s Oscar-nominated film Leviathan.

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