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.
- Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has won Artes Mundi 6, the UK’s largest art award, but in a twist, he’s announced that he’ll be sharing the £40,000 cash prize with the nine other nominees: Sanja Iveković, Omer Fast, Sharon Lockhart, Renzo Martens, Renata Lucas, Carlos Bunga, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Hailed for work that blends community development, aesthetics, and social practice, often focused within his Dorchester neighborhood, Gates told the BBC, “Winning this award is my validation that this new body of work has a place in the world.”
- After decades of photographing dolls, Laurie Simmons is now shooting real people—only with dollish eyes painted on their eyelids, an idea based on her recent facination with Japanese Kigurumi. “This interruption,” she acknowledges, “is so subtle people miss it at first.”
- Following the likes of Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson, artist Abraham Cruzvillegas is the next figure tasked with filling Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall. The Mexico City–based artist’s installation will be on view October 2015 through March 2016. “I use ‘dead’ things, or materials people think of as garbage,” Cruzvillegas has written of his found-object autoconstrucción works, “and give them a new use by revealing instead of hiding their nature.” His Walker-organized exhibition Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites is on view in two parts in Mexico through February 8 at Fundación/Colección Jumex in Mexico City and Museo Amparo in Puebla.
- 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.
- Ordered by an information tribunal to make public details of its BP sponsorship, Tate has revealed that the oil company gave the British museums £3.8m (~$5.7 million) in funds over 17 years in annual disbursements of between £150,000 and £330,000. While a Tate representative called the amount “considerable funding,” Anna Galinka of Platform, the group that prompted the disclosure of sponsorship numbers, disagrees: “The figures are embarrassingly small for the Tate to go on justifying its BP relationship.”
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