I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few days, but time has been rare and elusive.

A good friend of mine from Barcelona, artist Ruben Verdu, has created an art project dealing with pedagogy, language,  trademarks and trademark law. Not being one for literal approaches to the creation and dissemination of meaning, Verdu wonders if the registration of a word as a trademark anchors its meaning to a “proper usage.” One thing I like about this project is that it highlights the differences between art and law when it comes to the use of language and production of meaning. This latter point is frequently missed, and misunderstood, by artists, especially when it comes to words such as authenticity, originality, creativity, fixation, and idea.

Registered Blackboard, An Exercise In Tautology. Ruben Verdu.

I’m going to contact Ruben and see if I can get him to expound on this idea. For now, take a look at the image of his Registered Blackboard. What do you think?

I’ll be giving a lecture presentation next Wednesday, March 10th, at The Jacob Burns Moot Court, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, at 55 Fifth Avenue in NYC.  Playing off a typical form of law school pedagogy, I’ll lead a class-room debate on the ethical implications inherent in Ethan & Joel Coen’s filmic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men from within a mock court room theater. The event is curated by Adam Kleinman, organized and funded by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and co-sponsored by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in NYC. Should be fun. For more information on this program, click here.

Whether you’re attending the lecture or not, here is some interesting reading material related to the film.

• Of Rats and Men; or, Reason in Our Time
• What is law and do we really need it?
• Point Blank: No Country for Old Men
• Law and Violence

From today’s Guardian:

A solicitor [a non-litigation attorney] has been accused along with four other men of threatening to destroy a stolen Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece unless they were paid £4.25m [$6.36 million], in a conspiracy allegedly hatched in the offices of one of Glasgow’s leading law firms.

Valued at £30m [$44m] to £50m[$75m], the painting was the centrepiece of the then duke’s collection at Drumlanrig castle, near Dumfries, reputed to be the UK’s most valuable collection in private hands, when it was stolen in August 2003 in a daylight robbery. The heist remains the UK’s biggest art theft. The painting was recovered in October 2007[.]

Jörg Colberg asks about the difference between plagiarism and copyright. He points in particular to the ongoing disagreement between Vancouver photographer David Burdeny and photographer Sze Tsung Leong. Jörg has written about this before, but his exact question was more in line with “what recourse does the first photographer have against the second?”

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Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) and the National Coalition Against Censorship wrote to YouTube this past Tuesday, asking YouTube to reconsider its removal of the art work of video artist Amy Greenfield. According to EFF’s website,

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This is huge. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rightly decided that the US Post Office’s use of an image, based on a copyrighted sculpture, was not fair use. As a result, the Federal Circuit’s decision holds that the US Post Office is liable to the sculptor and remands the case back to the trial court so that damages may be determined.

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David Dickson and his sister Susan Priestley, who unearthed Titian’s alleged painting, Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist, in their family home 20 years ago, accused Christie’s of breach of duty or negligence. They claimed that fine art experts at Christie’s failed in their commitment to competently “research and advise” on the painting’s value when it was put up for auction with a guide price of £8,000-£12,000 in 1993. The paingint was subsequently put up for sale by Sotheby’s for a guide price of $4- $6 million after being identified as a Titian original.  According to The Telegraph, “the two parties reached a settlement in principle. The terms of the proposed settlement were not disclosed.”