The Supreme Court has sided with individual artists — but against art itself. In a fascinating copyright decision that transcended ideological lines, the court held that Andy Warhol’s distinctive reworking of a photograph of Prince did not count as fair use, thus requiring the Andy Warhol Foundation to compensate the original photographer.
The upshot is that little-guy artists win, because they now have more rights than they had before to claim credit for works re-used by others. But art as a whole loses, because the decision restricts how artists generate creativity by sampling and remixing existing works.
To understand the issue, just look at the original photograph of Prince, taken by the photographer Lynn Goldsmith in 1981 for Newsweek, and compare it to the Warhol version, produced for Vanity Fair magazine in 1984.
