Intellectual Property in the Art Market

At this year’s Frieze Art Fair in May, Richard Prince sold unaltered screenshots of others’ Instagram pictures (without permission) for upwards of $90,000 each. His contribution?: some obscure, Instagram comments on the bottom of each screenshot from what appears to be an account he owns: richardprince1234. After a private exhibition at Gagosian earlier in September of 2014 that gave way to much criticism, Prince had the art market once again debating issues of authorship, authenticity, and originality.

This occasion joins many other instances where the line between artist and seller is incredibly blurred and contested. After all, whom does art belong to? Who transforms an ordinary object—such as Warhol’s soup cans, or Duchamp’s “Fountain”—into a piece of art? And then, who can lay claim to the authorship of that work and, even further, sell that piece of art to others (let alone at exorbitant prices)?

Like many other, more “traditional” products, art can be studied from the perspective of value added. After all, no one protests that the final products we purchase on retail go through what is usually a long, complex supply chain where subsequent producers, dealers, wholesalers, etc. add a feature, a service or a physical transformation to the intermediate good they acquired, to then sell on to the next producer in the chain and, eventually, the end-consumer. Yet, nobody protests because this is both established practice and, most importantly, an arguably fair practice. The intermediate producer gets paid by the supplier further downstream for the service he performed on the product. Leaving aside those strategies frequently studied in the vertical relationships section of an Industrial Organization course, we could argue that all producers who had a role to play in the production of a product get fairly compensated for their value added.

The question in this case—that of the art market—is how much value is enough to transform someone else’s work into one’s own? And how little value added (in this case, some comments) is needed to transform an Instagram picture into a $90,000 work? How should the $90,000 price of that artwork be broken down between Richard Prince, the end-supplier, and those Instagram users who added their value in creating and uploading their image to the website? Didn’t they, after all, add much more value than Prince himself did? Or are Richard Prince’s contacts with the art market—his ability to be exhibited at Gagosian and at the Frieze, to print those snapshots and have them set up, worth incredibly large amounts of money? Is his name, the service he’s adding in getting these snapshots a fine art exposure, worth thousands upon thousands of dollars (these same questions could perhaps be asked, interestingly enough, of luxury fashion retailers: does the brand add that much value)?

And ultimately, this can lead us to ask: if Richard Prince’s service and value added are really worth that much, why is art fetching such high valuations? I’m certainly not the first to question art prices—Qatar is reported to have purchased Cézanne’s The Card Players for upwards of $250 million in a private transaction. The literature is extensive and often, understandably, must rely on the philosophical: art, after all, appeals to a part of us as humans that is perhaps “irrational”, that is “priceless” and invaluable.”

Yet, if that is true, and if simply adding several comments is enough value added to fetch thousands of dollars based on other people’s works, maybe it’s time we start copyrighting and trademarking every single thing we do.