Sunday, November 12, 2006

Who owns the Crimson Tide?


There's this guy, Daniel A. Moore, in Alabama. Been a fan for all his life, and has this thing he does which combines his football enthusiasm and his profession. He paints. He paints idealized versions of sports photos of big moments in the Crimson Tide's history, e.g., the Sack, when in '68 Notre Dame QB Steve Beuerlein (later to be Troy Aikman's backup in Dallas) was pretty nearly destroyed by Bama's Cornelius Bennett, in Alabama's first victory over the Irish.

Big moment. So Moore paints it, and other such, and sells his paintings to other Tide fans, for up to $65K (that is, before this Sunday New York Times article gives him more publicity. Only the University of Alabama is now asserting its--get this--intellectual property rights. They believe they have the right to any and all marketing of their product (i.e., the trademarked Crimson and White color scheme), and want Moore to cease-and-desist making his paintings.

Now, here's the issue: at what point do we say that the artist has transformed his subject from a sports-news photo into an original work of art? Courts in California have decided that a straight-forward charcoal of the images of the Three Stooges, silkscreened onto T-shirts, does not constitute art. But watercolors and oil paintings are artistic media which have been around much longer than sports photography or any university, and certainly longer than the university marketing practices which have inspired this lawsuit. If Moore were painting images of, say, Hofstra's football team, he wouldn't be able to sell them as he does--so obviously Alabama football is part of whatever aura runs up the commercial and aesthetic value of his paintings. However, there is a considerable transmediation involved in the adaptation of newspaper images to canvas. And the university used to support his work, to the extent of allowing him sideline passes to football games. No more. He can buy his ticket, sit in the stands, and give them their cut.

Art receives its value from the culture--as do sports and intellectual property and universities. If the public wants to pay $65K for big oil paintings of the most significant events in post-Civil-War Alabama history, that's because that's the amount some people are willing to pay. If the public wants to pay millions in ticket fees, merchandise, and associated activities such as tailgate parties around Saturday afternoon sports events, that's a matter of culturally assigned value. If the public wants to acknowledge diplomas from the University of Alabama as actually teaching its citizens anything of value, that's also a matter of value assigned by the culture. The university is responsible for the latter, in terms of monitoring what is going on--but does not itself create that cultural value. We do.