The exhibition was conceived as the visual compendium of a small publication about the controversial (and still current) argument of copyright. With William S. Burroughs as a spiritual guide (“Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original”), the curatorial project focused on copyright laws as intrinsically antithetic to any artistic production. For centuries painters and sculptors have copied and reinterpreted the works and styles of previous masters; musicians have constantly reformulated existing melodies (today also by employing the sampling technique), fashion designers have kept reinventing traditional silhouettes and in all artistic domains to copy and reinvent has always been (and still is) the norm, the standard methodology for creating new cultural contents. So why have the laws that regulate copyright become increasingly stringent to the extent that someone has even proposed that they should be extended to last forever?
To illustrate such complex and mostly immaterial issues, I decided to make an exhibition that would only include low-resolution printed images of works by Andy Warhol downloaded from the Internet created by artist Norma Jeane. For most of his iconic works, Warhol used, without permission, already-existing artworks or industrial products protected by copyright. However, these works are now themselves protected by copyright; thus, they perfectly embody the contradiction copy free vs. copyright.
