Kagan, J., dissenting
It does not take an art expert to see a transformation—but in any event, all those offering testimony in this case agreed there was one. The experts explained, in far greater detail than I have, the laborious and painstaking work that Warhol put into these and other portraits. See 1 App. 160–185, 212–216, 222–224. They described, in ways I have tried to suggest, the resulting visual differences between the photo and the silkscreen. As one summarized the matter: The two works are “materially distinct” in “their composition, presentation, color palette, and media”—i.e., in pretty much all their aesthetic traits. Id., at 227.[1] And with the change in form came an undisputed change in meaning. Goldsmith’s focus—seen in what one expert called the “corporeality and luminosity” of her depiction—was on Prince’s “unique human identity.” Id., at 176, 227. Warhol’s focus was more nearly the opposite. His subject was “not the private person but the public image.” Id., at 159. The artist’s “flattened, cropped, exotically colored, and unnatural depiction of Prince’s disembodied head” sought to “communicate a message about the impact of celebrity” in contemporary life. Id., at 227. On Warhol’s canvas, Prince emerged as “spectral, dark, [and] uncanny”—less a real person than a “mask-like simulacrum.” Id., at 187, 249. He was reframed as a “larger than life” “icon or totem.” Id., at 257. Yet he was also reduced: He became the product of a “publicity machine” that “packages and disseminates commoditized images.” Id., at 160. He manifested, in short, the dehumanizing culture of celebrity in America. The message could
- ↑ The majority attempts to minimize the visual dissimilarities between Warhol’s silkscreen and Goldsmith’s photograph by rotating the former image and then superimposing it on the latter one. See ante, at 9 (fig. 6); see also Brief for Goldsmith 17 (doing the same thing). But the majority is trying too hard: Its manipulated picture in fact reveals the significance of the cropping and facial reorientation that went into Warhol’s image. And the majority’s WarGold combo of course cannot obscure the other differences, of color and presentation, between the two works.
