Art, Art History and Design, School of

 

Date of this Version

8-2012

Comments

A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts, Major: Art History, Under the Supervision of Professor Marissa Vigneault. Lincoln, Nebraska: August 2012

Copyright (c) 2012 Jaclyn N. Siemers

Abstract

In this thesis I investigate the interworking and influences of the United States’ federal copyright legislation, specifically its relationship to the history of artistic production from the late nineteenth-century to the present. A detailed analysis of the evolving copyright statute, the social and legal impact of the multiple (including the counterfeit copy), and the progressive recurrence of representational money paintings will reveal the mutually dependent relationship of copyright legislation and artistic production. The progression of styles in America art—nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil illusionism, mid-century Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and contemporary appropriation art—provides an illustrated roadmap of the complex relationship between the law, visual and consumer culture, and money. I will use this roadmap to reinterpret the work of Andy Warhol and propose that his art making was fundamentally influenced by the tenets of American copyright legislation. To visualize the intricate relationship between art and the law, I trace the progression of the American money painting, and its divisive other, the counterfeit, to illustrate the economic incentive of aesthetic originality and federal copyright legislation. Moreover, I assert that Warhol’s often-segregated late work (1980s) can be cohesively connected to the core of his immense oeuvre when viewed through this legal lens.

Advisor: Marissa Vigneault

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