A choose in US District Court docket in New York dismissed a lawsuit in opposition to Jeff Koons on Tuesday (25 February), ruling that the plaintiff had waited too lengthy to assert copyright infringement over Koons’s notorious Made in Heaven sequence.
In 2021, the artist Michael A. Hayden sued Koons over three works within the Made in Heaven sequence relationship from 1989 and 1991, through which Koons and the Hungarian Italian politician and adult-film star Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina) are depicted in numerous sexually specific poses and acts. Hayden claimed that the works constituted copyright infringement, as a result of all of them featured a sculpture he had created for Diva Futura, an adult-entertainment firm co-owned by Staller.
In 1989 and 1990, Koons employed Staller—whom he subsequently married after which, in 1994, divorced, resulting in an acrimonious custody dispute—for picture shoots that turned the premise of the Made in Heaven sequence. In pictures from these shoots, and a number of other works from the sequence together with the three at problem in Hayden’s swimsuit, Koons and Staller seem on high of Hayden’s sculpture “depicting an enormous serpent wrapped round a pedestal of boulders”, in response to court docket paperwork. The Koons works at problem within the swimsuit are the photographic billboard Made in Heaven (1989), the polychromed wooden sculpture Jeff and Ilona (Made in Heaven) (1990) and the large-scale work on canvas Jeff within the Place of Adam (1990).
Crucially, Jeff and Ilona was featured within the Venice Biennale in 1990, when Hayden, who’s a US citizen, was nonetheless residing in Italy, the place the work depicting Koons and a member of Italian parliament engaged in specific acts “prompted a media sensation and scandal when it premiered”, in response to court docket paperwork. Nonetheless, Hayden solely turned conscious of the Koons works that includes depictions of his serpent sculpture in 2019, when he got here throughout an April 2019 article in La Repubblica about Staller’s dispute with the public sale home Sotheby’s over its show of the Made in Heaven billboard work.
In August 2019, Hayden utilized for copyright registration for his sculpture, Il Serpente for Cicciolina, with the US Copyright Workplace, which was granted in January 2020. He then contacted Koons’s legal professionals in March 2020, alleging copyright infringement, amongst different allegations. In December 2021, he filed the current copyright-infringement lawsuit.
Decide Timothy M. Reif dominated this week that Hayden’s declare is time-barred, writing: “It will be a distinct matter altogether if [Hayden] didn’t reside in Italy throughout a 20-year interval between 1988 and 2019 and had no motive to comply with Staller’s profession.” Nevertheless, the choose discovered, Hayden “ought to have found” Koons’s work “nicely earlier than he learn the 2019 La Repubblica article”.
Jordan Fletcher, a lawyer representing Hayden, advised Reuters that he and his consumer disagree with the choose’s choice and supposed to attraction.
The identical 12 months that Hayden introduced his case in opposition to Koons, the latter misplaced an attraction associated to a plagiarism lawsuit in France. That dispute, through which Koons and the Centre Pompidou had been co-defendants, concerned a piece from Koons’s Banality sequence, Fait D’Hiver (1988), which had been proven on the Paris museum. The swimsuit was introduced by the photographer Franck Davidovici, who took the {photograph} on which Koons based mostly his porcelain sculpture for a 1985 promoting marketing campaign for the style model Naf Naf. Per the phrases of that ruling, Koons was ordered to pay €190,000 in damages and the sculpture was barred from public show in France.
