Psychoanalysis & Copyright Law: “A More Subtle Theater”?1

In A Berlin Chronicle, the critic and writer Walter Benjamin, glossing the spiritual status of his native Berlin, summoned images splashed across the walls of houses “where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy to giants” (1978, p. 86). He was describing the impact of billboards, whose overpowering presence in the 1920s was still recent enough to warrant amazement. Approximately a century later, the monumental sculpture Playdoh at the Jeff Koons retrospective at The Whitney Museum of Art may lie in this memory-image's direct line of descent. A huge mound of brightly colored swatches of cast aluminum mimicking putty, as if straight out of the can, before the colors have had a chance to become adulterated by mixing and kneading, the pristine globs slapped on top of one another by a child's eager hands, may perhaps represent for raw memory the year 2014 in art as the giant about to carry out his morning ablutions summed up the culture of his youth for Benjamin. Even as the commodity has evolved, it still exists for us in heightened imaginary form, of ten seeming a virgin reminiscence outside of time. If the artist Jeff Koons has succeeded in capturing something about the truth of this, about the power certain types of objects under capitalism have for us, it cannot be forgotten that he has racked up quite a number of lawsuits in the process of doing so. That is, he has presented us with the experience of property as an internal object by trespassing property rights. How shall we understand this?

To answer, we would do well to toggle between psychoanalysis and the law. Cariou v. Prince, an appropriation case that reached its final disposition in 2013 (Cariou v. Prince, 2013), reflects in the legal sphere what this museum show demonstrated in the cultural one. It marks the increasing importance of the psychic record left by everyday consumptionan investigation that Koons, legal woes or