Cattelan accused of plagiarism again for his latest work, Sunday

More accusations of plagiarism for Maurizio Cattelan. It had happened recently for the famous banana attached to the wall, Comedian: an American artist, Joe Morford, had accused him of plagiarizing one of his works from 2000, but in the end the Paduan had won the legal battle. Accusing him this time is another American, Anthony James, according to whom Cattelan’s work Sunday , his new work unveiled by Gagosian last April 30, is a plagiarism of his Bullet Paintings. Curiously, James opened, on the same day and in the same city (New York) as Cattelan’s show at Gagosian, his own exhibition in which he displayed Bullet Paintings, panels of mirror-polished stainless steel riddled with gunshots. Cattelan also presented a large work composed of stainless steel panels, gold-plated, and equally riddled with bullets.

Through his attorney, Scott Allan Burroughs of the Doniger Burroughs law firm, James had Cattelan deliver a five-page letter with his grievances, pointing out that the U.S. Copyright Act , while not protecting ideas, nonetheless offers protection against an artist’s “expression of an idea.” Translated, according to James the manner in which an idea is expressed, that is, the form of the work, is subject to protection. Burroughs called into question a 1992 legal battle, as a result of which Jeff Koons lost to a photographer, Art Rogers, from whom he had taken an image for a sculpture of his own: the court ruled that there was “substantial similarity” between the two images and that therefore Koons’s work could be considered a copy of Rogers’s photograph (in the end, however, the two artists reached an out-of-court settlement). According to James, Cattelan would also hurt his market: Cattelan’s panels are in fact priced at $375,000, while James sells his Bullet Paintings for $40,000 each.

In the letter, James’ lawyer asks Cattelan to detail the creative process that led to the execution of Sunday, including sources of inspiration, as well as to comment on the similarities between Sunday and the Bullet Paintings. Cattelan has already responded in part by issuing some statements to Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker: the artist, Tomkins wrote, “declined to comment publicly, but privately said, ’I am very surprised. The resemblance is striking. All I can say is good luck to you both’.” James, in turn, reportedly responded, “I agree, it’s uncanny. The possibility that we both came up with almost identical iterations of the same concept is almost impossible.”

Playing against Cattelan is the fact that Anthony James has been executing his Bullet Paintings for years and has already exhibited them around the world several times. However, the gimmick of creating works with gunshots is not really James’s invention: artists such as Kader Attia, Jochem Hendricks and Mao Tongqiang (the latter two in turn creators of mirrored steel panels struck by bullets) have made similar works before. And these precedents, perhaps, could help Cattelan.

Cattelan accused of plagiarism again for his latest work, Sunday

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