{"id":2051,"date":"2011-03-16T18:36:14","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T18:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=2051"},"modified":"2018-12-12T15:17:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T21:17:54","slug":"epic-battle-over-the-spiral-jetty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/epic-battle-over-the-spiral-jetty\/","title":{"rendered":"Epic Battle Over the Spiral Jetty"},"content":{"rendered":"

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From The Salt Lake Tribune\u2019s Glen Warchol <\/a>comes news of conflict between local entrepreneurs Epic Brewing and the DIA Art Foundation of New York. At issue is the brewery\u2019s decision to name a beer after the Spiral Jetty and use a photo of the little-known artifact on the bottle.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really sad when a small business and an organization that promotes obscure and beleaguered artists and their works take each other to court. On the one hand, there is no question but that artworks and their makers are subject to wide abuse of this sort. Epic was wrong to help themselves to Robert Smithson\u2019s work without compensation to, or at least checking with, its present owners. But on the other hand, it\u2019s a bit disingenuous of DIA to represent themselves to Mr. Warchol, as they apparently did, as \u201ca foundation that preserves the legacy of artist Robert Smithson.\u201d DIA has owned the Jetty for most of its existence, including the thirty years that it languished under a few inches of salt water, visible from the air but not from the shore, and it is to global warming, not DIA, that we owe its recovery. More to the point, almost no one knows about Smithson or his work. Is the bruising to DIA\u2019s sense of corporate proprietorship really more important here than the likely promotion of recognition of an artist and his work beyond the tiny, minority community of Earth Art fans?<\/p>\n

How about this? Has DIA ever heard of Appropriation? The hottest ticket among New York\u2019s mainstream artists a few years ago was the outright theft of artistic form by other artists. Maybe Epic should declare their bottle a signed work of Appropriation Art. Or can DIA have its cake and wash it down with Epic\u2019s beer?<\/p>\n

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Geoff Wichert responds to the Tribune article on the Spiral Jetty and Epic Brewing mentioned in this week’s Mixed Media feature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":2052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-visual_arts"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-15 19:49:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2051"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41553,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions\/41553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}