$77 Million Museum Cover-Up / How You can Buy the U.S. Constitution / Is AI-Generated Art Free from Copyright? / And an Upside Down Piet Mondrian

Hello everyone. Welcome back to By Amara. This is a weekly news show where I discuss contemporary events in the art and history fields.

I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew. The format for the show that we typically follow is something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. I like to change it up every week.

So this week, we are going to have two something old, one something new, and then one something blue. Oooh, get excited! This week we're discussing a museum that covered up $77 million worth of broken art.

How to buy the US Constitution and not a ship, like the actual paper Constitution. Is AI-generated artwork free from copyright? And is there a correct way to hang a Piet Mondrian painting?

Or image, rather. So we're going to be talking about all that and more on this episode of By Amara. Let's get to it.

Okey-dokey. So I only have one update this week, which is very exciting. And sorry if you hear like fartish sounds, it's the chair that I'm sitting on.

It's not me, I promise, even though I have had a lot of dairy lately, so I actually have some breakouts from it because I'm allergic to dairy. If you have breakouts, it is probably dairy, so just stop having dairy for like three weeks and then you'll be good. But anyway, so it is not me, it is the chair.

Just FYI. It's too late now. I've already started, so we're just going to, I'm going to try to not move too much, but I get animated as you know if you've seen and or heard this already.

So anyway, to my updates, that is enough about my body. Let's talk about art. That is what you are here for.

You are here for art, not fart.

I hate myself. Anyway, so in episode 5 we talked about a fake Vermeer painting, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., some of the researchers or curators there ended up figuring out that the painting, Girl with a Flute, that they have in their collection wasn't actually painted by Vermeer. They used formal analysis, which I've talked about before in some of my Tik Toks, where it's looking at the physical, visual, physical, I just said physical twice, physical attributes of the painting or the artwork in question to see, hey, are these like the same kind of brushstrokes and stuff like that?

So that is how they were able to identify that Girl with a Flute may not have been painted by Vermeer. Now, there are some skeptics though. So even though The National Gallery of Art stated that they don't believe that this was painted by Vermeer, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam says that, you know, this is kind of inconclusive.

The director of The Rijksmuseum stated that because Vermeer took so many different approaches in his career, like how he painted and all these different things, we shouldn't rule out that this was painted by Vermeer. We now have dueling institutional ideals about painterly brushstrokes and things like that. I think that's very interesting.

The painting is about to be exhibited at The Rijksmuseum, so a wide variety of different Vermeer paintings from art collections around the world are going to be in this exhibit. I just hit my face with the microphone, sorry.

So, I'm having a rough day so far. So all of these paintings are going to be on exhibit. So it'll actually be interesting to see if the professionals at The Rijksmuseum are like, "Oh no, this actually may not have been by Vermeer." So I don't know, that'll be something, maybe I'll have an update to the update in the future after the exhibition, but we'll see.

That is the only update I have, so let's just get straight into the show.

So our first something old this week is a question that I feel like all of us can answer. Have you ever broken something really expensive that wasn't yours? Well, imagine breaking about $77 million worth of stuff that isn't yours.

So this is a really strange kind of story. There's not a lot to it, but it's just weird.

So for backstory, over the past 18 months, a bowl, a teacup, and a plate from the Ming and Qing Dynasties were broken in three separate incidents, incidences at Taiwan's National Palace Museum. Like that in and of itself isn't sketchy, but how it happened and why this hasn't been publicized before is a little sketchy. So first, the director of the museum, Wu Mi-cha, has been accused of instructing staff to cover up the incidents and to treat all paperwork related to these incidents, I keep saying incidents, as classified.

Wu and the museum though, they deny covering things up. They just say that it's been kind of a process. They kind of had like a weird way of phrasing it, where it's like they were saying something without saying something.

What's also sketchy about this though, is that even though they allegedly checked all of their CCTV footage of the museum, they were reportedly unable to determine who was responsible for two out of the three accidents. So that's a little weird. You would think that, you know, maybe there's a guard on staff or something who saw somebody break something or that they at least had camera footage of it or something.

I don't know, that's like really weird, but they were able to identify one person. So it was apparently a senior staff member who placed an artifact, and they didn't elaborate on which artifact it was, they put it on a 3-foot high desk and then the object fell off of the desk. So there's one mystery solved.

Yeah, it's just, it's a weird sort of thing to not even know who broke your art, and especially these priceless artifacts too, if it's $77 million, which then it's like, "Ooh, are you running a little bit of a insurance fraud or something?" I don't, I don't know. I have no idea how it works in Taiwan, but yeah, I just thought it was very interesting.

Apparently the National Palace Museum has the world's largest collection of Chinese artifacts, so their whole collection spans about 5,000 years of Chinese history, so let's just hope that the rest of these objects are safe and sound. I don't have anything else, it just was a very interesting thing, so yeah, that's all I got for that.

So our second something new, or oh god, this is a rough day. Our second something old, on November 13th, Sotheby's is going to be auctioning off the US Constitution. And yes, it is the paper document, the Constitution.

But before you get too up in arms or if you even care, I should tell you that this is actually just one copy of 13 that exist, which is like, "Ooh, 13, spooky." So there are 13 first printings of the United States Constitution that still exist today. Originally there were about 500 or so of these first printings that existed, but throughout time, things have just disintegrated or now it's confetti in somebody's basement or something like that.

So there are 13 left. Last year, in November 2021, Sotheby's actually auctioned off a separate copy of the US Constitution, and this one sold for $43.2 million and was bought by Ken Griffin, who's the founder of hedge fund Citadel and a major Republican donor. So the copy that's going for sale this month was last traded 125 years ago, when it was bought as a gift for Adrian Van Sinderen.

Do you know who that is? Neither do I. So I had to look him up.

Apparently he's a huge rare book collector in the early 1900s. I had no idea, I actually worked in an archive where we had a lot of rare books, but I had never heard of this guy before. So he started his career working at J.P.

Morgan before becoming a partner at brokerage W.A. And A.M. White.

It's like so funny to me back in the day when people would just use their first two initials for their names, that was like super common, hence J.P. Morgan. Anyway, so he became a partner at a brokerage, where he worked for the rest of his life, so he had tons of money.

If you read his little Wikipedia entry, he is like, he was hobnobbing with the finest, so it's not surprising that he would get the United States Constitution as a gift. So anyway, this copy of the Constitution is slated to go on sale for 20 to 30 million dollars. Last year's copy though was slated to only go for 15, I say only, was slated to only go for 15 million, but then it ended up selling for that $43 million, so we'll see where this goes.

That definitely kind of skews how much the estimate is. We'll see if this copy of the Constitution can hit that 20 to 30 million dollar mark. It is kind of weird that there are these private copies of the Constitution just floating around, because I don't know, in my mind I would think that they would be at NARA or the National Archives.

So it's just interesting that they're just kind of like private collectors can have these and whatever. I don't know, because I also have to think like, are these people actually equipped to be able to take care of this paper document? I don't know, I have like a million questions, I have no idea how it works, honestly.

Hopefully they have proper archivists or preservation experts who will be like, "Hey, you need to keep it like this or like this." If you want to own the United States Constitution, November 13th is your lucky day.

So, our something new this week, just like with the Andy Warhol case, we're talking about copyright again. This time though, it is a very weird, tricky case of copyright infringement. This is something that's going to have to be figured out in the United States court system, and just, in copyright law in general.

This is going to be a really big deal. So, within the last year, you may have heard about AI-generated art and how that is just ramping up tremendously, especially with OpenAI's platform, DALL-E. You can get these weird, dream-like kind of photos and things like that.

All you have to do is like type in a directive in the like search whatever. I don't have all the right words and terminology for this, so sorry ahead of time. But basically, you just type a command, like "Elephant eating a banana" or whatever.

I just had a banana, that's why it's on my mind. So, "Elephant eating a banana", and then you'll get this weird, trippy kind of image of an elephant eating a banana, and there are a bunch of different varieties of it, I don't know. You go, go look, go figure it out.

How this works though, with the technology, is that the AI image generators, and there are a bunch of them, I just named DALL-E because that's like the main one that I know of, but there are like Citybuilders, and like Mythical Monster kind of ones, and stuff like that. So, the AI image generators, they scrape publicly available photos across the web, or pictures rather, across the web to train their algorithm, because then they can sample them, and then they kind of mesh everything together and produce a unique image, which you can already tell, if you're familiar with copyright, how this is going to get really weird.

So, these images that are sampled are typically copyrighted works that come from a variety of websites, like most notably Getty Images, where you can get a lot of stock images. And actually speaking of Getty, while we're on the topic, Getty Images actually just banned AI-generated art due to these copyright issues. So, I think until it gets sorted out, they're going to be like, "I'm not even going to touch that", just so then they don't have to deal with any legal ramifications.

They announced in September this year, 2022, that because copyright laws regarding AI-generated art are currently unsettled, they don't want to have any part of it. So, where the issue kind of comes from is that there is no credit or compensation for content creators who make these original images. Granted, this whole debate is going to center around the copyright fair use law, where they're talking about, is this new image transformative enough?

So, does it reconfigure the original image enough to make it something new? That is a very vague sort of statement, but essentially it has to be done enough where it's sort of like parody or commentary, or something, something totally different from the original purpose. And like we talked about in the Andy Warhol episode, that is very complicated, I'm so glad I'm not a lawyer, just for a variety of reasons, but that is a very tricky question in the creative field.

And copyright law is still old. I mean, this is relatively new in the public sphere, being publicly available and things like that. So, copyright law definitely has a long way to go in order to be able to become more modern and deal with these sort of issues.

Like I said, Getty Images is banning AI-generated artwork from their platform. They're using the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which is a project that was just formed in February 2021 by Adobe, Sony, BBC, Microsoft, Twitter, and a bunch of other companies in order to filter out AI-generated content.

So, all of this brings me to now, when Google just announced that they're launching a new app called Wonder, to create AI-generated artwork. They have a few different key features in this app. So, it is going to be the same thing where you can type a prompt into their little prompt area, like a whole sentence, like "Elephant eating a banana riding a tricycle" or whatever, and you'll get a weird image that shows all that.

Not only are they doing that, but they're also going to, apparently, build cities with its Citybuilder feature. I have no fucking idea what that means, so don't ask me. And then, you can also create cartoon monsters with its Wobbly feature.

So, that's going to be something geared more toward kids, I guess, or I don't know, I'm a kid at heart, so I would probably like it. So, there isn't a release date for the app yet. It was just announced.

It's also a little unclear of how copyright legislation is going to go, like who is going to be championing for it and how, how is it going to go? So, as soon as I have those updates, I'll let you know, but that's kind of where the world is at in the AI-generated image world.

And finally, we are, oh, I clicked out of that way too soon, sorry. That was a harsh cut. So we are ending this week with our something blue.

This story actually jogged one of those latent memories that I didn't even know I had. And as soon as I read it, I was like, "Oh my god, I remember that TV show doing this." So I am a kid, I was, I'm a kid, no. I am an adult now, but I was born in the 90s and there was a TV show called Arthur, may- maybe you have seen it or maybe, whatever.

Arthur was an aardvark, it was on PBS, and I remembered this one specific episode. I had to like look it up, because I was like, I swear I remember this like thing. But Binky who's on the show, Binky who was like the bully and he ended up becoming a softie, he noticed in this art museum, when they went on a field trip, that they hung the artwork in the wrong way, and like nobody believed him, and then finally I think one of the curators or something, I don't know, I did a really brief like re-watch.

They were just like, "Oh my god, it actually is, like how did you know?" And then Buster and Arthur had to be like, "It was Binky." Anyway, so while an anthropomorphized bulldog did not do it this time, a museum curator at Germany's, apologies for my mispronunciation as always, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 Museum announced that the exhibition's highlight piece, New York City 1, has actually been placed or displayed upside down since it was first seen in public in the 1940s.

Like, I get it. So this is a piece by Piet Mondrian. If you've seen his work, I'll have some images up on the YouTube version of this show.

It's a lot of lines, it's a lot of color blocking, it's a lot of stuff. If you don't know how it's supposed to be displayed, how the fuck are you going to know that there's a right way and a wrong way? Granted, I get if you're a museum professional you should be a little bit more up on like the visual images and things like that, like what it's supposed to actually look like.

I just thought this was very funny and it is kind of a philosophical question of, is there a right way to show this, or is there a wrong way to show this? Because it is, it is just very interesting. It's kind of like a Wassily Kandinsky.

You can kind of see with some of his more figurative stuff that, you know, there is kind of a right way or a wrong way, but I don't know, I like the subjectivity of it. I also wanted to bring up, this is why you have people in the art history and history fields just study this one super niche little area, because the more you study something and the more you're in it, the more you'll notice things that other people haven't noticed for years, might not ever notice for years.

Like you will notice those little things that are like, "That actually looks a little weird," or "This might be this instead," which is why we're having all this reattribution lately. So that is what happened here. So there are actually two versions of New York City 1.

One of them is painted and it hangs in the Pompidou in Paris. That one, apparently, is proper side up, like it's correct side up. The other one though, that we're talking about right now, is it was actually made of adhesive tape and that's the one that's seemingly upside down.

So the curator, Susanne Meyer-Büser, noticed that this adhesive tape version of New York City 1 looked a little off. She saw a photo of the artist studio that was taken in 1944, shortly after he died, that showed New York City 1 on an easel in the background, with the tightly grouped yellow, blue, and black stripes at the top.

So the version that's on display right now though is upside down, the exact opposite. So this image was first put on display at the MoMA in New York in 1945, but has been at the art collection of the German federal state of the North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980. Besides this photo, Meyer-Büser also has a super practical theory behind her thinking of why this is the incorrect way that it's been shown.

She believes that Mondrian would have started from the top to the bottom. So she could see that the adhesive tape, the way that it was woven together, it was such a complex weaving mechanism that he wouldn't do it going from bottom up, he would do it from top to bottom. So when it's upside down, you can see, "Oh, this actually would be really complex to try to get this to work all the way up." so that is one very practical way that she, besides the photograph, that is the other practical way that she noticed this.

Now, knowing this, you'd think that they would turn it upright, right? No. It's a little more complicated than that.

So Meyer-Büser doesn't want to for two reasons. The first is that turning it over to be the correct side up could actually damage the artwork because it's made of adhesive tape. So over the years, the tape is kind of falling off and it's super fragile.

So turning it upside down, the gravity would essentially just pull it apart and make all the adhesive come off. So you don't want to do that, you want to try to keep it as long as possible. The other reason is that she believes now it's part of the history of the piece to be upside down, so I find that very poetic, I really enjoy that.

She also further stated that maybe there is no wrong or right way to hang it up, maybe it's just however you want it to be. I really like that. I know that some people in the art field can get very persnickety about their Mondrians and hanging things up the proper way, but you know, if there's another way that something speaks to you, is that okay?

Like maybe you don't want to show it the ar- the way the artist intended. I think that's totally fine, like I wouldn't give a shit, just hang it however you want, I don't know. That's just me though, I'm not very persnickety, I'm not very set in my ways about art, I'm just like, "Yeah, whatever, whatever you want, that's part of the creative practice." Like I think that makes the artwork even more creative if you want to interact with it like that and make it, you know, its own, it's still the same piece, but then maybe you can flip it around a little bit or whatever, I don't know.

It's up to you, so if you have a Mondrian, do whatever the hell you want, so. Just don't destroy it, that's all I ask. Okay, so that'll do it for this episode of By Amara.

Be sure to like and subscribe if you enjoy this. Be sure to, I don't know, let me know something about you in the comments below, I guess. And yeah, that'll do it.

I don't think I have anything else. No, I think that's basically it. So this is definitely a lightning round episode, so apologies, but I hope you learned something new today.

So, anywho, my name is Amara Andrew and never stop creating.