Cory Doctorow has a great column in the Guardian about a Pop Artists exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The show celebrates the fizzy remixing typical of Pop Art and is replete with “cut up magazines, copied comic books, . . trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made ironic use of a cartoon Charles Atlas, painted over iconic photos of James Dean and Elvis Presley,” and so on. But in a bizarre move, the curators have banned photographs — not to protect the physical integrity of the works, but to avoid infringing on the copyright of the creators. As Doctorow puts it over at Boing Boing, “Any gallery that bans reproducing Warhol on the grounds that you’ll violate his copyright should be forced into an off-site, all-day irony training session.” (Side point: I think Warhol would endorse anmoku no ryokai here.)

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