Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [114]
Such a personalization could "damage" the icon's image, or, worse, divert money away from the corporation. So the corporation has three choices: It must co-opt the artist's work, as, in a sense, was done with the Warhol image; Mattel's permission—not simply that of the Warhol estate—is required to reproduce it. It must commission art and impose "guidelines." Or it must do its best to squash it.
What further complicates the relationship of Mattel to the contemporary art scene is that many of Mattel's early corporate products (as well as the doll itself) are themselves works of art—exquisite miniatures that are, with aesthetic justification, preserved by collectors. Then there's the fact that art these days involves borrowing images. From Barbara Kruger's political collages to Richard Prince's manipulations of commercial photographs, "art" is about appropriation. Among its tenets, postmodernism suggests that no work of art or text is anything other than a reassembly of citations; thus, if all art is citations, all art is fair game to be cited.
What does it mean to cite Barbie? For baby boomers, Barbie has probably the same iconic resonance as certain female saints—though not the same religious significance. But how different the art of the Renaissance would have been if the Roman Catholic Church had required painters to place a trademark symbol on frescoes interpreting God and the saints. This is not, however, to imply that the Church would have disapproved of such an arrangement.
"I don't think the College of Cardinals used terms like 'copyright' or 'registered trademark,' but let's face it, the scripture was registered in essence and highly controlled by the Church," said Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and author of The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography. "Somebody like Raphael was perhaps one of the greatest commercial artists who ever lived. He had a great client called the Church; he had a great set of art directors called the College of Cardinals; and he had a great product—salvation. He was doing commercial illustration to sell a philosophy—the history of Christianity or Catholicism. The fact that in the twentieth century, we see genius in that, artistry in that, or invention in that is really beside the point."
Renaissance artists also had a strong inducement to stick close to scripture; those who deviated were dragged before the Inquisition. Substitute law courts for Inquisition and you could be talking about today's corporate icons. Walt Disney's executors, for instance, wouldn't permit his mice or ducks to be reproduced in The Disney Version, Richard Schickel's trenchant 1968 analysis of the aesthetic underpinnings of the "Magic Kingdom." The Disney organization is notoriously vigilant about where and how its characters appear—appropriately, perhaps, licensing Mattel to produce doll versions of figures from Aladdin, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast. Yet certain emblems and symbols—Frigidaire, Xerox, Jell-0—crop up so often that it would be impossible for a corporation to prosecute every unlicensed use.
What constitutes "fair use" for independent artists is now particularly relevant to Barbie, because Mattel has gone into the Medici business—commissioning artists to use its icon in an authorized context: a picture book, the proceeds from which will be given to an AIDS charity. The project resembles the advertising campaign for Absolut vodka, in which independent artists were commissioned to cannibalize their styles in the service of a product. This is not to say that commercial