Bicycle Wheel is an artwork created by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. It is one of his first readymades, which were objects that he found and labelled as art [5]. This work consists of a metal bicycle wheel mounted on a painted wooden stool [1] [2].
I searched the US Copyright Office and I found no record of a copyright. According to one source [2], the image of Bicycle Wheel is copyrighted by the Estate of Marcel Duchamp / ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris, and used according to Educational Fair Use. However, it seems that Duchamp did not sign or register his original Bicycle Wheel as a work of art [12] [8]. Apparently he did not consider any Readymade to be an irreplaceable original [12]. He made several replicas of Bicycle Wheel over time [12] [14] [8], some of which may have been copyrighted by his estate [2].
I contacted the Philadelphia Museum of Art and they explained “The Association Marcel Duchamp, represented by Artist Rights Society in the US and ADAGP in Europe, claims the droit morale to all of Duchamp’s works, trademark, name, etc.” The website US Legal explains:
Droit Moral is a French term for Moral Rights. It refers to the personal rights a creator has in their work. It protects artistic integrity and prevents others from altering the work of artists, or taking the artist’s name off work, without the artist’s permission. Moral rights are retained by an author even if all of the other rights granted by the Copyright Act are assigned to another. Moral rights cannot be assigned to anyone else by the author.
I appropriated the idea for the image above from M. Duchamp.
From what I can gather, making a copy does not violate the Droit Morale of Marcel Duchamp. I get the impression he wouldn’t mind a copy being made nor that the copy is different from the original [3] [8].
The work itself has different interpretations depending on how you look at it. Duchamp made Bicycle Wheel as a protest against the excessive importance attached to works of art [3] [4]. As well, he wanted to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art by selecting and designating ordinary objects as art [7].
The assumptions I want to challenge in presenting the above work is on the limitations on what can be protected. The current mechanism available is copyright, and that limits what can be registered to things [1] created by a human artist, and [2] involves some creativity, regardless of how modest it might be. With the advent of AI-based tools such restrictions prevent works created with these technologies to be protected against copying, modification and resale.
10. creativemindstu.wordpress.com
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