Saturday, January 26, 2008

Skying Artwork in a National Museum, Salvador Dali

Interesting that searching I am unable to find anything on the Web about 'skying artwork'. What is "to sky artwork"? It is the practice, infringing on moral copyright, of hanging or displaying artwork in such a way that it can not be easily seen.

For example, when I was at a National Museum in Washington D.C. to attend Carter's presidential inauguration in 1976, I walked into a room, and for some reason I stayed in the room roaming around for a while - there was a large triangular shaped display counter with someone working there. Chatting up the man, I walked to the far end of the counter. Imagine my surprise when I looked up to see a huge Salvador Dali painting of Christ during the last supper with a symbolic image of God (or Christ risen) transparent above the last supper scene.The person working there explained to me that the museum's director did not like Dali, so he had skyed Dali's expensive, fabulous and famous work so that no one would see it hanging above the display counter, high on the wall, on back end of an otherwise dead end hallway.

In the United States the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 may cover some of the central issues of moral copyrights that would not justify the museum director's actions - certainly Dali did not paint this work to cleverly *not* be displayed. But in Europe there may be more broad repercussions and remedies to a public funded entity such as a museum purposely hiding artworks which the museum director only personally finds distasteful or that he or she does not enjoy.

ps If Dali did in fact paint paintings so hideous that hiding them could be considered justifable, and such was his intention, how would we ever know?.

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