Page:Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith.pdf/55

4 undermines creative freedom. I respectfully dissent.

Andy Warhol is the avatar of transformative copying. Cf. Google, 593 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 24–25) (selecting Warhol, from the universe of creators, to illustrate what transformative copying is). In his early career, Warhol worked as a commercial illustrator and became experienced in varied techniques of reproduction. By night, he used those techniques—in particular, the silkscreen—to create his own art. His own—even though in one sense not. The silkscreen enabled him to make brilliantly novel art out of existing “images carefully selected from popular culture.” D. De Salvo, God Is in the Details, in Andy Warhol Prints 22 (4th rev. ed. 2003). The works he produced, connecting traditions of fine art with mass culture, depended on “appropriation[s]”: The use of “elements of an extant image[] is Warhol’s entire modus operandi.” B. Gopnik, Artistic Appropriation vs. Copyright Law, N. Y. Times, Apr. 6, 2021, p. C4 (internal quotation marks omitted). And with that m.o., he changed modern art; his appropriations and his originality were flipsides of each other. To a public accustomed to thinking of art as formal works “belong[ing] in