Early lessons in property rights are straightforward. If a bully grabs your Tootsie Roll on the playground, you’ve been robbed. If he copies your book report, you’ve been plagiarized. Later in life it gets more complicated. Take the case of east-coast artist Peter Anton, who says the Field Museum stole his candy.
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Anton’s been making sculptures that look like giant boxes of chocolates since 1995, when he plucked a truffle from his bedside stash and inspiration struck. He says his concept was so novel that galleries were leery at first, but when Bruce R. Lewin put one of his pieces in the window of his SoHo storefront, it was an immediate hit. The big open boxes of sweets–made of wood, plaster, clay, glue, and resin–became Anton’s specialty. His “photorealistic” bonbons were pictured in gallery ads and got television and magazine coverage. After a photo of a humongous box of chocolates appeared in the New York Times in June as part of a story about the Field Museum’s “Chocolate” exhibit (which had just opened at New York’s American Museum of Natural History), Anton received congratulatory calls from friends, relatives, and collectors of his work. But he was stymied: as far as he knew, he wasn’t in the exhibit, and no one from the museum had ever contacted him.
Upon receiving this letter, Anton says, he considered a lawsuit but decided to forgo that route when he learned it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Still, he says, the institutional “arrogance” rankled, and in spite of warnings that he’d “lose my name in the art world” by going up against a museum, he issued two press releases last month telling his story. The first was headed “Museum Gets Caught With Its Hand in the Candy Box: The Field Museum Infringes Famous Artist’s Copyright”; the second, “Art Heist.” In it Anton wrote, “It’s so unfair that a museum, which is supposed to be in support of art, artists, and culture, would copy my sculptures and then…completely disregard me….Artists have no recourse for copyright infringement because the legal expenses are prohibitive, especially when you are up against a giant multimillion-dollar business like the Field Museum.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/George Papadakis.
