A Western Massachusetts artist has been fighting one of the best known pop stars in the world over artistic copyright – though without much success.
Danny Quirk has seen his art get stolen before. The 28-year-old Longmeadow resident likes to paint scenes about military trauma, and one of his images — a soldier crying behind a mask — turned up on T-shirts made by veterans groups.
“I feel like, if i were to go after these veteran groups that used it, it would be comparable to suing a cancer organization,” he says. “For me, morally, it would be in the wrong.”
But this time it’s different.
In his basement studio-slash-bedroom, Quirk pulls out a series of surreal watercolors he did in college — called Self-Dissections. They show men and women, partly undressed, who appear to be peeling back their skin to expose their internal organs, muscles and tissue.
“This series was a lot about self-discovery,” Quirk says. “The figures are quote, unquote, dissecting themselves.”
He posted photos of the series to his Facebook page, which has 65,000 followers. And last year, several of them alerted Quirk that his images were going out from the social media accounts of none other than Madonna. The global superstar – or someone on her team — posted collages, created by another artist, that feature the bodies Quirk had painted, under a photo of Madonna’s face.
“The work was never credited,” Quirk says. “It was never acknowledged.”
Quirk exhibits his art around the country but earns a living through medical illustrations. He still lives with his parents and has 40,000 dollars left on his art school loans. Even so, he says he wasn’t looking to Madonna for money – just recognition.
“The amount of exposure that came from the pieces, coming from a name like that, that could have generated some serious work,” he says.
But he says he couldn’t even get a call back from Madonna’s agent or publicist. (Neither could we.) Quirk let it go, until months later, when Madonna went on tour to promote her album Rebel Heart, and he heard again from a fan.
“It was like, ‘Congratulations, that’s cool that your work is being featured in Madonna’s concerts,'” Quirk recalls. “I was like, ‘What?!'”
You-Tube videos confirm that a number of images, including at least three of Quirk’s art, appear on a giant screen behind the singer as she performs the album’s title song.
“It wasn’t just a picture circulating the internet,” he says. “It was actually used in concerts, concerts where people pay stupid money to go to.”
He consulted a few lawyers but says they discouraged him from suing. That’s because federal law allows someone to use another person’s art under what’s called the “Fair Use” statute if they can prove that the image is not directly making money, or that it transforms the original picture into a new piece of art. Plus, Quirk never officially copyrighted the work.
“Even if a victory does happen, it’s guaranteed that the legal fees will far outweigh any sort of claims that would actually get from that,” he says.
He did enlist his Facebook followers to flood Madonna’s Instagram account with complaints, and the controversy generated national press. But some copyright lawyers wonder if Quirk gave up the legal fight too soon.
“It’s clear misappropriation,” says Emily Danchuk, an attorney with the Maine-based firm, Copyright Collaborative, which specializes in artist rights.
She’s concerned that when the little guy doesn’t stand up to corporations or celebrities, “it simply perpetuates the ability of these people to say, ‘It’s OK, they’re not going to come after us. We’ve got a team of lawyers that could put him into the ground, and they’re not going to do anything about it, so why not steal?'”
Danchuk says she’s represented artists who’ve won settlements for stolen work, though she acknowledges the Fair Use doctrine is subjective and applied inconsistently. Even artists argue over whether free expression is more important than artistic property rights.
Still, she thinks Quirk is at least entitled to a say in how his work is used.
“I think the thing that makes me so angry about this kind of thing is that he wasn’t given a choice,” Danchuk says. “He may hate Madonna.”
As it happens, he doesn’t hate her. “I tend to listen to darker stuff, Marilyn Manson,” he says, but he’s been known to crank up a Madonna dance-tune during the occasional all-nighter. And he admits it’s been fun to come up with Madonna-themed puns in his emails to her:
“It was like, ‘You may or may not have realized it, but you stole my material, girl.'”
Quirk says he would reconsider legal action if he doesn’t have to front the attorney fees. Meanwhile, he’s taking steps to safeguard his artistic property online — like adding prominent watermarks of his signature, and posting distorted photos of his paintings to make them harder to copy.