A Court Just Stopped a Danish Luxury Company From Shredding a $90,000 Tal R Painting and Using It to Decorate Its Watches

The artist Tal R is breathing a
sigh of relief today. A court in Denmark issued a ruling this
morning essentially saving the painter’s 2017 work,
Paris Chic, from being destroyed for the purpose of
embellishing luxury wristwatches. 

The case, which was heard by the
Maritime & Commercial High Court in Copenhagen, centered on
whether Dann Thorleifsson and
Arne Leivsgard, co-founders of the high-end Kanske and Letho watch
brands, could cut up Tal R’s painting Paris Chic—which the duo purchased just this past August
for £70,000 ($90,506) from London’s Victoria Miro Gallery—in order
to decorate watch faces for their products. Paris Chic comes from the Copenhagen-based artist’s 2017
series “Sexshops,” which depicts the facades of various sex shops
from Paris to Berlin,
Antwerp, Prague, and Tel Aviv. 

Thorleiffson and Leivsgard’s
plan, which they announced in October (a mere two months after
acquiring the work), was to use fragments of the sliced-up canvas
to adorn roughly 300 Letho watches, each to be priced at 10,000 Danish kroner ($1,486). Per his lawyer,
Tal R argued that it is unacceptable “for someone to alter the work
and then reintroduce it to the public domain, and particularly not
for commercial reasons.”

Yet, according to The
Guardian, Thorleifsson and Leivsgard avidly defended
their agenda, while complimenting Tal R in an oblique way. “We
needed an artist that was esteemed by experts because we also
needed to get a reaction,” Thorleifsson said. “If we just took a
$100 canvas, no one would really care. It needed to be a true
masterpiece.” 

If the court ruled in their
favor, the two had planned to destroy Paris Chic in a public forum—billing the scheduled desecration of Tal R’s
painting, perhaps ironically, as a vernissage. 

Tal R’s lawyer, Jørgen Permin,
commented on the win in a statement to Artnet News, saying that
everyone involved is “very pleased with the very clear decision of
the Maritime & Commercial High Court, which ruled in our favour on
all counts. We and Tal R hope it will mark the end of this case and
that it will mean that Tal R and his fellow artists may avoid
similar disputes in the future.” (Artnet News also reached out to Heidi Højmark
Helveg, who represented Thorleifsson and Leivsgard, but did not
hear back by press time.)

Unfortunately, such cases are not
as unusual as one might think. In 2016, Ghanian artist
Ibrahim Mahama was caught in a legal dispute with controversial art
dealer/collector Stefan Simchowitz after he claimed that Simchowitz “mutilated” his
jute sack works—said to be worth $4.5 million—“by cutting them up,
and stretching and framing them as individual pieces to sell, all
without any required written authorization.” (To be fair,
Simchowitz wasn’t angling to turn Mahama’s artwork into a line of
luxury handbags.) Details of the case remain mum, as the
stipulations of the settlement reached in May 2016 remain
confidential.

The post A Court Just Stopped a Danish Luxury Company From
Shredding a $90,000 Tal R Painting and Using It to Decorate Its
Watches appeared first on artnet News.