Sonia K. Katyal
SONIA K. KATYAL is Chancellor's Professor of Law at UC-Berkeley Law School, where her work focuses on art, intellectual property, and civil rights (with a special focus on race and sexuality). Professor Katyal is the co-author of Property Outlaws (Yale University Press, 2010) (with Eduardo Peñalver), which studies the intersection between civil disobedience and innovation in property and intellectual property frameworks. She is also the first law professor to receive a grant through the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation for her forthcoming book, Contrabrand, which studies the relationship between art, advertising, trademark, and copyright law.
BRANDED
On the Semiotic Disobedience of Hank Willis Thomas
By Sonia K. Katyal
In July of 2007, the exterior wall of the Birmingham Art Museum displayed a haunting image. In its center was a photograph, depicting a classic MasterCard advertisement, but with a few key differences. Rather than the traditional picture of a beaming couple embarking on an adventure, (“There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”), the photograph displayed a radically different scene.
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