Cloud Gate, 2006, Chicago. Image: Wikimedia
Anish Kapoor, whose massive Cloud Column sculpture was very recently added to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s collection and outdoor campus, is suing the National Rifle Association for using images of his famous “bean” sculpture (actually titled Cloud Gate, completed in 2006), and the very star of Chicago’s Millennium Park, in a video advertisement for the NRA in 2017.
Via Artnet news, Kapoor is “filing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the US in response… the artist filed the complaint on June 19 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.”
The NRA launched the ad on NRA TV in 2017. The NRA titled the commercial “The Violence of Lies” (also “The Clenched Fist of Truth”) and the video (via Artnet) “…denounced the US media and its ‘liberal agenda’ in an effort to recruit new members and solicit donations. Cloud Gate is among several landmarks and monuments across the country featured in the video.”
No surprise that the artist wasn’t thrilled with the use of Cloud Gate for the NRA’s agenda. He penned an open letter about it in March of 2018 (in which he writes that the ad “…plays to the basest and most primal impulses of paranoia, conflict and violence, and uses them in an effort to create a schism to justify its most regressive attitudes,”) and when he asked that images of Cloud Gate be removed from the ad, his request was rejected or ignored by the NRA.
The lawsuit seeks damages of $150,000 and a demand that the NRA stop running the commercial.
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