Artist Jeff Koons has once again prevailed in a legal challenge, as a New York federal appeals court affirmed that a copyright lawsuit filed against him by artist Michael Hayden was brought too late.
According to court documents filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit was dismissed for the second time on procedural grounds: Hayden waited until 2021 to file suit, which sought to assert copyright over a set piece Hayden had created that appears in a 1989 photograph from Koons’s notorious “Made in Heaven” series, which also included oil paintings and a billboard. The case centered on a Styrofoam sculpture of a coiled serpent created by Hayden for the Italian adult film star Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina), then Koons’s collaborator (and later, wife).
Hayden registered the sculpture with the US Copyright Office in 2019, reportedly the year he learned of its appearance in the series, and sued Koons in 2021. The panel of three judges dismissed the case, writing in their opinion that the decision should not be taken to mean that Koons’s use of the sculpture did not constitute copyright infringement.
The court found that Hayden had ample opportunity to discover the alleged infringement before the three-year statute of limitations had passed, given that he had lived in Italy for decades and was fluent in Italian. “Made in Heaven” had made a controversial splash in the public eye and was widely covered in the Italian press, and the series has become a defining body of work in the famous artist’s oeuvre.
