Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 60.0

Cite as:  598 U. S. ____ (2023) 

9 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

It does not take an art expert to see a transformation—
but in any event, all those offering testimony in this case 
agreed there was one.  The experts explained, in far greater
detail than I have, the laborious and painstaking work that
Warhol put into these and other portraits.  See 1 App. 160–
185,  212–216,  222–224.    They  described,  in  ways  I  have
tried  to  suggest,  the  resulting  visual  differences  between 
the photo and the silkscreen.  As one summarized the mat-
ter: The two works are “materially distinct” in “their com-
position,  presentation,  color  palette,  and  media”—i.e.,  in 
pretty much all their aesthetic traits.  Id., at 227.3  And with 
the change in form came an undisputed change in meaning. 
Goldsmith’s focus—seen in what one expert called the “cor-
poreality and luminosity” of her depiction—was on Prince’s 
“unique human identity.”  Id., at 176, 227.  Warhol’s focus 
was more nearly the opposite.  His subject was “not the pri-
vate person but the public image.”  Id., at 159.  The artist’s 
“flattened, cropped, exotically colored, and unnatural depic-
tion of Prince’s disembodied head” sought to “communicate
a message about the impact of celebrity” in contemporary
life.  Id.,  at  227.   On Warhol’s  canvas,  Prince  emerged  as
“spectral, dark, [and] uncanny”—less a real person than a 
“mask-like simulacrum.”  Id., at 187, 249.  He was reframed 
as a “larger than life” “icon or totem.”  Id., at 257.  Yet he 
was also reduced: He became the product of a “publicity ma-
chine” that “packages and disseminates commoditized im-
ages.”  Id., at 160.  He manifested, in short, the dehuman-
izing  culture  of  celebrity  in  America.    The  message  could 

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3 The majority attempts to minimize the visual dissimilarities between 
Warhol’s silkscreen and Goldsmith’s photograph by rotating the former 
image and then superimposing it on the latter one.  See ante, at 9 (fig. 6); 
see also Brief for Goldsmith 17 (doing the same thing).  But the majority
is trying too hard: Its manipulated picture in fact reveals the significance
of the cropping and facial reorientation that went into Warhol’s image. 
And  the  majority’s  WarGold  combo  of  course  cannot  obscure  the  other 
differences, of color and presentation, between the two works.