01/02/2002

The French artist Christo has won legal rights to the ownership of the photographic images of the “wrapped” Reichstag building in Berlin, which he covered in metallic silver fabric in 1995. The artist took legal action against a photographic agency that wanted to sell postcards featuring his work of art showing the wrapped Reichstag, but Germany's Constitutional Court, ruled the pictures can only be sold with the permission of the artist and his wife Jeanne-Claude. The judge decided that as the “wrapped Reichstag” was in fact a temporary art exhibition and thus the intellectual property of the artist. In 1998, Christo stated that the act of wrapping objects was good “for absolutely nothing else than for being a work of art. It is not a symbol, it is not a message, it's only a work of art." The first exhibition in the United States to encompass four decades of work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude will open at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., from the 3rd of February to the 23rd of June 2002. (Andrew Moore)