ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one among a variety of alternative explanations: Koons may have caught the very leading edge of a profound wave of change in the social and cultural conceptualization of copyright law—specifically, the emergence of an understanding that is at least incipiently "postmodern" in nature. Law has always lagged in its assimilation of new theories and their associated rhetorics. It would be news if a close reading of some recent copyright decisions revealed an emergent postmodern take on copyright. If the rise of the authorship concept is historically and chronologically linked to the emergence of modernity, its durability has been attributed to a subsequent and mutually supportive encounter with literary and artistic Modernism. The "copyright wars" of the 1990s have given us new reason to appreciate how effectively the emotive tropes of individualism can be mustered in support of particular policy objectives. The present account of "postmodern copyright" may find favor where the original "critique of authorship" did not.
