Photo: Craig Samborski
In addition to a fleet of tall ships attending the Philadelphia-Camden Tall Ships Festival 2015, there will be a 61-foot tall, 11-ton inflatable rubber duck. The duck is said to be based on a the plans for a inflatable sculpture originally made by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman named “Spreading Joy Around the World” but universally known simply as “Rubber Duck.” While the rubber duck has indeed been spreading joy around the world, appearing at over 20 locations around the globe, the artist is not happy about this rubber duck. Hoffman is charging that this is an “unauthorized rubber duck project.” Is the Philly Rubber Duck an imposter?
While notionally, the giant rubber duck travels the world spreading joy, in fact, new ducks are fabricated for each venue. Hofman sends drawings and instructions, and the exhibitor finds an inflatables fabricator who can make the duck according to Hofman’s specifications. That is what transpired when the rubber duck appeared at the Tall Ships festival in Los Angeles last year. The same promoters are behind both the LA festival and Philly festival.
Hofman is claiming that the promoters are now using his duck without permission or payment. As reported by Philadelphia Magazine: Hofman says he first learned that the giant rubber duck was appearing at Philadelphia’s Tall Ships festival …, after he received emails from Philadelphians saying how excited they were that his artwork was coming to their city.
“I was shocked,” Hofman tells us on the phone from his office in Holland. “They don’t have permission to show my duck again. And they are charging money for tickets. I want this rubber duck for the whole world to see. It is sad. They make it into this joke, but the rubber duck is not a joke. It is serious artwork which connects all people in the world.”
The way Hofman tells it, he was never even paid for the use of his duck at the Los Angeles festival, and now the organizers have taken the exact same duck and moved it to Philadelphia, using it to promote the festival here in much the same way that they did in 2014 on the West Coast. Just look at the Tall Ships Philadelphia home page. And Hofman says that they are doing so without him agreeing to it. “They are basically saying ‘Fuck you,'” he adds.
But Tall Ships Philadelphia producer Craig Samborksi, who also produced the Tall Ships LA fest, says not so fast.
Samborski claims that Hofman was paid for Tall Ships LA — he thinks it was $50,000 — but admits that Hofman may not have received his final payment. But, more importantly, Samborski says that the duck used in the Los Angeles event and now in Philadelphia isn’t even Hofman’s duck.
“It’s not his duck,” Samborski insists. “It’s just another large inflatable duck.”
According to Samborski, Hofman was paid to deliver a set of engineered blueprints that would allow Samborski’s team to build Hofman’s giant rubber duck. “He did not do that,” says Samborski. “He provided what I would classify as artist sketches. They weren’t engineered plans. They were line drawings. And we asked for an 18-meter-high duck, and he sent plans for a 12-meter-high duck.”
And so, Samborski says, he hired people to come up with engineered plans for an 18-meter-high rubber duck, and then he hired others to build the thing.
A duck is a duck is a duck? Left: “Authorized” giant rubber duck, courtesy Florentijn Hofman. Right: “Unauthorized” giant rubber duck, courtesy Tall Ships Philadelphia. “The two companies I went to wouldn’t even build it based on his plans,” he says. “It wasn’t structurally safe.”
But what about the Tall Ships LA website, which clearly credits Hofman with the duck?
“Ah, thank you for pointing that out,” says Samborski. “I am going to make sure that’s changed now. We fully believed we were going to get his duck for that event, and once we didn’t, I guess we never changed the site.”
Samborski adds that he doesn’t have a contract with Hofman in any event, explaining that the company that produced Tall Ships LA — a company with which he was involved — is now defunct. It was that company that had a contract with Hofman.
When we told Hofman of Samborski’s claims, namely that the duck set to appear in Philadelphia is not his duck, he was incredulous.
“It’s the exact same duck!” he yelled over the phone. “I am furious. He is just trying to score. This is very tricky and cheeky of him. He is a dishonest man.”
“Those are some awful things to say,” Samborski retorts. “If I feel anything, it is a certain amount of buyer’s remorse. What we got was not what we were told we were getting. He was paid a very hefty sum of money for not delivering what he promised. And now this has turned into a very unpleasant situation.”
Unpleasant, indeed.
Hofman tells us that depending on what happens next, he may have to get his lawyer involved.
“I generally don’t personally believe in suing,” he says. “I’m an artist, and I like to make great work without bringing negative attention on this super-happy global artwork. But they are just cheating, showing my work without approval. And so, we may have to take legal actions.”
Well, good luck, says prominent Philadelphia intellectual property attorney Jordan LaVine of Flaster Greenberg. Putting aside the issue of the contract, which was, according to Samborski, made between Hofman and a now-defunct company, the issue is really one of copyright protection.
“He is essentially claiming a copyright in large rubber ducks,” observes LaVine, whose clients include the New York Times, Martha Stewart and Ancestry.com. “The touchstone question here is, does his work have enough originality that copyright would attach to it. A rubber duck is an extremely common thing, and making a very large one does not necessarily give someone copyright rights in that artistic expression. This just looks like a standard rubber ducky.”
So, the question remains — is the Philly duck stolen art? an imposter? Or just another giant inflatable duck?
is a copy of the mona lisa the mona lisa? is it art or just a facsimile?
little yellow rubber duckies were around long before Hofman was even born and will probably be around long after he is forgotten.
The main problem is that the promoters themselves said that Hofman inspired the duck and they did business officially with him before. I think that the promoters just decided to cut Hofman out, effectively stealing his work. They will get away with it, but it doesn’t make it right.
The artist should be paid. There would be no giant rubber duck without him. He was credited in LA and then not fully paid. Not right. The artist should be paid.
Agreed.
Hofman didn’t create the rubber duck design – he took someone else’s work and scaled it. That was his artistic contribution. He doesn’t supply the duck, nor does he make them. It seems that he has limited his contribution so much that there is little left for him to defend.
The Philly event didn’t advertise it as being his duck, just as the “world’s largest rubber duck”. So they’re not even passing off. If I make a giant wooden clothespeg or typewriter eraser, do I owe Claes Oldenburg money? I don’t think so.
Claiming that Hofman didn’t create the rubber duck design sounds wrong. Andy Warhol did not create or design Campbell soup cans, yet his paintings of the cans hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the world of pop-art, the use of iconic images is not uncommon. Many artists have used a variety of common figures at different scales in public art. They are given credit for their work, as indeed should Florentijn Hofman.
Your claim that the Philly event promoters did not advertise the duck as Hofman’s is also wrong. They listed it as Hofman’s duck on the festival website, where it was picked up by various media sources. Only after the controversy blew up, the promoters claimed that it was on oversight and would be taken down. Given that they had done business with Hofman in the last West Coast Tall ships festivals, their claims seem rather feeble. The truth is that they did advertise the duck as Hofman’s.
Bottom line, it appears that unscrupulous promoters attempted to take advantage of an artist. Perhaps it is artistic justice that their impostor duck was a literally a bust.