The Copyright Symbol Was the Joke

In May 1978 two teenagers started writing on doorways in Lower Manhattan, and after every line they drew a small circled C.

The mark was SAMO©. The two were Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz, and the copyright symbol was not added later by a dealer or an estate. It was there from the first wall, because the joke was that SAMO was a product.

That detail is the whole reason to look at this again. A copyright symbol is a claim of ownership over a thing that can be copied. They put one on a surface they did not own, for a text anyone could read for free, in a city where the same act was a misdemeanour. Nobody registered anything. Forty-eight years later the estate licenses the name through a commercial agency.

The Basilica at Pompeii, VIII.1.1. The building where the largest concentration of scratched Roman wall writing survives. Photograph CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five marks that claimed a wall

1. SAMO©, and a joke about ownership

Al Diaz's account of the name is domestic and unglamorous. It came out of a private phrase between friends, and Basquiat reused it in a school-paper satire about a huckster selling a guilt-free religion called SAMO©. The religion was the product. The symbol belonged to the product. When the phrase moved onto walls, the symbol came with it.

The slogans are not tags in the train-writing sense. They are ad copy for a fake belief system.

• SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD

• SAMO© … 4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH

• SAMO© … 4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE

• SAMO© AS AN END TO MINDWASH RELIGION, NOWHERE POLITICS AND BOGUS PHILOSOPHY

The routing matters too. The writing moved TriBeCa, SoHo, the West Village, Chinatown, the East Village, and the content changed by district. Art-world jabs went up in the gallery blocks. Consumer jabs went up around St Marks Place. This was targeted at an audience that read, in the places where that audience walked.

One correction worth making, because it is repeated constantly: there is no evidence Basquiat wrote on trains. SAMO was doorways and walls, aimed at people who went to galleries.

2. TAKI 183, and a newspaper that published the format

Seven years earlier, on 21 July 1971, the New York Times ran a piece titled "'Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals."

Taki was a Greek-American teenager from 183rd Street in Washington Heights, working as a foot messenger, which is to say his job was to move across the whole city every day. The tag was his diminutive name plus his street number.

The article's effect was not that it made him famous. It was that it printed the format. Name plus street number. It also listed the imitators it had found: Joe 136, Barbara 62, Eel 159, Yank 135, Leo 136.

A newspaper, trying to explain a nuisance, published a working specification to every teenager in the five boroughs. That is the most consequential thing any piece of writing about graffiti has ever done, and it was an accident.

3. Pompeii, where people signed walls with their real names

CIL IV 2487, as recorded in the nineteenth century: Admiror te paries non cecidisse qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Go back far enough and the anxiety disappears entirely.

The wall texts of Pompeii, catalogued as volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, run to around eleven thousand items if you count the painted election notices, and something over five thousand if you count only the scratched graffiti. They are inside houses as often as outside them. They appear in the vestibules of rich houses, in reception rooms, on staircases, in the law court.

They are signed with real names. Aufidius. Gaius Pumidius. Floronius, a serving soldier of the seventh legion. People wrote their own names on other people's walls and went home.

There is no surviving Roman law against it and no municipal ordinance. What survives instead, on the most heavily written wall in the city, is a complaint about the writing, scratched by one of the writers:

I marvel, O wall, that you have not collapsed in ruins, you who bear so much tedious writing.

That text survives twice, in two different places: CIL IV 1904 in the Basilica, and CIL IV 2487 elsewhere in the city. Somebody liked the joke enough to repeat it on a second wall.

It is aesthetic criticism, not law enforcement, and both people who wrote it were doing the thing they were complaining about.

4. The Village Voice, and what naming costs

On 11 December 1978 the Village Voice ran Philip Faflick's piece on SAMO©. It is often described as an exposé that unmasked them. It was not. They sat for the interview and were paid, by Diaz's account, fifty dollars each.

What it did was convert an anonymous mark into two named young men. Diaz says that is exactly what broke the partnership: he wanted the anonymity and Basquiat wanted the name.

Basquiat later appeared on Glenn O'Brien's TV Party as SAMO©, alone. Elsewhere, interviewed by Marc Miller, he named Diaz without prompting: "No, No, it was me and Al Diaz." Both things are on the record. Authorship was contested in real time, by the authors, in public, and the contest was never resolved by anything except the market.

5. Artestar, and the joke resolved

Table 1. Four claims on a wall. Only one of them was made by someone who owned the wall, and that was the newspaper.

Basquiat died on 12 August 1988. His work is not, as is often stated, licensed by the Artists Rights Society. The Museum of Modern Art's own credit line reads: © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

Al Diaz reactivated SAMO© as his own practice in 2016 and exhibits and sells under it.

So the symbol that started as a joke about a product being owned now sits above a real licensing arrangement, administered by an agency, for two estates that disagree about who wrote it. The © turned out to be the only accurate thing on the wall.

What I take from it

The three marks in this piece do the same job in three different centuries, and the difference is not in the mark. It is in what surrounds it.

Pompeii had no mechanism for turning a signed wall into property, so the signatures stayed signatures. New York in 1971 had a newspaper, which turned a name into a format. New York in 1978 had a press, a gallery system and a market, which turned a shared joke into a single attribution and then into an asset.

The mark never changes. The apparatus around it decides what the mark becomes. If you are putting your name on something now, that is the part worth looking at.