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Today, Google honors Joan Miro.

In 12th grade AP Art History, I wrote my term paper on Miro's Nocturne. The paper was pretentious bullshit, as I recall, tying together pretty much every pre-war, Continental, semi-existentialist book I had read, skimmed, or glanced at the cover of. All six of them.

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Retract my earlier post:

Artist's family asks Google to take down today's `painted' logo

By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News

After angering authors last fall with a wide-ranging book-copying project, Google may now be alienating some visual artists as well by allegedly reproducing famous works in drawings on the search giant's home page.

Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google's logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site.

The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, had asked Google to remove the image early this morning.

``There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights,'' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society.

In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

``From time to time we create special logos to celebrate people we admire,'' the statement said. ``Joan Miro made an extraordinary contribution to the world with his art and we want to pay tribute to that.''

Google has changed the logo on its homepage to commemorate events such as the Olympics or Albert Einstein's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Miro's birth in 1893. He died in 1983.

[ . . . ]

Google's logo allegedly incorporated images from Miro's ``The Escape Ladder,'' 1940, ``Nocture,'' 1940, and ``The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,'' 1941.

Feder said the society receives hundreds of requests each day from media organizations who are interested in reproducing a copyrighted work in some form. He said the authorization process is simple: all Google needed to do was send an e-mail asking permission to use the images.

``We would have asked the estate or the family, and they would have said yes or no,'' he said.

Of course, the Mercury News includes a screenshot of the offending Google page. Go look at them violate the Miro estate's copyright; I'm happy just violating theirs.