Appropriation as a System of Value Production—Erik Brunetti’s Conceptual Practice Across Art, Commerce & Law
Erik Brunetti’s four-decade practice examines how recognizable visual forms accumulate authorship, authority, ownership, and value as their meanings are repeatedly transformed through public use, reproduction, recontextualization, and institutional interpretation.
Over nearly four decades, Brunetti has worked through painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, publishing, graphic production, apparel, and print. The consistency of the practice resides in a sustained inquiry into what happens once an image enters public use: how authorship is established, how recognition accumulates, how ownership is formalized, how restrictions are imposed, and how meaning changes when the same visual form is encountered within different material and institutional settings.
That inquiry formed within the visual environment of late-twentieth-century Los Angeles, where graffiti, independent publishing, photocopy culture, record graphics, skateboarding, advertising, apparel, photography, and street-level distribution already shared methods, audiences, and visual codes. Brunetti was working within that field before streetwear became a stabilized commercial category. Reproduction and distribution were integral to authorship because public recognition developed through recurrence, repetition, and exposure across multiple sites rather than through the singular encounter traditionally associated with the studio object.
FUCT, established in 1990, became one of the most sustained structures through which Brunetti could test those conditions. Its graphic program placed authored marks into garments, advertisements, publications, photographs, retail environments, and printed ephemera, allowing a visual form to acquire public identity through repeated use. The commercial structure therefore became one of several environments in which authorship could be examined under pressure from reproduction, distribution, ownership, interpretation, and collective recognition.
Appropriation enters Brunetti’s practice as a means of working with images whose meanings have already been established through prior use. Corporate marks, public symbols, advertising language, and other familiar forms arrive with histories of recognition attached to them, allowing Brunetti to work directly with the authority those images have accumulated. Their reuse changes the terms under which they are read, exposing the ways authorship, ownership, commerce, law, and historical interpretation can alter the status of the same visual form over time. Within this framework, value emerges through successive acts of recognition, use, protection, preservation, exhibition, and publication, each of which places the image within a different structure of meaning and consequence.
The legal history of FUCT made this process unusually explicit. In Iancu v. Brunetti (2019), the United States Supreme Court held that the Lanham Act’s prohibition on registering “immoral or scandalous” trademarks violated the First Amendment because it discriminated according to viewpoint. The Court identified Brunetti as an “artist and entrepreneur.”
A sign that had developed through graphic authorship, commercial use, and public recognition entered a legal system charged with determining the terms of federal protection. Questions already embedded in the practice—authorship, ownership, restriction, recognition, and authority—acquired constitutional consequence.
The importance of that episode lies in the continuity it reveals. Brunetti’s work repeatedly addresses the changing status of visual forms as they move between different structures of use and interpretation. The same mark can function as an authored image, a commercial identifier, intellectual property, historical material, an object of controversy, or the basis of a later artwork. Each context assigns different meanings and different forms of value while the underlying visual form remains recognizable.
In the installation pictured above, from Brunetti’s 2014 exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York, his Branded Steerhides appear alongside the hand-forged irons used to make them. The marks on the hides vary in darkness and definition: heat, pressure, and the resistance of each surface interrupt the clean repetition a graphic symbol might otherwise promise. Displayed together, the irons and hides let the viewer see both the instrument and the result. A cattle brand carries an established language of ownership, but Brunetti makes the act of marking—and the imperfect impression it leaves—visible as part of the work. Here, authorship and property are expressed through material, not only through the image.
Publishing and photography provide additional evidence of the same continuity. Brunetti’s publications establish when particular images entered public use and how they were reproduced, sequenced, and distributed, while photographs document the settings, objects, and audiences through which those images acquired recognition. The Foundation’s holdings connect these materials to garments, correspondence, production files, legal records, exhibitions, and later artworks, making it possible to follow the development of the practice across forms that were subsequently classified as separate fields.
Those categories have shaped Brunetti’s reception. FUCT has been read through fashion and streetwear; the graphics through design; the Supreme Court case through trademark law; photographs through documentation; archival materials through history; paintings through fine art; installations through exhibition history. Such divisions obscure the continuity of the practice by assigning separate professional categories to manifestations of the same underlying inquiry. The evidence becomes more coherent when these manifestations are considered together, revealing a sustained inquiry into the changing status of visual forms: the conditions through which they acquire recognition and authority, become subject to competing claims of ownership and interpretation, and assume new meanings as they move between material, commercial, legal, and institutional contexts.
The exhibition record belongs to that same chronology. Brunetti exhibited at O.K. Harris in 1996, Team Gallery in 1998, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Art in the Streets in 2011, with Vito Schnabel in 2014, at the Underground Museum in 2014, and at Spazio Maiocchi in 2022. These exhibitions sit alongside the graphic, commercial, publishing, legal, and material developments of the practice rather than constituting a separate phase. They document the persistence of the same conceptual concerns across different formats and institutional settings.
Value is one of the recurring subjects of Brunetti’s practice because the same visual material can acquire different forms of consequence as its context changes. Recognition, commercial use, legal protection, historical survival, exhibition, publication, and collecting each assign a different status to the object and alter the terms under which it is understood. Brunetti’s work repeatedly engages these shifts, making the production and reassignment of cultural, proprietary, economic, and historical value part of the work’s conceptual structure.
Brunetti’s work belongs within a conceptual lineage in which meaning is produced through the changing relation between an image and the structures that receive, reproduce, regulate, and interpret it. His use of medium is therefore contingent upon the particular problem under examination, whether that concerns repetition, recognition, ownership, restriction, material persistence, public interpretation, or historical reclassification. Commerce and law function within the practice as consequential sites in which visual meaning is formalized, contested, protected, and reassigned.
The practice concerns the conditions under which images acquire consequence. FUCT represents one of its most sustained examinations of those conditions, while the Supreme Court litigation demonstrates the extent to which questions originating within Brunetti’s visual practice eventually entered constitutional law. Painting, sculpture, installation, publishing, photography, drawing, and apparel continue the inquiry under different material and institutional conditions. Across these forms, the coherence of Brunetti’s practice lies in a sustained examination of how recognizable visual material acquires altered meaning, authority, ownership, and value as it moves through the structures that determine what images can become.
This article forms part of the Foundation’s continuing research into visual authorship, appropriation, and the production of cultural value. For the historical and evidentiary framework underlying this inquiry, see Before Streetwear: Graphic Appropriation, Visual Authorship & the Evidentiary Record of Late-Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, Erik Brunetti Foundation for the Arts, 2026.