Seeing the Light

The Los Angeles Downtown News has a piece on neon artist Lili Lakich, who's about to publish a book about her career, called Lakich: For Light. For Love. For Life. The story mentions her lawsuit several years back against Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable over the use of one of Lakich's sculptures on the cover of Huxtable's book The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. Apparently the case settled for $40,000 after two years, but it also seemed to cause an irreparable rift between Lakich and the Museum of Neon Art, which she co-founded with fellow neon artist Richard Jenkins in 1981. Lakich says it was because "the museum's directors did not back her in the lawsuit against Huxtable," but the article fails to spell out how exactly they should have helped. In any case, it seems like another example (stressed here before) that, in litigation, even when you win you often lose.