Assembly Memorandum on Assembly Bill 5052-B. It is evident that the statute [**19] was intended to protect the integrity of the original artworks and the artist's lim-ited edition multiples after they were sold or transferred to new owners. The statute prevents the new owner from displaying or publishing and attributing to the creator an altered version of that creator's work. However, nothing in the legislative history suggests that the New York leg-islature intended to limit the Act's protection to that sce-nario. To the contrary, because the intent of the bill was to protect not only the integrity of the artwork, but the reputation of the artist, n4 the spirit of the statute is best served by prohibiting the attribution to an artist of a pub-lished or publicly displayed altered reproduction of his original artwork. From a photographic reproduction, it cannot be seen whether the alteration [*138] was effected on the original or the copy, and both may cause the same harm to the artist's reputation when the altered version is published with attribution to him. In fact, the mass mailing of an altered photographic reproduction is likely to reach a far greater audience and cause greater harm to the artist than the display of an altered original, which may reach only [**20] a limited audience. While this situation may not have been expressly con-templated by the drafters, the wording of the statute lit-erally covers it, n5 and the spirit of the statute would be contravened by it.
n4 See Damich, A Comparative Critique, 84 Colum. L. Rev. at 1741 ("Clearly, the thrust of the New York statute is more toward protection of the artist's reputation than toward protection of the work.").
n5 If the words "reproduction thereof" were intended to mean the reproduction of an altered original or limited edition multiple, as defendants maintain, those words would not precede the words "in an altered, defaced, mutilated or modi-fied form" but would have instead followed them.
Defendants' additional contention that even if the words "reproduction thereof" apply to their copies of plaintiff's works, the Act still does not apply because they copied plaintiff's catalogue, not his original artwork, lacks merit. That defen-dants photographed an authorized photograph, instead of the original work, does not exempt their alteration from the statute. To hold other-wise would eviscerate any protection under the Statute once an artist publishes his work in con-junction with an exhibition since someone want-ing to alter his work could simply copy from the catalogue rather than the original work.