“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Semple told me. “I like the idea of being able to try a name on and see how it feels, and test what the ownership of a name means, I suppose.

British artist Stuart Semple has been ordered by a French court to pay €16,000 ($18,200) in damages for selling a paint he called Easy Klein—a vivid blue he spent a decade developing as a tribute to ...