Copyright Law

"I would like to be employed by my gallery to turn the stuff there -- the art -- into money so I can repay the debts I owe"

Posted on February 25, 2008
Bloomberg's Philip Boroff reports that Larry Salander has asked the bankruptcy court to authorize his gallery to rehire him to help locate artworks and turn them into cash. The creditors don't seem too thrilled with the idea (one creditor's lawyer is quoted as saying: "My impression, based upon my conversations with creditors, is it's a universal view that there are no circumstances in which the fox will be allowed back into the henhouse").

Randolph Update

Posted on February 24, 2008
The momentum seems to be staying with Randolph College in its deaccessioning lawsuit. Christa Desrets reports in the Lynchburg News & Advance that seven of the 19 plaintiffs disputing the sale have withdrawn from the case. A lawyer for the plaintiffs attributes the development to the recent decision by the court "par[ing] the scope of the case to issues related only to the four paintings, and not to any other litigation involving the school becoming coeducational...

Art Law Op-Eds

Posted on February 24, 2008
It was art law day on the New York Times op-ed page yesterday. First, former State and Justice Department official Allan Gerson wrote about the "From Russia" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts that was nearly canceled until the British Parliament enacted special legislation providing immunity to Russia against any ownership claims with respect to the loaned paintings...

Fisk Trial Ends

Posted on February 22, 2008
The Fisk-O'Keeffe trial is over. Judge Lyle promised a ruling within 30 days.Richard Lacayo notes: "If the O'Keeffe Museum gets its way, it seems to me it will be a Pyrrhic victory in public relations terms. Does the O'Keeffe really want to be known as the museum that seized an entire collection, an important teaching resource, from an historically black university?"

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Platforms

Posted on February 22, 2008
Kate Taylor's New York Sun story today on art-world fund-raising events for Barack Obama mentions that his "arts platform" includes support for "Senator Patrick Leahy's Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would amend the Internal Revenue Code to allow artists to take full deductions on works that they donate to a museum or another nonprofit...

1031 Update

Posted on February 21, 2008
I mentioned a few months ago that legislation was being considered that would have eliminated like-kind exchange treatment under Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code for art and other collectibles. William Exeter of Exeter 1031 Exchange Services reports that that provision has been dropped from the pertinent legislation...

"Double Threat" Crime?

Posted on February 21, 2008
Saul Levmore, Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, has an interesting theory as to why two of the four recently-stolen Buhrle Collection paintings turned up in an unlocked car just a few hundred yards from the museum.

"Mr Parisot wanted to give a fraudulent provenance to the drawings so that he could increase the prices for her work"

Posted on February 21, 2008
The Art Newspaper reports on fraud charges in Paris against art historian and Modigliani specialist Christian Parisot, who is accused of faking 77 drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne, "the artist?s mistress and mother of his daughter, [who] committed suicide, pregnant and aged just 21, the day after Modigliani died in 1920...

Wal-Mart Suit

Posted on February 20, 2008
I see from the Iceland Review that Wal-Mart is suing Icelandic artist Lárus List over his registration of the domain name wa1mart.com. Apparently List showed a painting with that title in a gallery in Reykjavík a couple of years ago, and then registered the domain name...

Fisk Trial Underway

Posted on February 19, 2008
The Fisk-O'Keeffe trial begins today. "The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum ... hopes to seize the entire Stieglitz Collection based on its argument that Fisk has violated the conditions of O'Keeffe's donation." According to the Nashville Tennessean's Jonathan Marx, the trial is expected to last two days.

More More Moore

Posted on February 19, 2008
I was surprised to learn that the University of Alabama's trademark lawsuit against artist Daniel Moore is still rolling on. Apparently a year and a half of mediation couldn't produce a settlement, and now the case is being assigned to a special master...

Kids Today

Posted on February 18, 2008
The New York Times has news this morning of an edgy young artist whose work was deemed inappropriate for the London Underground.

BREAKING: Paintings Found?

Posted on February 18, 2008
Reports are trickling in that some or all of the four paintings stolen from a Zurich museum last week have been found.

Speaking of not-so-sharp grappling hooks ...

Posted on February 18, 2008
There is this story from Spiegel Online.

Butt For Cause?

Posted on February 17, 2008
A March 11 trial date has been set in the case of a Virginia high school art teacher who was fired "after a video showing him painting with his posterior and genitals appeared on the Internet." As the AP summarizes the claim, "his lawyer and the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union are arguing that the school system violated his constitutional rights, and that what [he] did in his own time was his personal business...

"The mundane reality is that many art thieves are simply not the sharpest grappling hooks in the toolbag" (UPDATED 2X)

Posted on February 17, 2008
In today's New York Times Week in Review, Randy Kennedy discusses the "strange disconnect between the enduring mystique of art theft and the reality of its perpetrators."Related article from a few days ago at cnn.com: "Everyone wonders, 'Why steal something you can't turn to cash quickly?' Art thieves do a simple risk versus reward evaluation, said Corine Wegener, associate curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts...

More on "To burn or not to burn?"

Posted on February 16, 2008
A few weeks ago I mentioned the decision Nabokov's son was facing of whether or not to honor his father's request to destroy unpublished work he'd left behind. If a painter requests that her heirs destroy her remaining works, should they do so?Tom Stoppard has now weighed in on the "burn" side: "It?s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it...

Randolph College News

Posted on February 16, 2008
The temporary injunction blocking the Randolph College deaccessioning has been lifted because opponents of the sale were unable to raise the second half of a $1 million bond required to keep it in place. Christa Desrets has the story in the Lynchburg News & Advance...

Resolved

Posted on February 14, 2008
The Chicago Tribune reports that The Art Institute of Chicago has resolved its claims for restitution for its fake Gauguin. The museum bought the sculpture in 1997 for $290,000 from English art dealer Libby Howie, who had bought it in 1994 at Sotheby's in London for about $30,000...

Manslaughter Charge (UPDATED)

Posted on February 14, 2008
Artist Maurice Agis, "who created an inflatable sculpture that killed two women when it flipped over in a freak gust of wind" in England in 2006, has been charged with manslaughter. BBC story here.UPDATE: Ed Winkleman: "In the case of Mr. Agis, who is 76 years old, and whose piece worked perfectly for 10 years before this freak accident, a charge of manslaughter strikes me as political scapegoating...

Fisked Messages

Posted on February 14, 2008
A short piece in the Nashville Scene criticizes Fisk University for being in "denial" about its inability to sell the Stieglitz Collection:"Oh, poor forgetful Fisk University. School officials there have spent the last two years begging the Davidson County Chancery Court to let them sell artwork from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection ...

More on the California Raids

Posted on February 13, 2008
Harvard lawprof Terry Martin e-mails some interesting thoughts on the recent California museum raids:"These federal raids on the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles and on four California museums raise an interesting set of links between foreign, state and federal law...

Fax Campaign

Posted on February 13, 2008
There's a fax-the-mayor effort underway in support of the evicted artists at 475 Kent.

"As in all cases involving the theft of well-known artworks, the mystery is what the thieves intended to do with the paintings"

Posted on February 12, 2008
The New York Sun's Kate Taylor has more on this weekend's major art theft from a Zurich museum. The Art Loss Register's Chris Marinello tells her, "If they try to unload these, we will find them."Ed Winkleman applies Occam's Razor: "Stealing artwork this famous strikes me as evidence of stupidity ...

Fiskier

Posted on February 12, 2008
Lee Rosenbaum has more on the decision rejecting Fisk's proposal to share the Stieglitz Collection with the Crystal Bridges Museum.Of all the strange aspects of the case, two stand out to me as the strangest.The first is timing, or chronology. If it's contrary to O'Keeffe's intentions that any part of the Collection be sold, fine -- but then what have we been doing all this time? Why wasn't that finding made right at the beginning of the case? And how to explain the court's September ruling rejecting a proposed deal with the O'Keeffe Museum "in light of the possibility of securing a more advantageous solution with Crystal Bridges"? What was that about?The other issue has to do with the O'Keeffe Museum's status as the successor to O'Keeffe...

Bio-art Sentence

Posted on February 12, 2008
The New York Times reports that University of Pittsburgh geneticist Dr. Robert Ferrell has been sentenced to a year of unsupervised release and fined $500 for providing artist Steve Kurtz with bacteria to use in a bio-art work. Kurtz is still facing trial on federal mail and wire-fraud charges...

No bids?

Posted on February 11, 2008
The New York Times reports that the Getty Images auction "appears to be in jeopardy." There apparently haven't been any offers "significantly above its current market value of $1.6 billion."247WallSt.com's John Ogg says it's a business erosion story: "Getty Images has a business model that is at risk in a wiki world with low-cost of entry for start-ups...

"Might have been the largest art theft in Europe"

Posted on February 11, 2008
From The New York Times:"Armed robbers stole four important paintings by van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Cézanne from a museum in Zurich, the Swiss authorities announced Monday .... Three thieves, wearing dark clothes and ski masks, walked into the Emile Bührle Foundation, a private collection housed a couple of miles outside of Zurich?s city center ...

"This building is ... magical. It?s different. You can?t replicate it"

Posted on February 10, 2008
Today's New York Times has an update on the situation at 475 Kent Avenue: "The roughly 200 residents ... have not been able to move back in, leaving 200 lives, and scores of livelihoods, in limbo."

More Fisk Follies

Posted on February 09, 2008
You knew it would come to this: "Fisk University will not be able to sell a 50 percent share in its Alfred Stieglitz Collection of modern art to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., says a Friday court filing. Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's latest ruling in the university's protracted lawsuit would appear to be a decisive blow against Fisk, which has spent more than two years attempting to solve financial difficulties through the sale of its prized Stieglitz collection, donated to the school by painter Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949...

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