Panorama Colloquium: “Beyond Copyright: How Does Law Impact Art?”

 

Wendy Katz and I co-edited a section of Panorama Journal!

Beyond Copyright: How Does Law Impact Art?

 

Oil painting of a man in a ragged top hat and coat, holding a painting palette and brushes, looking at a locked wooden door marked "Studio." A sign onthe door reads "To Let - / On good security"

David Gilmour Blythe, Art versus Law, 1859–60. Oil on canvas, 32 7/8 x 29 x 2 5/8 in. Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund. Public domain, photograph by the Brooklyn Museum

Co-editors

Wendy Katz and Lauren van Haaften-Schick, “Beyond Copyright: How Does Law Impact Art?

Contributors

Katherine de Vos Devine, “Mining Raw Materials: Copyright, Contemporary Art, and False Dichotomies
Monica Lee Steinberg, “Loopholes for Some, Taxes for Everyone Else
Kelema Moses, “Hawai‘i Land Struggles and a Pacific Statehouse
Amy Sara Carroll, “‘Reading like a Poet’ between the Lines of the Cultural Exemption and the Mexican Exception”
Carma Gorman, “What’s American about American Industrial Design? US Laws
Matthew Hunter, “Insurance: Beyond Law

“The Recent Sale of Amy Sherald’s ‘Welfare Queen’ Symbolizes the Urgent Need for Resale Royalties and Economic Equity for Artists” co-authored article on artnet.com

Op-Ed on artnet.com

The Recent Sale of Amy Sherald’s ‘Welfare Queen’ Symbolizes the Urgent Need for Resale Royalties and Economic Equity for Artists

There are creative ways that collectors, auction houses, and artists can collaborate to build a system of “resale equity.”

From the article:

“We propose a system of ‘resale equity’ in which works like [Amy] Sherald’s Welfare Queen could go to auction with flexible and elective resale-royalty provisions. Sellers could agree to return some portion of the proceeds back to the artist, ideally via a nonprofit so that the donation is tax-deductible. Auction houses or other market intermediaries wishing to incorporate such activities into their equity practice could pledge a portion of the seller’s commission or the buyer’s premium back to the artist.”

Read more at artnet.com

Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Lectures

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I’m very pleased to present my research alongside my colleagues in the Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship Program at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art! 

Full program and recordings (through May 12, 2022) here

Thursday, May 13, 2:30–5 p.m. ET
Moderated by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media, Smithsonian American Art Museum

  • Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
    “Phantasmagoric Abstract Painting: Thomas Wilfred’s Mobile Color Theatre 1918–1925”
     
  • Ana Gabriela Rodriguez, predoctoral fellow in Latinx art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Courtauld Institute of Art
    “Alternative Perspectives: Puerto Rico’s Generación del 50 between the Graphic, Photographic, and Cinematographic”
     
  • Lauren van Haaften-Schick, predoctoral fellow, Smithsonian Institution, Cornell University
    “‘Use the system as a pipeline’: Artists’ Resale Royalties to the Redistribution of Wealth”

Stanford Center for Law and History Annual Conference

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I’m thrilled and honored to present my research at Stanford Law with so many esteemed senior and emerging interdisciplinary legal scholars. 

Full poster image with program here and conference abstracts here

April 23, 2021 – 12pm EST, 9am PST

Lauren van Haaften-Schick
PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University

Remedies for Inequity 1971-2021: Resale Royalties to Redistribution via ‘The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’ (1971)

During the 1960s-70s as artists in the United States challenged traditional aesthetic forms, they also questioned property and power relations in art by protesting inequality, advocating for artists’ rights laws, and experimenting with contracts, testing how legal regulations and ownership relations could be reconceived. One of the most iconic products of this moment was The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement drafted by conceptual art dealer-curator Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky in New York in 1971. This “Artist’s Contract” was intended to become the standard agreement for all artwork sales, and granted artists many rights not available through U.S. copyright law at the time, including moral rights, the right to approve exhibitions of one’s work, and most controversially, a 15% royalty of collectors’ profits at every resale. While its main purpose was to “remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world” that privileged the interests of art buyers over those of artists, it was also designed to account for the needs and motives of all parties, recognizing the extraordinary connection between artists and collectors as both influence and are impacted by the changing value of artworks over time.

But amidst the activist fervor from which the Artist’s Contract sprang, a series of more radical proposals also emerged that focused not only on how artists’ rights frameworks could benefit individuals, but how the wealth produced through the art market could be redistributed. These included plans for an “Artists’ Survival Fund” that would support living artists through studio and exhibition space, and by meeting more general needs like legal defense and even health care. Supporters of these plans were quick to criticize the Artist’s Contract for abandoning redistribution as a goal, and for potentially re-entrenching the art market’s severe imbalance of resources and power by rewarding only those rare artists whose work was already profitable. Legislation for resale royalties, which the Artist’s Contract inspired, has been similarly criticized.

While research demonstrates that the Artist’s Contract and resale royalty legislation have benefitted artists at all economic levels, they remain no panacea for the problems of the art economy today. Since 1971, speculation in the art market has ballooned, as has its wealth gap, mirroring broader economic inequities. Against this backdrop however, a younger generation of artists and curators have recently revised it towards redistributive ends. This paper considers these historical countermodels and emergent proposals to ask: What can we glean from the shaky history of the Artist’s Contract and resale royalty legislation to theorize – and perhaps even draft – “remedies for inequity” today?

American Bar Association International Law Section

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Looking forward to sharing more research on the Artist’s Contract as a precedent for smart contracts with leaders in this area!

“Using Blockchain Technology to Secure Artists’ Fair Share of the $64 Billion International Art Market – A Fair Deal”

April 15, 2021 – 1:20pm – 2:20pm
 
Moderator:
Susan Schwartz, Susan Schwartz Law, Burbank, CA
 
Speakers:
Deborah Reid, Reid Art Law, Jacksonville, FL
Amy Whitaker, Assistant Professor, New York University Steinhardt, New York, NY
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Predoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Robert Norton, CEO, Verisart, London, England, UK

 

College Art Association 2021 Conference

For the College Art Association 2021 conference I co-hosted a forum on the conference presenter agreement, which raised eyebrows among membership for its restrictive approach to fair use. We hope that the feedback from membership which we collected during the discussion will inspire a more equitable agreement in the future.

Committee on Intellectual Property – Dialogue & Drop In: Exploring IP considerations through the CAA 2021 Presenter Agreement

Friday, February 12, 2021 . 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

  • Live Q&As Online – Meeting With Facilitators: Susan Douglas, University of Guelph; Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Cornell University; Nick Pozek, Columbia University, Celena Gonzalez, IMLS

This session will use the College Art Association Annual Conference Presenter Agreement to explore the interconnected rights assigned to and waived by artists and scholars in common agreements. Open to all, this conversation will also serve as a listening session to advise the Committee for Intellectual Property on current member priorities and interests.

We request that participants in this session adhere to the Chatham House Rule.

Seth Siegelaub: “Better Read Than Dead,” Writings and Interviews 1964–2013 – in print!

I am beyond thrilled to announce a new publication: 

Seth Siegelaub: “Better Read Than Dead,” Writings and Interviews 1964–2013 
Edited by Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sara Martinetti, Jo Melvin
Co-published by König Books and Stichting Egress Foundation 
Available in the US through Art Book / DAP and your local art book shop

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This collection contains numerous previously unpublished documents from Siegelaub’s archives giving insight into the development of exhibitions January 5-31, 1969,  the Xerox Book, the Artist’s Contract. It also includes every piece of published writing by Siegelaub including his introductions to the two-volume Communcation and Class Struggle, and unpublished texts such as an excerpt from his unpublished memoir. Complementing these materials are interviews from 1969-2013 documenting as a whole his activities in conceptual art, political publishing and collecting books in Marxist theories of communication and the history of textiles. He truly was like no other! 

 

REDISTRIBUTION, discussion series in collaboration with Kenneth Pietrobono, hosted by EFA Project Space, July-September 2020

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Happy to announce the launch of a discussion series organized with Kenneth Pietrobono on redistribution. New recorded discussions and other materials posted online at EFA Project Space July to September 2020.

From the press release: EFA Project Space is pleased to virtually host REDISTRIBUTIONAn online collaborative discussion series with researchers, workers, and artists exploring the complications, contradictions, and entanglements in the escalating need and demand to redistribute. Articulated as a tool to remedy continued inequity and accumulation of wealth, this series investigates the barriers to enacting redistribution, the challenge of redistributing power, and potentials for restorative equity within redistributive acts. Hosted by Lauren van Haaften-Schick (PhD candidate, Cornell University) and Kenneth Pietrobono (artist and researcher, Uncertainty Labs), the series examines the complexity within redistribution and contributes to ongoing efforts to understand the political, social, and economic limits to equitable distribution and the pursuit of alternatives. 

 

More info on EFA’s site here

 

The Agreement of Original Transfer of Work of Art With Resale to Benefit a Charitable Organization

In 2019 Joseph del Pesco (curator at the Kadist Foundation) and I, along with lawyer Laurence Eisenstein, began working on a revised version of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement that reimagined its provision for an artist’s resale royalty as a tool for some form of charitable redistribution. 

The new contract is online here and ready to use! https://artistcontract.org/

From the Agreement introduction:

The following contract is a revision of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement created by conceptual art dealer-curator Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky in New York in 1971. The “Artist’s Contract,” or “The Projansky Agreement,” as it is known in art and legal circles respectively, is a model contract for artists to use when selling their work or transferring ownership. Its most enduringly controversial clause calls for an artist’s resale royalty. Kadist has commissioned lawyer Laurence Eisenstein to help us reimagine and update the contract’s resale royalty clause to redistribute it as a tax-deductible donation to a charitable organization designated by the artist. In this way, the wealth created by the resale of an artwork might serve a general good, as a future investment in organizations that exemplify the values of the artist. Artists need only fill out this page, click save, and then print.

Read more here!!

 

College Art Association Conference February 2020

I’m pleased to once again present research in progress at CAA, and to have the chance to steal a few days for archive sleuthing while in Chicago. Looking forward to seeing friends, colleagues, colleagues who are friends and friends who are colleagues there. 

Visit Caa Website

Panel: Market Data: Beyond Prices and Provenance (The Association for International Art Market Studies)

Thursday, February 13, 2020, 2:00-3:30pm

Paper: Subversion in the Fine Print: ‘The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’ at Auction

Abstract: Auction records are primarily associated with tracking art prices, tracing ownership history, and assessing the market’s shifting geographical loci. This information is evident in standard data fields for provenance, hammer price, sale location, and more. But auction records sometimes also include non-standard details beneath the subtly sidelined section “Other Information,” where we occasionally find another sort of ‘fine print’: notices to potential purchasers that the artist is entitled to resale royalties by law, or, by contract. The appearance of such a notice stirred controversy in 1987, when Hans Haacke’s On Social Grease was auctioned at Christie’s New York. The sale was subject to terms in the notorious The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement by conceptual art curator Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky in 1971, which grants artists 15% of collectors’ profit upon resale, among other rights. Auctioned works affected by the Contract since are listed with similar notices. This paper examines the language and aesthetics of these notifications of the Artist’s Contract in auction listings, where sometimes it appears antagonistic, and other times, defanged. These notices form a topography of artists’ resistance to secondary market speculation, and reveal a further subversive layer: While the Contract is signed between artist and collector at first sale, in subsequent sales it’s signed between seller and buyer, thereby tacitly calling upon buyers, sellers, and auction houses to honor – and self-enforce – the Contract’s greater political mission of establishing market equity for artists.