Category Archives: Notes

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archive Research Travel Fund

I had the immense pleasure of spending two weeks in the archives at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York researching the artist’s involvement in advocacy for artists’ rights laws, thanks to a generous grant through the Archive Research Travel Fund. I can’t recommend the opportunity and the organization enough! Thanks to all! 

 
Image: Rauschenberg at the Miami Herald, looking through photography archives for source material for Cover for Tropic, The Miami Herald (1979), published in an edition of 600,000 in Miami, December 1979. Photo: Attributed to John Doman
Source: https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/grants/art-grants/archives-research-travel-fund
 

CryptoCreative Symposium at Creative Tech Week, May 10

I’m excited to be invited to speak on artist’s contracts and resale royalties, and to learn more about blockchain at CryptoCreative at Creative Tech WeekA Symposium Exploring Blockchain’s Impact on Creativity and the Art

Creative Technology Week

4:15-5:00 Panel: Smart Contracts for Creativity: Royalties and IP. Moderator: Robert Griffitts, Masur Griffitts. With Lauren Van Haaften-Schick, Artist Contract Expert; Cynthia Gayton, Esq.

The day will cover:

  • Definition of therms like Blockchain, Tokens, DApps and SmartContracts for those new to the space
  • Exploration of what decentralized and distributed mean for the Blockchain
  • How SmartContracts Help Track Provenance, IP and Royalties for Online Content, Art and Music
  • Design, Arts and Music Startups Organizing Around Innovations in the Blockchain
  • Exploring High-Stakes Online Trading and Live Auctions of Proveably Rare Art, GIFs and JPGs
  • How Musicians and Artists are Tokenizing to Generate Revenues
  • Art Installations Using Ethereum, BitCoin and CryptoCurrency

More on the speakers and week of events here

 

Rethinking Artists’ Rights: Roundtable Series at Pioneer Works, April 18, May 15, June 18

Rethinking Artists’ Rights
Roundtable series at Pioneer Works
April 18 // May 15 // June 18 // 7-9pm
159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, NY

Senator Alphonse D'Amato (R-New York) denouncing NEA funding to Andres Serrano and other artists before congress, May 18, 1989.

Senator Alphonse D’Amato denouncing NEA funding to Andres Serrano
and other artists before congress, May 18, 1989.

Artists played a pivotal role in protests and government hearings on resale royalties, moral rights, and free speech during the 1960s-90s, but the legacy and relevance of that activism remains under-discussed. Since the destructive culture wars of thirty years ago, collaboration with law and policy makers has seemed fraught, leading us to question whether we should work with government or institutions, or build self-determined alternatives. Recent case law has produced an equally contested terrain, revealing ways in which artists’ rights issues can challenge cultural and legal norms of value, ownership, and free speech, while also demonstrating that the privilege granted to artistic expression can be manipulated for political ends. In this time of heightened political involvement, how might the art community re-engage artists’ rights as a local politics? And how do we come to terms with the use of artists and artists’ rights in the larger context of ‘culture wars’ and anti-intellectualism deployed in the political field today?

This three-part roundtable series will bring together practitioners from art and law to unpack the legacies of artists’ rights statutes and cases, and imagine new ways forward.

Organized and facilitated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick and Kenneth Pietrobono.

Wednesday April 18, 7-9pm
National Endowment for the Arts ‘decency clause’: 20 U.S.C. § 954(d)(1) (1990)
Following a series of battles over the public funding of art, new legislation mandated that the NEA only fund artworks adhering to “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” In the ensuing case NEA v. Finley (1998) the Supreme Court found that the clause was not a violation of free speech, perhaps leaving uncertainty concerning the ability of artists to contest or create the laws directly impacting them.
Guest: Svetlana Mintcheva, Director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Register here

Tuesday May 15, 7-9pm
The Visual Artists Rights Act: 17 U.S.C. § 106a (1990)
Moral rights laws protect an artists’ work from being misattributed to them, and modified or destroyed against their will, among other rights. The statute is anomalous under U.S. law for granting artists continued control over their sold works, but also relies upon a potentially constricted definition of art. Recent cases including Mass MoCA v. Büchel, and the erasure of the graffiti hub 5Pointz will be discussed, among others.
Guests: Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Artist & Art Lawyer, founder and director of the Art & Law Program, Renee Vara, founder and CEO of Vara Art advisory, and Abram Coetsee, PhD Candidate at Cornell University.
Register here

Monday June 18, 7-9pm
The American Royalties Too Act of 2015: H.R. 1881
Over 70 countries have laws granting resale royalties for artists, but no federal law exists in the U.S., and the most recent proposed legislation, H.R. 1881, died in congressional committee. The California Resale Royalties Act, Cal. Civ. Code § 986 (1976) is the exception, but a suite of court decisions in recent years have dissolved its enforceability. The status of resale royalties laws will be discussed, in addition to historic and emerging alternatives, such as artist’s contracts.
Guest: Donn Zaretsky, Partner at John Silberman Associates PC in New York, concentrating his practice in art law.
Register here

All events free and open to the public with advance registration.

 

Panel “The Rhetorical Practices of Art and Law” at the Law, Culture, and the Humanities annual conference

I had the great pleasure of presenting on a panel for the Law, Culture, and the Humanities conference held at Georgetown University Law Center March 16-17, 2018. The conference is a hub of amazing thinkers like no other! 

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The Rhetorical Practices of Art and Law

Chair: Bonneau, Sonya G. (Georgetown University Law Centre)

Lauren van Haaften-Schick, (Cornell University) “Publishing Conceptual Art: Seth Siegelaub’s Economy of Intellectual Property and Books”

Nate Harrison, (Tufts University) “Appropriation Art, Labor, and the Law: From an Aesthetics of Administration to an Administration of Aesthetics”

Sonya G. Bonneau, (Georgetown University Law Centre) “Artistic Expression: Free Speech or All Talk?”

Panel: Getting Basic: Misappropriation, Plagiarism, Fair Use, and Grey Areas

Friday February 2nd I’ll join Sue Jeong Ka, Alison Harbin, and Alia Sonora at SOHO20 as a panelist speaking about, what else, copyrights and artists contracts!

Getting Basic: Misappropriation, Plagiarism, Fair Use, and Grey Areas

all rights are not reserved 002_72dpi

Typeface: Helvetica Black (from The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and sale Agreement by Seth Siegelaub)

SOHO20 and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) NYC are pleased to present Getting Basic: Misappropriation, Plagiarism, Fair Use, and Grey Areas, a panel and discussion hosted by artist Sue Jeong Ka about the issues surrounding copyright, power, and the unfair appropriation of individuals’ work in art, pedagogical, and institutional settings.

Questions of artistic originality and authorship among teachers, students and peers have spurred constant debate in contemporary art. Such problems within institutional structures are complex when uncredited labor, and violations of artists and cultural workers’ moral rights run rampant in a competitive art world. This system perpetuates asymmetrical power relations, depriving vulnerable contributors due credit and compensation for their labor. This event is a forum for collecting insights and stories from artists, architects, curators, educators, entrepreneurs, lawyers, scholars, and workers about ethical art practice.

More here.

“(Un)Common Intent: Performance Scores as Contractual Exchange” Panel for CAA 2018

For CAA this year I’ll be presenting a paper and co-chairing a panel with John A. Tyson, who I also had the pleasure of working with for my 2017 panel “Seth Siegelaub and the Expanded Archive of Conceptual Art.” 

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“(UN)COMMON INTENT: PERFORMANCE SCORES AS CONTRACTUAL EXCHANGE”

Time: 02/22/2018: 10:30AM–12:00PM
Location: Room 501A

Chairs: Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Cornell University; John Tyson, University of Massachusetts Boston

“Determining Obligation: Contractual Relations in John Cage’s Indeterminate Scores”
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Cornell University

“Between Score and Contract: Negotiating Ed Kienholz’s “Concept Tableaux””
John Tyson, University of Massachusetts Boston

“Equivalent to Performance: Danh Võ and the Art of the Contract”
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University

Discussant: Susan Rosenberg, St. John’s University

 

“The Location of Power” Exhibition Essay on Hans Haacke for Evidentiary Realism

This spring artist/curator Paolo Cirio invited me to contribute an essay on the work of Hans Haacke for Cirio’s exhibition Evidentiary Realism at Fridman Gallery, New York, and Nome Gallery, Berlin. Documentation of the works and all invited writers’ texts are online here.

Catalog available online via NOME gallery here

Nome Gallery_Evidentiary Realism

From the exhibition site: Evidentiary Realism is a platform featuring artists engaged in Investigative, Forensic, and Documentary art practices. It aims to articulate a particular form of realism in art that portrays and reveals evidence from complex social systems, with prioritizing formal aspects of visual language and mediums.

 

Seminar for SOMA Summer August 7-10

I’m collaborating with Anthony Graves on leading a seminar for SOMA Summer in Mexico City, looking at the appropriate theme of Authority, and focusing on issues of authorship, control, and the fictional institution. 

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SOMA Summer WEEK 06 — August 07 to August 10

Monday August 07
4:00 to 7:00 pm – Seminar with Anthony Graves and Lauren Haaften-Schick
Authority: In his infamous inquiry into “What is an author?” (1969) Michel Foucault defined the “author function” as linked to the “juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” In this conception, the author’s name and signature circulates not with the purpose of promoting the free spread of ideas and texts, but rather, is symptomatic of a total system of assignation, which is capable of rendering the author visible within (and therefore vulnerable to) a juridical and institutional system. In this notion, the historical and cultural construction of the “author” operates to engender that subject’s subsumption under a system of power relations; a system self-validated or upheld by the specter of legal and institutional authority.   But might the tools and techniques of the juridical and the institutional be re-scripted towards unanticipated, even emancipatory ends, thereby performing a reversal of the “author function” and the systems of control it enacts? This seminar will consider the foundations of authority in its material supports—exemplified in the language of the document—and the artistic re-authoring of legal and institutional forms. We will proceed from Foucault’s critical framing of the author function, J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, and criticisms by Derrida, and will expand to artists’ writings and “documents” in order to consider just how and where sites and positions of authority may (or may not) be claimed.

 

“Seth Siegelaub and the Expanded Archive of Conceptual Art” at the CAA annual conference

At the CAA 2017 annual conference I had the extreme pleasure of co-chairing a panel on “Seth Siegelaub and the Expanded Archive of Conceptual Art” with fellow Siegelaub scholar Sara Martinetti. 

Papers: Retroactive Effects: Notes on the History of Conceptual Art after the Conceptualisms Annabela Tournon Zubieta, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS); Contract as Form and Concept: The Siegelaub-Projansky Agreement in Art and Legal Histories Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Cornell University; Collecting Textiles, Documenting Texts: Seth Siegelaub’s Endeavors after Art John A. Tyson, National Gallery of Art; Seth Siegelaub, Beyond Conceptual Art: Curating “Paperwork” at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Sara Martinetti, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Discussant: Andrew Cappetta, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester