Archive of Henry Lydiate‘s Artlaw column, published in Art Monthly since 1976. Have a legal question about your career? Check our Directory or send us a legal query.
Reputation: Art & Artists
Last month’s column explored the fragility of the public reputation of art business professionals in the digital age, highlighting how traditional laws of defamation are invariably unfit for the purposes of deterring or preventing social media…
Digital Drivers
Sales of contemporary art have increased exponentially since the global economic downturn around 2009. Recent professional art market research shows that post war and contemporary art sales account for roughly half the global spend on all types of…
When Collaborators Turn
Marina Abramović is being sued for breach of contract by her former artistic collaborator Ulay over works they jointly created when working and living together in Amsterdam for a dozen years: Relation Works, 1976 1988. This lawsuit…
Moral Lights
Appropriation – without a capital ‘a’ – of images by artists has been common practice throughout art history. Artists whose images are appropriated can and do use national and international copyright laws to take legal action against unlawful…
Film and Video
The Whitechapel Gallery’s current survey show ‘Electronic Superhighway 2016 1966’, is a reflection of the extent to which digital media are now being used by increasing numbers of visual artists, especially as the costs of equipment have…
Conservation
Deterioration and degradation of contemporary art increasingly concerns specialists in the field of conservation and restoration. Such experts are being asked for advice and assistance from key actors – including artists – in the art ecosystem, about work made…
Taking Care of Business
Damien Hirst’s autobiography will be published by Viking Penguin in Autumn 2015. When recently announcing the deal, the publishers promised that Hirst will ‘lay bare the modern art world’. The book will be co written with…
Suing Art Experts
Last month’s consideration of art after death suggested that artists might adopt straightforward and sensible practices to authenticate and inventorise their works, to avoid difficulty and complication after death as well as during their lifetimes. This month…
Why are Artists Poor?
Borrowing the title of Hans Abbing’s important sociological interrogation of contemporary art practice from 2007, let us consider a case in point. A young unknown artist relocated 30 odd kilometres north of his hometown to a…
Who Owns Street Art
A Banksy style rat holding a sign asking ‘Why?’ was recently stencilled on the wall outside a London shop from which the Banksy attributed mural Slave Labour had been hacked away a few weeks earlier. This…
Life After Art School
Art school education was first publicly funded in the UK during the reign of King Charles 1 in the 17th century, and developed in the 18th century through the establishment of academies of art supported by…
The Boyle Family
Mark Boyle interviewed by Henry Lydiate Henry Lydiate’s Artlaw Column appeared in the first issue of Art Monthly when he first met Mark Boyle and his family. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Artlaw and the opening…
Heath and Safety
If you have a studio the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 will apply to your use of it, as the regulations apply to all places of work, and this includes an artist’s studio. An overview…
Breaking the Rules
As an art lawyer, Warhol’s death provoked in me serious thoughts about art and money, including the rules of the marketplace. Between thought and expression Lies a lifetime. * And though the rules of the road have…
Shamrock Organisations
Gustave Courbet’s huge 20ft wide by 12ft high oil painting, The Painter’s Studio (A Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Life), 1855, represents among other things his view of the (then) new role of the artist in…
Soul Trading
The classic ‘who, where and how’ of marketing, to which Nich Pearson implicitly referred last month (Art Monthly No 95, p.9) when bemoaning the absence of vigorous professional marketing in the visual arts in recent years, inspired serious…
Commercial Dimensions
The UK's creative industries currently earn £112b a year according to statistics from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, representing a growth rate of 9% annually between 1997 and 2000 (compared to an average of 2.8% for…
Management Of Creativity 30 Years On
In October 1976 the first issue of Art Monthly carried the first Artlaw column. Have things improved, worsened, or stayed pretty much the same over the last 30 years? From Jennie Lee’s appointment as…