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.
Conservation Renovation & Restoration
The three cases detailed in this article all raise the same question, one which has serious legal as well as professional practice implications for commissioners, owners, curators and conservators – as well as for living artists:…
Virtual Collections: National Portrait Gallery versus Wikipedia
The digital revolution’s radical transformation of information and communications technology has enabled public and private collections throughout the world to offer instant internet access to images of countless numbers of their artworks: virtual…
New Legal Rights
Parliament gives artists two new legal rights: to earn extra cash from their work; and to exert exclusive aesthetic control over it. ‘These rights are given to all artists for their lifetime and pass to their heirs…
Moral Rights: Artists have got ’em
A vandalised painting exhibited by a gallery, a sculpture dyed black by a visitor, an artwork altered and published bearing a false signature – recent months have seen a number of these artists’ horror…
Ignorantia Lex Non Fit Defensia
Copyright in the visual arts is the inherent right of a creator over his/her artistic work to prevent other people copying that work. I received a novel and remarkable press release last month, issued by…
Online Sales
Banksy has become the target of a print fraud, it was exclusively revealed by The Art Newspaper (October 2007): ‘unauthorised works by the anonymous graffiti artist have been sold on the internet; prices for these have been illegally…
Copyright and Moral Rights: New Legislation (moral rights)
This article explains what are Moral Rights. On August 1, 1989 the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 comes into force. In March, we began a three part exploration of key changes…
Digital Archives
Archiving artists’ works and related material has been greatly facilitated in recent years by significant advances in digital technology, which has stimulated museums and galleries to consider not only digitally archiving material in their collections, but also its…
©autionary Tales: Of Hoffman
Tale One In October of last year photographer David Hoffman successfully prosecuted London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ Councillor Barrie Duffey (Liberal), for distributing a leaflet which violated Hoffman’s copyright. The leaflet is not a grand affair:…
Public Sculpture
Sculptures situated in public places can easily be photographed, filmed, or drawn without the knowledge of the sculptor, and such two dimensional reproductions might equally easily be merchandised commercially. What rights, if any, do sculptors have over their…
Common Sources
Jack Vettriano’s oil painting, Reach Out and Touch (February/June), 2003, was sold last year for around £35,000. It depicts a rear view of the artist, bespectacled and wearing a white collared shirt and black trousers with forked braces,…
Leibovitz Futures
‘One of the world’s most successful photographers essentially pawned every snap of the shutter she had made or will make until the loans are paid off’: thus reported the New York Times on February 24 2009, breaking the…
Performance Art
In 1964 Joseph Beuys gave an improvised 30 minute performance broadcast live on Germany’s second public television channel ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), which he called Marcel Duchamp’s Silence Is Overrated. The performance was not taped but Beuys allowed…
Orphan Works 1
‘Orphan works’ are copyright works that have no identifiable or traceable owner under international and national copyright laws, and are therefore allowed to be freely copied and merchandised. These sensible arrangements were developed through international copyright treaties…
Copyright Services
Picasso’s keen interest in taking care of the commercial dimension of his professional practice manifested itself relatively early in his career and extended also to the careers of his contemporaries; he contributed significantly to the establishment of one…
3D Artworks
The 1977 movie Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was the subject of a recent lengthy trial at the High Court in London, at the heart of which lay the fiendishly difficult question of what – in…