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.
40 Years of Collecting
During 2024, the UK’s Design and Artists Copyright Society, DACS, celebrates forty years of operations. DACS is a not for profit share rights management organisation that champions, protects and manages the intellectual property rights of visual…
To Have and Not To Hold
In November 2023 art market media focused on an original street artwork attributed to Banksy, and particularly on doubts cast over the legality of the work’s fractionalisation scheme, its true authorship and provenance of…
The Emperor’s New Code
‘NFT artists and collectors and traders take care,’ was last month’s envoi concluding a selected survey of the current state of the art NFT landscape. Key emerging legal issues include copyright infringement, stealing then minting and…
Get Minted
2021 saw NFTs flooding into the contemporary art ecosystem; but will 2022 see their arrival as a welcome cornucopia of plenty or an unwanted pandora’s box of unforeseen pestilence? A selected survey of the current NFT landscape, keeping…
Exhibition Relief Funding
Museums and Galleries Exhibition Tax Relief (MEGTR) came temporarily into UK law to give financial support for mounting and/or touring new public facing exhibitions in the five years from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2022, after…
Laundering
On 10 January 2020 new anti money laundering laws came into force in the UK that have wide ranging, game changing and undoubtedly controversial implications for the art market. The Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Amendment) Regulations 2019 are…
Tariff-Free Art Trade
On Friday 18 October 2019, while the UK House of Commons was preparing to hold the next day’s ‘Super Saturday’ sitting to decide whether to accept the revised UK/EU withdrawal agreement and political declaration that had been…
Love & Money
There has been an unprecedented amount of media coverage of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon (2006) shredding incident since it took place at Sotheby’s London’s evening sale of contemporary art on 5 October 2018. But none of this…
Art? Pension? Trust?
Summer time is the silly season when most journalists and politicians take long vacations and news media are filled with stories that are trivial or nonsensical. During the past few months an art news story has emerged…
Artists’ right to unemployment benefit
At a time of mass unemployment and world wide recession, how does the unemployed artist fare in the welfare state? Will unemployment or supplementary benefits be paid? Does the state have a duty to meet…
Dire Straits: in the gallery
Although great strength and power can be drawn from legal information and knowledge, the processes of applying and using the law are often regarded as too cumbersome, complex and costly to be of any real…
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…
Do you any up to date information regarding VAT treatment on commission owed to individual non-VAT registered artists from galleries that may or may not be VAT registered themselves?
The legal and business situation discussed in the 1979 article posted…
Authenticity Certificates Value
What is the essence of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing? What makes these works – which famously exist as a series of instructions, executable by anyone who owns them – authentic LeWitts and not just some lines…
Sotheby’s and Christie’s
The new year ushered in several important judicial decisions dealing with artlaw matters, including the Bacon Estate; the Sotheby’s and Christie’s so called ‘price fixing’ case; payments to artists of royalty fees by UK Universities; and Gilbert…
‘She’s nobody’s child; the law can’t touch her at all’
It’s dip. Show time again: a time for looking back over the past years work and exhibiting it for public view; a time also for looking forward to taking the…
VAT minus Zero – no limit
VAT is a pain in the arts. My two recent columns on the subject – Vexing Art Toll? (AM No 24) and VAT Revisited (AM No 29) – have aroused so much interest and…
Dealing in Fakes
Since the criminal prosecution of the late and celebrated Tom Keating in the 80s, the UK has not experienced serious allegations of sales of forged or counterfeit artworks although there was in recent years an allegation made…