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.
Supplementary Benefit
Supplementary benefit is for those whose resources are insufficient to meet their requirements. Last month we looked at artists’ entitlement to unemployment benefit and their duty to make National Insurance contributions; now we must consider artists’ rights to…
Down in the Flood
Well, it’s sugar for sugar And salt for salt, If you go down in the flood, It’s gonna be your own fault. * Or is it? The Conditions of Entry said: ‘Works submitted for consideration are…
Taxation of Prizes and Grants
Booker, Whitbread, Turner, John Moores – are the winners of those prizes liable to pay income tax? What about other minor awards and prizes given by public and private donors? What about competitions,’buying time’ awards,…
Artists’ Selling Power
The film and entertainment industries exercise strong bargaining power over non negotiating artists, or ‘hired hands’, whose marketability remains unproven and relatively low – the powerless majority. However they have had to learn to accept the bargaining…
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…
Damage to Work
Damage to work can be a real problem, particularly when it’s discovered during a show. Although artists and galleries tend to rely on insurance companies to pay for restoration costs, there have been an increasing number of…
The Momart Fire
At 3.40am on Monday May 24 2004 fire fighters received the alarm call, and the blaze at one of Momart’s warehouses lasted five days. Media coverage was extensive and worldwide, for what was a devastating single act…
VAT revisited
Since the Chancellor of the Exchequer doubled the VAT rate to fifteen percent, many artists, administrators and gallery proprietors have raised queries about the tax. Most problems have arisen through a lack of knowledge or from a misunderstanding…
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
‘The fine artist came to seem a near miraculous creator of value, transmuting relatively inexpensive materials into fabulously expensive commodities.’ Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick’s comment on the development of today’s art market place, in…
‘One for you, nineteen for me’
George Harrison's pre decimalisation crie de coeur is everyone's concern, particularly at this time of the year and especially in the arts when organisations and individuals are busy making up and presenting, accounts and…
Dear Worried Brown Eyes
This month, I have chosen some of the most prevalent artlaw queries to deal with, in the hope that a wider readership will benefit from the answers given. Social Security and Grants “I wonder if you…
Flavin’s Fittings
In 1928 a US Customs Court in New York ruled that Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space, 1923, was a work of art, not an ‘article of utility’, which US Customs had decided it was. US photographer Edward Steichen…
Loaner Beware
This is a very unusual step for any artist to take in the UK. How have these circumstances arisen, what is the likely outcome, and what lessons can be learned by artists, collectors and galleries? The case of…