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.
Tattoo You
‘Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ’ is an old music business saying, which perhaps applies to legal responses in recent times to the rise in popularity of body art, tattooing in particular. In March 2020 landmark court…
Death of a Gallery
Blain|Southern’s sudden closure of its three gallery operations at London, Berlin and New York in February 2020 shocked the contemporary art world (Artnotes AM434). Apart from inevitable questions raised by Ernest Hemingway’s aperçu in The Sun…
Being An Artist’s Lawyer
In April 2020 a unique event will take place in Los Angeles at Southwestern Law School’s Donald E Biederman Entertainment and Media Law Institute. As part of the Institute’s programme of Continuing Legal Education for California…
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…
Legal Drivers
Banksy began his practice as a freehand street graffiti artist, subsequently using stencils to facilitate the swifter execution of work – and thus avoidance of detection and arrest for criminal damage or trespass to other people’s property. He…
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…
Collecting Performance Art
A unique art fair exclusively showcasing performance art was held for 72 hours in September 2019 during the Brussels Gallery Weekend. Organised and curated by A Performance Affair (APA), a recently established not for profit share entity,…
Sale or Resale?
When is a sale a resale? The distinction and difference can be significant in the context of artists’ legal right to receive royalty payments as percentages of the price paid when their works are resold in the…
Legacy
There has been significant recent growth in representation by art market professionals of the estates of artists who died in recent times, and such activity is fast becoming an established business specialism within the contemporary art ecosystem. Agents and…
Ownership
When is a ‘work’ completed? Is it when the artist releases it for public viewing, and/or only if released for sale? What is the status of a work an artist (or a deceased artist’s estate) disowns after its release?…
Afterlife of Photographs
On 16 May 2019 the fifth edition of the international photography fair, Photo London, opens at Somerset House. 100 or so specialist galleries from around the world will exhibit for sale photographic works by over 400 artists…
Digital Single Market
On 13 February 2019 in Strasbourg the EU agreed to introduce new copyright rules to create a fair, transparent and predictable business environment for users of online platforms. Key features of these rules include new exceptions to…
Authentication
Works by African American artists have recently been achieving unprecedented interest in both museum and art market worlds, possibly stimulated by the critical success of Tate Modern’s 2017 show ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black…
Living Legacies
Two interesting new tools have recently been published to help artists plan their legacies. In October 2018 the UK’s Art360 Foundation launched a free app designed ‘to make archiving and cultural preservation skills available to all’, and the…
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…
Scarcity
On 3 September, the United Arab Emirates’ Department of Culture and Tourism announced the ‘postponement of the unveiling of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi’, and promised that ‘more details will be announced soon’. No details have yet been given…
Style, Content and Plagiarism
‘Cultural appropriation’, ‘unethical borrowing’, ‘plagiarism’ and ‘rip off’ are recent headline grabbing media comments criticising a photoshoot of Rihanna published in Vogue Paris in December 2017. In July 2018, Twitter user STEVE JXSEPH @STEVEJXSEPH posted on…
Blockchain
It is a decade since the conceptual invention of ‘block chain’ technology, which envisaged the creation of a permanent and continuous digital list of records (blocks) of transactions linked (chained) using encoded cryptography to prevent modification of data. Implemented…