Showing items tagged "Contracts"
Freedom and Creativity
2024 started with publication of a seminal judicial decision confirming that UK copyright law’s originality test – for creating a copyright protected new artwork – requires the expression of personal creativity by the author; and that this…
Briefs and contracts for public art commissions
A commission will lead to a contract for an artist, to create something to a specified brief. That brief is set by the commissioner and can be very loose or very specific. This…
Artists fees
The fee you can charge for your time depends on how long you have worked professionally and the job you are doing There are number of online fee calculators if you are looking for a quick idea of…
Terms and Conditions
The social network revolution of the past two decades of digital and technological innovation and exponential growth has been embraced by artists to transform their communications with each other and their viewing audiences. But few of us…
Secondary Sales Risks
Caveat emptor is usually translated as ‘let the buyer beware’. Its common use in law and business connotes a doctrine that still operates today, especially in the increasingly lucrative market for secondary sales of contemporary art: caveat…
Continuing Silence
Many aspects of the art business world attract criticism or attack for being slippery and opaque, none more so than in the realm of sales transactions where privacy and discretion are paramount. First sales of artwork directly by…
Dealing Differently
In 1976 this column looked at the case of a London based artist who sent work to a New York gallery for exhibition and sale in the US: the works were sold and the gallery sent the artist…
Doing a Deal: Part 1
Selling work is the primary source of income for most commercially successful artists, and is the strongest aspiration of most of those for whom a market place is not established. It is no surprise that…
Banking on Trust
‘Men keep their agreements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them’. This ancient saying by Solon, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, still resonates today in the arena of deal making…
Permission to Sell
Contemporary art sales are attracting increasing media interest beyond the usual art industry suspects, particularly from financial journals and commentators. There is a significant boom in both the number of sales and of the prices of works…
Material Ephemerality
Works made from short life materials used by modern and contemporary artists increasingly pose problems and challenges for those who handle or possess works: collectors, estates and foundations, conservators and restorers, curators and consignees, storers and transporters; and…
Consignment: Trust
The term commonly used to describe the contractual relationship between artists supplying their works to galleries for exhibition and possible sale is ‘consignment’. In business and legal terms, consignment does not mean selling work to a gallery, rather…
Creative Collaborators: Authors or Assistants?
In this post digital age increasing numbers of artists collaborate to create non traditional works of time based or mixed media, for which a significant global market has developed and is advancing. For art market…
Commissioning Contemporary Art
There is a real shortage of published material that authoritatively and comprehensively covers the complex and extensive challenges of commissioning new artworks: conceptual, cultural, ethical, managerial, financial and legal. A new book, Commissioning Contemporary Art: a handbook…
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…
Authentication Revisited
Authenticity certificates were explored in last month’s column (Art Monthly 355). This month we revisit the subject in the light of further authentication disputes and debates. Art Fairs have vastly increased in number over the past ten years…
Authenticity Certificates
Public and private collectors and art market professionals have started to request certificates of authenticity to accompany the transfer of ownership of works. What are they, how are they used, who provides them and what is their legal…
Artwork Liabilities
The marked deterioration of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 – the tiger shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde – was the subject of a prescient article by contemporary art…