Artist Resale Rights

The Antiques Trade Gazette has a good article on artist retail rights laws, as legislated in the UK.  The article is based upon a just updated legal guide on the subject by Simon Stokes.  It poses some very good questions, but also shows that good intentions are not without consequence.

The ATG reports

There are legal issues, too, which add uncertainty. For example, how does the law apply to international sales (the Directive doesn't help here)? What about artist/craftsman-designed furniture, jewellery and craft works - are these covered? Who has the right to request information and collect ARR if the artist or their estate have not mandated a collecting society, now there are two main ARR collecting societies in the UK: DACS and ACS?

In the UK artists can't collect ARR themselves; they must do so through a collecting society.

It is not easy to obtain precise data on the overall impact of ARR on the UK art market. Economic research tends just to use more readily available auction house data, so combining this with dealer data to obtain an overall picture is difficult, but the annual royalties based on auction house data are now likely to exceed £10m. However, we need auction house and dealer data combined to gain a clearer picture of what they actually are. Hopefully the two main UK collecting societies, ACS and DACS, will co-operate to provide this information in due course.

Previous studies indicate that the majority of the money collected goes to successful living artists and artists' estates. Again it is hoped that in due course both collecting societies will co-operate to publish readily comprehensible data on these payments, the better to inform the policy debate.

What this data does suggest, however, is that ARR is only likely to generate very modest sums for younger, less-established artists. If the government were serious about promoting artistic creation, targeted spending of similar amounts would surely yield better fruit and avoid all the downsides of ARR from an art market perspective.

So ARR has good intentions behind it, but it is a bad law. If it can't be abolished in the short term its worst effects could at least be ameliorated by raising the threshold in the UK at which it applies from €1000 to €3000. This is permitted under the EU Directive and is something that many in the art market are campaigning for.

Meanwhile, the UK Government could get off the fence and provide some sensible guidance to the art market on a number of contested areas and also be seen to be more supportive of art market concerns.

Source: The Antiques Trade Gazette