As I mentioned in an earlier post, the end of the year brings many articles and posts about year end reviews. Daniel Grant at the Huffington Post looks at the large number of art lawsuits from 2012. This includes resale rights, limited editions, due diligence, the Knoedler and many many more.
It is an interesting article and shows that art law is certainly alive and well.
Grant reports
Source: The Huffington Post
The most noteworthy gallery to be sued in the past year was Knoedler & Company, which closed its doors in November of 2011 after 165 years in operation in the face of a spate of lawsuits charging that since the mid-1990s it sold 20 (and perhaps more) fake or misidentified paintings by such artists as Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. The Knoedler Gallery acquired these paintings from a small-time Long Island art dealer, Glafira Rosales, who claimed to have gotten them from a Mexican collector she refused to identify.
If the Eggleston lawsuit asks, What does "limited edition" mean, the lawsuits against Knoedler ask, What comprises "due diligence": What do we expect of art dealers when they sell us expensive artworks by important artists? Looks as though we need the courts to decide.
The courts, in this case, the U.S. District Court of Appeals in northern California, did make one clear decision in May, striking down as unconstitutional the state's 35 year-old Resale Royalty law, which requires the payment to fine artists of five percent of the profit when their work is sold on the secondary market and either the seller resides in the state or the sale takes place in California.
The portion of the legal community that focuses on the arts (literary, performing and visual) is still small, in part because there aren't really that many disputes requiring legal counsel and also because the people most likely to be wronged are lesser-known artists without the resources to pay for lawyers. It was big money that drove the lawsuits over the most recent art season, but these cases are notable because they ask basic questions, from what is art to who decides where and how it will be sold and displayed. They are questions that in an earlier age might have been more a part of the general discourse -- there was a time when art exhibitions elicited outrage and debate! -- but are now left to the courts to decide. Perhaps, if she wants more attention, Cindy Sherman should write a legal brief.
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