"I don’t think anyone should get tangled up with the IRS if they don’t have to, for one. You get mauled."

Hannah Cole interviews Susan Crile about her Tax Court victory.

"Loved by some and loathed by others, the Legs quickly became an iconic local landmark and the subject of a protracted legal dispute, beginning in 2008 and continuing today."

Adelaide Dunn (Advanced Topics in Art Law Class of 2016) reviews a documentary film about a zoning controversy over a Larry Rivers sculpture in the Hamptons.

"A New York art gallery owner was ordered ... to pay $500 for every day she continues to ignore inquiries by Joseph Statkun ..." (UPDATED)

". . . a contemporary artist who won a default judgment on claims the gallery cropped one of his paintings without permission."

UPDATE:  Judgment paid in full.

Disavowal

There's been some discussion of a recent Southern District decision dismissing a breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit against an art advisor having to do with another "disavowed" Cady Noland work.  See, for example, The Art Market Monitor here ("Did Cady Noland Case Clarify Role of Art Advisors?").  I think the facts/posture of the case were too weird to draw any general conclusions from it.  Basically, a collector purchased a Noland work from a gallery with a rescission clause providing for a refund if she disavowed the work.  Which she did.  The gallery returned part of the purchase price, but not all.  The art advisor's role in the transaction was unclear:  "despite the suggestion in plaintiff's briefing that [the collector] 'retained' and 'paid' [the advisor], ... the Amended Complaint nowhere alleges as much."  And it also wasn't clear to the Judge what the advisor was supposed to have done wrong.  The inclusion of the rescission clause "affirmatively benefited" the collector; the problem was just that the gallery failed to pay back the money as agreed.  You get the sense from reading the decision that the Court felt like the collector's real beef was with the gallery -- who for some reason has not been served.  All in all a pretty strange case and not one that I think will provide much guidance going forward.

Does California's new "autograph law" apply to works of art?

Sheppard Mullin says it might.

"After years of litigation, we have gotten rid of all of her claims and we are entitled to go forward with ours."

The New York Times:  Case Against Robert Motherwell’s Foundation Is Dismissed.

This one too has been long-running.  Background, from 2009, here.

"The outlook for New York’s largest art museums is a little unsettling."

The always-interesting Adrian Ellis on how things might look for museums over the next four years:  "A Trump presidency is anxiety-inducing not because of any direct financial impact, but because of its potential impact on the world economy, and therefore on New York philanthropy and tourism. Perhaps more significantly, a culture war between scapegoated elite liberal and humanities institutions and a populist presidency seems likely. This climate may in turn affect both their overall appeal to the narrowing band of philanthropists and put at risk the fiscal privileges they enjoy under section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code."

"In a more ethical world, to spend tens of millions of dollars on works of art would be status-lowering, not status-enhancing."

Dwight Garner's NYT review of Peter Singer's new essay collection led me to this 2014 piece, where he (Singer) asks, "In a world in which more than six million children die each year because they lack safe drinking water or mosquito nets, or because they have not been immunized against measles, couldn’t you find something better to do with your money?"

The world's biggest art gallery

Bloomberg had a story recently on Park West Gallery, which "sells pictures and sculptures at thousands of live auctions held on more than 100 [cruise] ships each year" and "has had annual sales as high as $400 million and counted more than 2 million customers."

The controversy around this has been going on for years, and Tyler Cowen had some simple advice here.

"We now have so much faith in the legal system."

After Knoedler Suit, a Passion Undimmed.

"However, there may be a different group of artists who deserve their own separate pantheon—those who have made judicial, rather than art, history—for expanding artistic freedom and enabling other artists to create work without fear of prosecution."

Daniel Grant in The Observer:  Freedom of Expression? Fair Use? Thank These Artists You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.

Artist Pension Trust News

It's merging with MutualArt.com.  The Art Market Monitor calls it "one of the more curious announcements in the art world" and says:

"What the combined companies can do together that they could not do apart is not readily apparent. Nor is there an obvious business model for either company as a separate entity or combined."

Background on Artist Pension Trust here.

Tyler Cowen on How Trump Should Support the Arts

The ground rules:  "I applied several standards to my recommendations. First, they must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, they should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, they should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the U.S., and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes."

The recommendations:

1.  End the transfer of 40% of the NEA budget to state arts councils; and
2.  Restore NEA funding for individual artists.

I stole that pithy summary from Michael Rushton, who adds:  "The two recommendations are driven by a common goal: help fund more interesting, innovative art. Transfers to state arts councils don’t do much for that goal, since they are driven by local politics and the need to serve constituencies on building projects and established arts organizations. Even at the federal level, grants to composers and artists have a chance of doing more to generate interesting art than traditional grants to orchestras and museums."  (His conclusion:  "Of Cowen’s recommendations, I am solidly behind (2), on the fence on (1). But at least he is trying to suggest an end for arts policy, which in turn suggests ways of criticizing alternative means to those ends and suggesting better ones. More like this, please.")

Jamie Martin to Sotheby's

"The scientist James Martin — who for 20 years conducted art fraud investigations for the F.B.I. and played a central role in significant forgery investigations — will join Sotheby’s this week after the acquisition of his firm, Orion Analytical."

"Lowe proclaims that his workshop seeks to 'redefine the relationship between the original and the copy.'"

There was a really interesting piece in last week's New Yorker on "The Factory of Fakes" -- Adam Lowe's 3D reproduction project, Factum.  A taste:

"Factum made its reputation in 2007, with a replica of Paolo Veronese’s monumental painting 'The Wedding at Cana,' which Napoleon presented to a new museum, the Louvre, after ripping it off the wall of a refectory in Venice in 1797. The painting’s place in the refectory, which was designed by Palladio, had never been filled; Lowe installed his copy in the exact spot. Factum’s noninvasive protocol, in which their scanner’s lasers captured every whorled brushstroke without touching the canvas, was in stark contrast to the Louvre’s restoration of the painting, in the nineteen-nineties, during which it accidentally fell onto some scaffolding and was gored in five places. ... When Italians witnessed the unveiling of the Veronese replica, in the creamily lit space where the artist intended his masterpiece to be seen, many of them wept. Bruno Latour, the French theorist, championed the 'Cana' project, and he and Lowe later wrote an essay about it, in which they referred to a 'migration of the aura' from original to copy."