"If the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate."

"That today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court."

The NYT's Randy Kennedy on Prince-Cariou, fair use, and appropriation.

"So it has come to this, eh?"

The Art Market Monitor:  Dealer Attacks Giacometti Foundation Director Over Fakes.

"What else, in times like these, might that kind of money be used for?"

Sebastian Smee feels a little queasy about the Peabody Essex Museum's recent announcement that it raised $550 million to "fund a massive expansion ...and to build up its endowment."

"Crystal Bridges is poised to make a genuine cultural contribution, and possibly to become a place of pilgrimage for art lovers from around the world"

Roberta Smith weighs in.

"A moral tragedy? Good lord."

More responses to Jeffrey Goldberg's broadside against Crystal Bridges.  Clive Crook says the two columns are "terrible," "among the angriest attacks on [Wal-Mart] I can recall reading, which is saying something. Coming from a writer I think of as a fount of common sense they shocked me."  And Michael Kinsley concludes:  "Walton could have put her museum in New York, where this sort of thing belongs. Most of us don’t get to Bentonville as often as we’d like. Or she could have decided not to build it at all, for fear that journalists would start comparing her to Marie Antoinette. Would that have been better?"

On Empty Spaces

Watkins College of Art professor Tom Williams is worried that "if people don’t step forward to defend [the Stieglitz] collection (and the university that houses it), and this deal goes ahead, it will disappear from this city for years at a time. These remarkable works will not be here for local schoolchildren and college students, and they will not be available to the larger Nashville community. Their habitual absence will leave an empty space in the culture of this city that may never again be filled."

"This deal," however, provides, that the collection will be there for local schoolchildren and college students for at least two out of every four years.  The rest of the time it will be available to the larger Bentonville community and its local schoolchildren and college students, filling an otherwise empty space in the culture of that city.

"The 2d Circuit's forthcoming decision in Cariou likely will be a significant landmark in the debate over appropriation art."

Says Paul Weiss's Lew Clayton.

"Artist Resale Royalties: Do They Help or Hurt?"

Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman at the Freakonomics blog.  Related post here.

"If the scheme is approved ..., an estimated 300,000 artists are due to receive funding."

EU proposes the world's largest ever cultural funding program.

"Goldberg is really attacking the foundation on which almost all American art museums are built" (UPDATED)

Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg takes another whack at Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum (previous whack discussed here).  Judith Dobrzynski is not amused.

UPDATE:  Lee Rosenbaum says "Goldberg has gone off the deep end."

"Is droit de suite really in the artists’ favor?"

Abigail Esman of Forbes has her doubts.

"Four Things to Know About the Nutty New Droit de Suite Bill Introduced in Congress Last Week"

From Artinfo's Shane Ferro.  Related thoughts from Lee Rosenbaum here.

"The theft of public sculpture has got to stop." (UPDATED)

Tom Flynn has had quite enough.

UPDATE:  Art Theft Central's Mark Durney weighs in.

"It's not a good plan to redress one perceived inequity by creating another."

Lee Rosenbaum, who says she has been espousing the cause of artists' resale royalties "since the '70s," is nevertheless not a fan of the recently introduced bill.

"The museum has hired a .. consultant ... to sell its permanent art collection. Some items have sold, and the proceeds were used to pay remaining creditors."

A reminder of what happens when we let them fail.

The end of the line for the Fayetteville Museum of Art. [via]

More on Artists' Copyright Claims

From Walter Robinson.

"Allowing museums to share in art royalties serves a double purpose, proponents of the federal bill said."

"As a matter of practical politics, it figures to put a potentially powerful constituency in their corner – just as excusing art dealers and individual collectors from paying royalties stands to preempt a good deal of potential opposition."

"Perez, a museum trustee, shifted the focus away from art -- from what matters -- to himself, putting patron above artist, money above art."

Here is an example of the Miami Art Museum's naming proposal drawing sharp criticism when other public institutions have been re-named with hardly a ripple of concern.

Are yoga poses copyrightable?

The Copyright Office says no.

"Visual artists deserve a share in the sales and resales of their creative works." (UPDATED)

The NYT's Patricia Cohen reports that resale royalty legislation has just been introduced at the national level:  the proposal is to "set aside 7 percent of the price of artworks that are resold for more than $10,000 at auction houses," half of which would go to the artist and "the other half to nonprofit art museums."

Some related posts here, here, and here.

UPDATE:  More from Helen Stoilas in The Art Newspaper:  "The legislation, as it stands, would only apply to the resale of works at public auction houses 'with more than $25 million in sales in the prior year'. Auction houses that operate only online would be excluded, as would private galleries."