On Hold

Wired News reports that the House won't be taking any action on the orphan works bill until after the Nov. elections. Apparently they've got more important business to deal with.

Renoir Recovered

From this morning's New York Times: "Italian police have recovered a Renoir painting that was stolen from a private collection 33 years ago .... Following a tip from an art critic, Vittorio Sgarbi, who was enlisted to evaluate the work by a gallery owner ..., the police arrested the gallery owner and two other suspects. The oil painting ..., which is valued at $730,000, was stolen from a family in Milan in 1975. It was recovered along with a forgery of a Manet work, which Mr. Sgarbi had also been asked to appraise."

"Britain's art collections are taking a beating"

Also via David Nishimura, the Guardian reports:

"Details released under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Gallery, the Tate and the V&A, reveal that dozens of works have been dented, scratched, dropped and vandalised over the past five years. The culprits are not only malicious or clumsy visitors, but also partygoers, staff and removal men."

"Amateurs, beware"

David Nishimura on the Robert Mardirosian conviction: "With top-rank artworks, thieves often find out that it's not easy to turn them into cash. The only crooks who seem to turn a consistent profit are those who go for a quick ransom payment -- but I suspect that the only ones who manage to pull it off are those who have some experience in the field."

Orphan Works Act Update (UPDATED)

It's passed in the Senate. Now on to the House, which, as Photo District News points out, has been considering a slightly different version.

UPDATE: The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists "slams" the Senate: "It seems that Congress is using the fiscal crisis as cover to pass this law, which will make it easier for copyright infringers to steal our work."

Genuine Faker

The U.K. Independent has the latest on famous forger John Myatt, mentioned earlier here and here (and soon to be the subject of a major motion picture). He currently has a show at Harrods in London.

Embezzlement Suit

Fruitlands Museum is suing its former deputy director and chief financial officer (and three of her children) for an alleged embezzlement scheme:

"The suit alleges that Kempton and her children obtained credit cards in the museum's name and made personal purchases. It also alleges that Kempton used museum funds to pay for personal credit cards; violated her lease by not paying monthly rent for a museum-owned cottage; used Fruitlands funds to pay for utilities at the cottage; and diverted museum funds to her children."

Boston Globe story here. More here from the Harvard Post. Boston criminal lawyer Sam Goldberg hopes the family has "retained experienced counsel to prepare for the onslaught of the filed civil complaint [by the museum] as well as the almost-surely upcoming criminal indictments."

For previous installments of museum financial officer embezzlement, see here and here.

Le Rêve on View

The Picasso painting that Steve Wynn put his elbow through in 2006 will be publicly exhibited for the first time since the accident in a show opening Oct. 15 at Acquavella Galleries in New York. More here from Bloomberg's Lindsay Pollock. Wynn ended up suing Lloyd's of London over the proper valuation of the loss (he claimed it was $54 million). The case was promptly settled.

"Just as when you sell a painting at Sotheby's, nobody knows what it's worth until the auction is over"

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

"Too far, and not far enough"

Mark Dery on the orphan works bill:

"As written, the OWA won’t solve anything. With its impossibly vague talk of 'reasonable compensation' and 'diligent' searches, its fundamentalist faith in the private sector (commercial registries) and technological quick-fixes (image-search technologies), the OWA is, as Lessig argued on his blog, a bill that both 'goes too far, and not far enough.' Too far because the weasel phrase 'reasonably diligent search' will provide legal cover for unwitting—as well as willful—infringers of copyrighted works that have washed up on the web without identifying information, yet are not listed in commercial registries. Not far enough because the line the OWA draws in the sand between a good-faith effort to determine the copyright status of a putatively orphaned work and intentional infringement is, in Lessig’s wonderfully pungent phrase, 'just mush.'"

"The easy part is stealing it; the hard part is selling it"

"Living legend" FBI art-squad agent Robert Wittman retired last week. Stories here and here. Earlier post here.

Next chapter: he's going to work for the Fox Rothschild law firm, to "assist security directors in museums, galleries and auction houses to protect their collections and represent collectors." Says Wittman: "There's a huge exploding market ripe with fraud and forgery out there."

Catching Up

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento points to a couple of stories I missed last week.

One:

"Thieves have stolen an engraving by Spanish master Francisco de Goya from a temporary exhibition in Colombia. The engraving ... was one of 80 by the Spanish artist on loan from the Goya Fuendetodos Cultural Corporation of Zaragoza, Spain."

And two:

"A Midtown gallery from which dozens of photographs of Salvador Dali were stolen didn't do enough to safeguard the precious works, their owners charged in a lawsuit filed yesterday. The heirs of famed photographer Philippe Halsman, who frequently collaborated with the Spanish surrealist, want the Howard Greenberg Gallery to pay them $684,000 for the lost photos, plus damages. They sold several photos through the gallery beginning in 2004, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. When they asked the gallery to return all of the unsold works ... the owner told them they were stolen, according to the complaint."

"The greatest and most important earthwork in the world was potentially threatened by a corporation that wanted to make a buck"

It's Spiral Jetty week over at Tyler Green's place. From today's opener: "The question is: Is Spiral Jetty threatened by future commercial development? And are arts organizations, most of which have little or no experience in dealing with the confluence of interests and entities involved in preserving an artwork in the landscape, using all available and appropriate measures to save the Jetty?"

I mentioned this story (and my client, the artist Nancy Holt) earlier here.

"Please know that you need to remove our logo and the NFL logo from all images"

The Washington Post reports on the latest squabble involving sports artists and trademark rights. At her 43(B)log, Rebecca Tushnet has a pithy summary: "painter paints a picture of Redskins player in uniform; wishes to sell painting; now there’s a dispute over the presence of Redskins [trade]marks in the painting."

Tushnet is also quoted within the article: "The idea in general is that we want artists to be able to portray the world as they see it, and we live in a heavily branded world."

She mentions the Tiger Woods case. There is also the University of Alabama's ongoing lawsuit against sports artist Daniel Moore. Both cases are discussed here.

Nelson-Atkins-Lawsuit

The Kansas City Star: "The Kansas City Council has interfered with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s ability to use its own real estate, according to a new lawsuit filed in federal court. The lawsuit, which the gallery’s foundation and trustees filed Wednesday, asked a judge to stop the city from enforcing an ordinance the council passed this summer that barred the museum from putting offices on property it owns near the gallery."

"These works belong, properly, in the place where the largest number of people can enjoy and learn from them"

An interesting student Note in the Notre Dame Law Review on fractional gifts of art (and I don't say that merely because it credits me with giving a name -- the "mismatch problem" -- to the most serious problem with the 2006 legislation on the subject).

The technical corrections enacted earlier this year make it a little out of date, but still worth a read.

Savage Suit

From the New York Post: "A prominent art dealer is suing the makers of a movie that portrays him having incestuous three-way sex with an ex-girlfriend and the son who murdered her."

The movie is "Savage Grace," starring Julianne Moore. The art dealer is Sam Green.

"Morganelli said that he is not looking to target any specific voting demographic by making this effort a part of his agenda"

The Temple News has more on Democratic candidate John Morganelli, who has made the Barnes battle an issue in the Pennsylvania attorney general election. "If he becomes attorney general, Morganelli would like the case reopened so that a judge can make a decision based on 'more balanced evidence.' He said certain proposals were overlooked, including one by Montgomery County commissioners to offer $150 million to keep the Barnes in its current location." I don't recall any $150 million offer, but there was this.

Recovery

Dutch detectives have recovered five 17th-century paintings that were stolen from the Frans Hals Museum in 2002. "The Golden Age works, worth millions of dollars, were found after an 18-month investigation by Dutch police who used undercover agents to crack the case and worked closely with Britain's Serious and Organized Crime Agency." Three men are "being held on suspicion of receiving the stolen paintings," and "police said they seized cars, including a Ferrari and a Range Rover, at one of the houses along with handguns, body armor, designer watches, drugs and an undisclosed amount of cash."

"Anyone with a touch of larceny in his heart cannot but thrill to hear of such feats of expert-foxing legerdemain"

Terry Teachout on Jonathan Lopez’s “The Man Who Made Vermeer: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren.”

Here is another review, from the New York Sun: "In the case of art fraud, however, whatever admiration we feel for the skill of a forger who passes off a modern fake as a venerable Old Master and makes fools of the experts is mixed with a sharp sense of betrayal. A painting that was once proclaimed a masterpiece suddenly loses its beauty when shown up as a forgery. How were we so thoroughly hoodwinked? What we thought was a Vermeer or a Frans Hals and flocked to see turns out overnight to be nothing but kitsch. And yet, isn't it the same painting, fake or not? ... [A] forged artwork makes us question our very eyes."