"Because the art industry is largely unregulated, it is particularly important to hold accountable those who fraudulently handle works of art entrusted to them."

Another Salander-related conviction.

Only Wrong When Brandeis Does It

The Musée Picasso has earned €16m from loans of work.

I wonder what the hall monitors will say.

Gallery Sued

Courthouse News Service reports that artist Dana Melamed has sued Priska C. Juschka Fine Art.  She claims they owe her more than $68,000 from works sold, they gave discounts without her permission, and are refusing to return works worth $400,000.  She also asks for $1 million in punitive damages.

Paddy Johnson says "certainly, $1 million in punitive damages seems excessive. Then again, so does under-representing the amount a work sold for and still failing to pay the amount owed."

Speaking of Warhol . . .

Stolen Mick Jagger print recovered.  Story here.

Another Warhol Authentication Suit

Josh Baer reports that "Addison Thompson has sued the Andy Warhol Foundation and Authentication Board and Museum alleging, 'fraudulent concealment and violations of the Sherman and Donnelly Acts arising from defendants engaging in a conspiracy to monopolize the market for the authentication, offering and sale of artwork by Andy Warhol.'"  Presumably, it's about this.  Says Josh:  "Having seen the Joe Simon case results this one probably won't go Thompson's way either."

More on the Gauguin Attack

The Gauguin attacked at the National Gallery last week "sustained no damage."

The attacker also explained why she attacked the painting:  "I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosex­ual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you."

A conversation with Cariou's lawyer

April 20th at VLA.  Details here.

"Screaming 'This is evil,' a woman tried to pull Gauguin’s 'Two Tahitian Women' from a gallery wall Friday"

A painting is attacked at the National Gallery.

Get Artelligent

One more reminder about this interesting-sounding event:  Understanding Art as an Asset.

The Richard Prince Deposition Book

Or, by its full title:   Canal Zone Richard Prince YES RASTA: Selected Court Documents from Cariou v. Prince et al, including Excerpts from The Videotaped Deposition of Richard Prince, The Affidavit of Richard Prince, Competing Memoranda of Law in Support of Summary Judgment, Exhibits Pertaining to Paintings and Collages of Richard Prince and the Use of Reproductions of Patrick Cariou's YES RASTA Photographs Therein, and The Summary Ass Whooping Dealt to Richard Prince by the Hon. Judge Deborah A. Batts, as compiled by Greg Allen for greg.org in March 2011.

You can order your copy here.

"To say that Cariou’s work was used as 'raw material' is not to demean the work; it is simply a factual description of how the photographs were used."

Joy Garnett on the Richard Prince decision.

Important New AAMD Policy on Deaccessioning

The AAMD announced a major change to its deaccessioning policy today.  From now on, sales on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are prohibited; sales on Tuesdays and Thursdays are allowed.

A spokesman for the AAMD said it was important to prevent sales on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because once an object falls under the aegis of a museum, it is held in the public trust, to be accessible to present and future generations.

He added that, if such sales are allowed, somebody will say, Why should I give this to you? What guarantee do I have that you're not going to sell this tomorrow?

It's just a very, very, very, very, very, very core principle that museums conserve their works in trust for the community.

When asked why the same considerations don't apply to sales on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the spokesman said, "Those sales are different."

When asked how they are different, the spokesman replied, "Shut up. How would you like to be sanctioned?"

For more on this breaking story, see here.

Barnes News

The hearing in the Barnes case yesterday seems like it was a non-event:  the Judge set a briefing schedule; the Barnes and the Attorney General have until mid-April, then the Friends have until the beginning of May to respond.  Stephan Salisbury has a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He also reports that yet another petition opposing the move was filed this week, this one by Richard Ralph Feudale, a lawyer and the author of Barnes Rune 2012 (Decoding the Mysteries of Pennsylvania's Barnes Foundation, A Special American Place).

Salisbury also has this quote from someone from the attorney general's office:

"He argued that his office, charged with protecting the public interest in regard to nonprofit charitable organizations, was not a neutral observer.  'We determine the public interest,' he said. 'We're an advocate. In this case, we advocated along with the Barnes Foundation [for the move], because we thought it was the best way . . . to maintain the Barnes.'"

I think that's exactly right.  I've never understood this notion that it was somehow wrong for the AG to push for the move.  Once he decided that, all things considered, that was the best outcome, what was he supposed to do?  When Lee Rosenbaum calls, for example, for "Super Cooper" to block the Fisk deal, isn't she calling on him to take a side in the dispute?  Does his having done so open the court's decision up to challenge on the ground that the attorney general favored one side in the dispute over the other?  The Friends petition accuses the AG of "forfeit[ing] his neutrality" (e.g., paragraph 22), but, if he has, then hasn't Super Cooper done so as well?  It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of the attorney general's role.

"We thought it fell under fair use."

Forbes.com reports that, in order to distinguish synthetic DNA from its natural counterpart in an experiment they were doing, geneticist J. Craig Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into the synthetic version, including James Joyce’s: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” But, "after announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission."

As James Grimmelmann notes in the first comment here, "you would think the Joyce estate had learned nothing from Shloss v. Joyce" (about which see here).

"I thought I better recover the photograph before he goes underground, destroys it, or tries to sell it to someone who is not going to return it."

An important Czech photo, stolen from a Prague museum earlier this month, is found.

Barnes Update (UPDATED 2X)

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Stephan Salisbury reports that the Barnes Foundation and the Pennsylvania Attorney General have filed their responses to the Friends of the Barnes's latest attempt to reopen the case opposing the move: "In [the latest] petition, the Friends of the Barnes asked Judge Stanley R. Ott, who has presided over the case since 2002, to take another look, based largely on quotes from the 2009 documentary movie The Art of the Steal. The Barnes and the attorney general argue in their responses that there is nothing new in the opponents' legal briefs or the movie, and that the Friends of the Barnes and its members cannot intervene in the case anyway because they have no legal standing."

UPDATE: The Main Line Times has more, including that the Barnes and the AG have asked for their attorney's fees. I'm not surprised.

UPDATE 2: LA Times art critic (and Art of the Steal talking head) Christopher Knight discovers a "surprise" in the motion: one of the five Philadelphia Inquirer stories cited in support of the proposition that the information in the petition is "not new" is from 2005, five months after the court ruled that the collection could be moved. That's true, but it's worth noting that there was a second petition filed in 2007 (by some of the same parties who've brought this third suit), which the court dismissed three years ago. So the 2005 article is "not new" in the sense that it preceded that second lawsuit.

"The case illustrates the financial risks of the art market and highlights the difficulty of valuing an artist's work."

The Wall Street Journal's Robert Frank has more on Norman Waitt's lawsuit against Gerald Peters Gallery.

We Demand That You Not Close the Museum You Are Not Closing (a continuing series) (UPDATED)

Brandeis is renovating the Rose. Judith Dobrzynski has the story.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe has more: "major renovations" to protect the collection "for the long haul."

Big Fair Use News: Patrick Cariou Prevails in his Copyright Lawsuit Against Richard Prince (UPDATED 3X)

Rob Haggart has the details. The decision is here. Background, including predictions of an easy win for Prince (in response to which someone says: "I wouldn't be so sure: litigation is always uncertain, and never more so than when it comes to appropriation art"), here. Back with more after I've had a chance to read the decision.

UPDATE: I've now read the decision, and the key bit is that the court rejected the fair use defense because, as Artnet's Walter Robinson puts it, "Prince's works do not specifically comment on Cariou's originals." (Robinson says: "Face it, the notion of 'appropriation' just doesn't play well in our law courts.") The NYT's Randy Kennedy writes that "Judge Batts wrote that for fair-use exceptions to apply, a new work of art must be transformative in the sense that it must 'in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works' it borrows from."

That hasn't always seemed to be a requirement in other fair use cases. In Blanch v. Koons, for example, the Second Circuit noted that Koons used "Blanch's image as fodder for his commentary on the social and aesthetic consequences of mass media" (rather than, as Judge Batts would seem to require, fodder for his commentary on Blanch's image). Quoting the Supreme Court's Campbell decision, the court said the test of transformativeness is whether the later work "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message." It's hard to imagine, to take another example, Shepard Fairey's Obama image passing muster under Judge Batts's standard. (That image was many things, but a commentary on the underlying photo was probably not one of them.)

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento says the decision "give[s] credence to my theory that courts are increasingly becoming agitated with this 'free-for-all' mentality of certain artists when it comes to appropriating and commercializing off of other artists’ works."

The Copyright Litigation Blog's Ray Dowd says "the opinion is noteworthy and will basically EXPLODE the contemporary art world."

Charlie Finch says "having a judge as an interpreter of the meaning of art remains Kafkaesque: we can trot out the entire oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and a thousand other artists as violators of Judge Batts’ standard. But what of photographer Cariou? Is he not an artist, as well?"

Photo Teacher Paul Turounet "wonder[s] what this might mean for artists such as Thomas Ruff, Penelope Umbrico, Doug Rickard and Michael Wolf, appropriating imagery from the internet, including various search engines, Google Streetview and Flickr?"

Finally, good summaries of the decision from The Art Newspaper's Charlotte Burns and David Walker of Photo District News.

UPDATE 2: More reactions coming in. Ed Winkleman: "The ruling was a chilling decision for artists who work in appropriation."

Peter Friedman: "We need not go so far as to conclude that Cariou’s lawsuit signals the death of appropriation art in all its various guises. Blanch v. Koons alone is proof that is not the case. But if we realize how plainly and directly Prince’s appropriations damaged Cariou’s opportunities to economically benefit from his own work, the outcome (if not all of the reasoning) of this new case is obviously correct" (emphasis added).

Greg Allen, on the other hand, still can't believe Prince "somehow lost his open & shut copyright infringement case," and says the whole thing is "basically a flabbergasting shitshow":

"If it stands, it would have major, sweeping, and stifling effects. Not only would the current operating assumptions of fair use and transformative use be ratcheted way back, but the contemporary art world would be turned upside down. It would restrict both how artists appropriate, or even refer to, copyrighted work. And it would turn galleries into copyright police, with an affirmative responsibility to clear images, sources, and references for the work they show and sell. If visual artists and the art market have been operating in some kind of an appropriation bubble, this decision would pop it. Artists would have to adopt the sampling, licensing, and rights clearing practices and infrastructures of the music industry . . . . [T]he decision has some glaring omissions and relies rather heavily on almost-20-year-old textbooks and articles from law journals, while ignoring several highly relevant, recent decisions. The most notable ignored precedent is Blanch vs. Koons (2006), which happens to involve another Gagosian artist, and which seemed to set out a workable test of transformative use."

UPDATE 3: Interesting interview with Cariou here.

"Things might not have come to this point if anyone had looked at the Met's website . . ."

". . . which still lists the painting as 'Partial and Promised Gift of Jan Cowles and Charles Cowles'."

Georgina Adam has more on the "unusual lawsuit" recently brought against Gagosian Gallery.