The Art Law Blog

The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog on "the tax relief policy announced last month in U.K. that would limit a taxpayer's donations to £50...

Julia Halperin on dealer Marc Jancou's lawsuit against Cady Noland and Sotheby's.

A $110 million Cézanne has been recovered in Serbia.

Listen here .

Daniel Grant:  The Knoedler-Rosales Case: A Dealer's Defense .

Felix Salmon on the Eggleston lawsuit:  "At first glance this looks like what it is: one of the silliest lawsuits the art world has s...

"... alleging that the artist's recent decision to print and sell oversized versions of some of his famous images in a Christie...

Story here .

Roberta Smith (in her response to Morley Safer's "60 Minutes" piece on contemporary art):  " These days the art world blo...

Rutgers lawprof Stuart Green had an op-ed in the Times last week on the difference between theft and copying.  Kal Raustiala and Chris Spri...

Four paintings that were stolen from a Madison Avenue gallery in 1988 have been recovered .

Serial forger Mark Landis gets a museum show .  Background here . UPDATE:  Derek Fincham :  "[T]he attention paid to him now will hop...

Patricia Cohen has the story in the NYT.  Background (also by Cohen) here .

The Met gets $20 million.  Details here .

Ten years for James Biear .

With the sales announced this week of works by Cindy Sherman and Edward Hopper , this bears repeating. In 2009, Ford Bell, the President ...

" ... though she had prepaid for two months and let it deduct rent automatically from her credit card. "

SFMOMA is selling a Hopper at Sotheby's. That must be one of the paintings the museum was not holding in the public trust, to be a...

The Akron Art Museum is selling a Cindy Sherman at Christie's in May.  The museum’s director says "he wanted to capitalize on the ...

Derek Fincham finds "one more connection between the drug trade and art theft."

I was on a panel on deaccessioning last fall at Hofstra Law School with Francine Koslow Miller, who has a new book out called Cashing in on ...

At the Freakonomics blog, Daniel Hamermesh notices that the basic laws of supply and demand apply to the art market.

" A lower court ruled in favor of Costner last year. The South Dakota Supreme Court is deciding whether to uphold that ruling. "

Josh Baer reports on two new art-related lawsuits:  " Berry-Hill Galleries and James & David Hill have been sued by arty investo...

That's the money quote from the District Court's " tentative ruling " dismissing the California resale royalty suit, which...

Self-recommending , as they say.

The best part of the Barnes move will be listening to the Usual Suspects tell us how that eighth of an inch -- or the improved lighting, or ...

Yesterday was the oral argument on the auction houses' motion to dismiss the California resale royaly class action . I don't see any...

Speaking of the Barnes's tragic five-mile journey, Cheryl Allison of the Main Line Times reports that Judge Ott has "upheld his e...

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Stephan Salisbury:  " Art poised for eager crowds ." In March 2009, "membership totaled 390...

Adam Meyerson:  When Philanthropy Goes Wrong .

Matthew Yglesias:   " Louis Vuitton's Campaign Against Free Speech ."

" He said he may have easily put '1,000 or 2,000' forgeries on the market ."

" Our aim is simple:  to help people identify and return stolen / looted / missing antiquities and archaeological material ."

Richard Posner : "The standard analysis of the optimal scope of copyright protection holds that it requires a balancing between acces...

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones :  "Art does not heal the sick, or feed the poor. It is useless. It is gratifying. It should never be...

Via the Art Market Monitor .

The case of the red goat graffiti .

An interesting-sounding exhibition at SOMArts in San Francisco, "touch[ing] on issues of equity—who gets to break the law, when, and w...

Josh Baer :  " Dealer Marla Kennedy has sued Richard Silver, the New York Observer, their writer Elise Knutsen and attorney Vindoo Varg...

Eileen Kinsella reports in ARTnews that "several art-authentication boards and artist-endowed foundations have decided that the risks ...

The auction houses filed their reply brief this week in the California resale royalty lawsuit.  I remain most interested in the Commerce Cl...

Part one , part two .

" . . . though he could be released in six months if he succeeds in a boot camp-style program ."

The Fall 2011 issue of ARCA's Journal of Art Crime  is out.  I wrote about de Csepel v. Republic Of Hungary , regarding foreign sovereig...

I've also been meaning to get to this story, which in some ways is similar to the Detroit story I mentioned yesterday .  A Washington S...

I've been meaning to mention this column from a couple of weeks ago raising the possibility of some art being sold to help stave off De...

He " admitted that he fabricated documents and lied during the discovery process in copyright litigation with the Associated Press....

Derek Fincham notes that a version of Munch's "The Scream" is heading for sale at Sotheby’s in New York and " officials ...

Forbes reports on a fascinating valuation dispute in the Ileana Sonnabend estate.

The NYT's Patricia Cohen has the latest on the Knoedler mess.

The New York Times on Cal Berkeley's " embarrassing loss ."

Fisk has filed its response to the Tennessee Attorney General's request for permission to appeal .  There's a news story here .  I h...

It's complicated .

" The French police force has opened an investigation into the possible forgery of early photographs ."

The Chronicle of Philanthropy :  "President Obama on Monday proposed to limit the percentage of income that wealthy donors can write of...

In Italy.  Story here .

Barbara Guggenheim on what happens in a post-authentication committee world.

Wine steward/art thief Mark Lugo plead guilty to a grand larceny charge in New York this week and faces one to three years in prison when ...

Former Brandeis President Judah Reinharz is still repulsively defending his (failed) plan to sell some of the school's artwork: ...

Artinfo reports on a settlement in a private California resale royalty suit brought by artist Mark Grotjahn against collector Dean Valentin...

The plaintiffs have filed their response to the auction houses' motion to dismiss .  No online link yet; background about the case here ...

" But when he had some of the works evaluated by Basquiat’s and Haring’s estates in 2010, he was told that they were forgeries ." ...

Artnet's Rachel Corbett has a report on Janine Gordon's appellate brief .

An interesting decision in the Southern District last week in a breach of contract case involving a "back-to-back transaction" for...

In Colorado .  "The lawsuit, filed ... by a group of students at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, argues that land ma...

As a follow-up to his New York Times piece earlier this week on the Daniel Moore case, Daniel Grant has a post at the Huffington Post on a...

Cheryl Alllison of the Main Line Times has a report on this morning's sanctions hearing in the Barnes case.  Judge Ott "closed th...

... of adversely affected experience in an impossible to predict way .  The Barnes sets its opening hours .

The Tennesse Attorney General has gone ahead and filed for permission to appeal the most recent ruling in the Fisk case.  Here's a brie...

" That is to say, the appeals court could leave for another day how transformative a work needs to be and say simply that these works...

Julia Halperin at ARTINFO.

The Main Line Times :  "A court hearing is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 2, at 9:30 a.m.... at which the Friends of the Barnes Foundatio...

Daniel Grant had an update in the New York Times today on the University of Alabama-Daniel Moore lawsuit .  There's an appellate court ...

I don't remember seeing this in the earlier reports on this story, but, according to this article in the Albany Times-Union, not only ...

Had a chance to read the Cariou appellate brief .  They smartly keep the argument as narrow as possible:  they don't say all appropriati...

The NYT's Patricia Cohen has the details .

The University of Alabama's lawsuit against artist Daniel Moore is still going!  Oral argument on the appeal scheduled for Feb. 2.  Jon...

Patrick Cariou's lawyers filed their appellate brief yesterday.  Haven't had a chance to read it myself, but in the meantime, here ...

Dan Duray has the details on a new lawsuit involving Gagosian Gallery and the Cowles family.  He points out that, were it not for this suit...

In the NYLJ, Judith Prowda, the Chair of the NYSBA Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Section, argues against the proposed resale royalty b...

An Australian art dealer has been arrested and charged with "87 offences relating to his investment art fraud scheme."

" Using the photo in a judicial opinion couldn't conceivably be hurting the copyright holder ." Judge Posner helps himself t...

The Basquiat Authentication Committee is disbanding . UPDATE:  The Art Market Monitor :  "The committee itself may turn out to be les...

The auction houses have filed a (joint) motion to dismiss.  You can read the motion here ; background about the case here . The main argum...

The Mei Moses art index was up 11% in 2011, "beat[ing] the total return of the S&P 500 index of US equities by about 9 percentage ...

Courthouse News Service:  Velvet Underground Wants to Free Warhol's Banana .

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento:  Is This Copyright Infringement of an Artist's Painting?

" The Church of Kopimism, whose principal tenent is the right to file-share, has been formally recognized as a religious organization i...

The Art Newspaper's Charlotte Burns reports . Background here .

The Ninth Circuit has upheld Halsey Minor's judgment against Christie's.  The decision is here .  Background here . 

An upstate group of nuns have lost their fraud case against a dealer arising out of a Bouguereau they sold to him.  Background here .  He b...

The Tennessean had a story over the weekend with the rather dramatic headline: "Fisk art deal in jeopardy."  What that turns out ...

Paintings by Picasso and Mondrian were stolen from the National Art Gallery in Athens today.  Art Theft Central's Mark Durney says  Gre...

The Gallerist's Michael H. Miller  reports that a New Orleans man named Robert E. Lucky Jr. has been sentenced to two years in prison f...

I haven't been linking to all the discussion of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), but David Carr had a good overview in the Times last...

Carol Vogel reminds us today that "for more than a decade museums have been joining forces to buy" art. It’s "an arrangement...

NY1:  LES Gallery Offers Reward For Return of Stolen Artwork .

Daniel Grant:  Will the Legal Status of Appropriation Art Be Decided This Year?

The new year begins with this back-and-forth between Judith Dobrzynski and Lee Rosenbaum over Boston's newly-revised "payment in ...