Thanks so much for your thoughtful article on legal protection for public artwork.

I would like to point out a few clarifications on your information, though, if I may:

1) “Works for Hire” are only applicable to “employees” of said organizations, not independent contractors (like most of us artists are). Yes, the org can try to stipulate the piece being a “Works for Hire” in a separate agreement, but the law states that there are only nine categories of work that an independent contractor can be classified as making a “works for hire”:

1) as a contribution to a collective work,
2) as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
3) as a translation,
4) as a supplementary work,
5) as a compilation,
6) as an instructional text,
7) as a test,
8) as answer material for a test, or
9) as an atlas

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

No public artwork to my knowledge fits any of those nine categories, yet we see lawyers try to get artists to sign these illegal documents of “Work for Hire” over and over again. Every single time we come up against one of them, we inform them of the law and they change the agreement.

2) We’ve never had the need to go down to the copyright office to register one of Sharon’s pieces because, as is well known:

“You have a copyright in your artwork as soon as it has been created and fixed in a tangible object. It does not need to be registered with the copyright office or have a copyright notice attached to receive copyright protection. A copyright lasts for the life of the artist, plus 70 years after the artist’s death.”

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/how-to-copyright-artwork

3) Although case law on the Visual Artist Rights Act (VARA) of 1990 may be limited, the idea that it is has a “limited” scope as you write, is just not factually correct. Indeed, its range and breadth is wide and far-reaching and covers most public artwork. In fact, few lawyers would fight a claim to VARA rights by an artist. We actually won a suit against Yahoo! this very way, by citing VARA when in 2007 they destroyed a public piece installed at their corporate headquarters in 2000:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/artnetnews/artnetnews10-4-07.asp

“Talks to restore Reflecting Tips broke down when former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel intervened, saying he wanted it removed, and in April 2007 the company “improved” the site by mowing away the grass and adding a border of perennial flowers — presumably destroying the confusion of wires with grass that was integral to the original piece. Louden is suing Yahoo, saying its actions violate the Visual Arts Rights Act.”

We won that case because of VARA and the piece was restored in a collaborative initiative between Sharon and Yahoo!

So in summation, artist have lots of legal protection when it comes to their public works, in my opinion. The most important one being the fact that we have copyright protection from the moment a work is completed and the fact that “Works for Hire” does not apply to independent contractors.

Artists need to know that they have more inherent legal protection than we’ve been led to believe.

Thanks!

Vinson Valega
Project Manager
Louden Studio
https://SharonLouden.com

And it’s pathetic (laughable) if any contemporary western abstractionist doesn’t already know, in the 21st C, after all, about the uses of patterning and abstraction in traditional African art independent of whatever Picasso and other did with it…
Though in traditional forms, those abstractions were often linked to specific meanings; the symbols often were another form of language.

Please do not post links to auction house news sites. Thank you. We have removed the link.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/hamline-university-what-to-think-firing.html

Not sure where Hyperallergic covered this at the outset but glad to see this brief notice outlining a troubling subject that warrants serious attention.

Thank you for this excellent and sad article. I studied for many years, decades really, with the Tibetan teacher and artist Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché.

He warned that we were entering the Dark Age knows as the Age of Materialism, and that this time was most dangerous because it was the Age Of Spiritual Materialism.

He was so concerned that in 1973 he wrote the book ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’.

Somehow, I doubt Alain Bordier read it.

Your review of Sally J. Han’s work made my day. Thank you.

Carolee

Winslow Homer is now a silk scarf? Who allowed that?

I thought it had come to an end with the A. Gorky baseball cap I bought at his retrospective in Philly years ago. Then I thought the Jack Bush socks at the McMicheal were a bit of a joke and would not last. Wrong there.

And to think I studied marketing in addition to art history and studio.
Somethings are just not right though…