Court’s Function Is Not to Tell Scholars What to Authenticate

Ray Dowd, of the Copyright Litigation Blog, comments on a recent lawsuit against the Calder Foundation. In that case, “[t]he plaintiff owned a work it believed was created by the late Alexander Calder…. The plaintiff sued because the Calder Foundation refused to include the work in the artist’s catalogue raisonne.” The plaintiff lost, primarily because “the court found that it did not have the power to declare the purported Calder work authentic nor to order the Calder Foundation to include it in the catalogue raisonne.” Adds Dowd,

Foundations vary greatly in practices, market power, and credibility.  There is no disputing that for certain artists, the foundations act in dictatorial and inappropriate ways, leveraging the artist’s power far beyond what copyright law contemplates.

Read Dowd’s analysis here.

Tags: Art Law, art lawyers, authentication, catalogue raisonne, Copyright, mobile