Lecture Presentation: Your Land and Mine: Propriety and Debasement in Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been asked to present a paper for the 2014 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting. The Conference will be held in New York City, at the Hilton New York Midtown, from January 2-5, 2014. The section on Art Law will be on Friday, January 3, 2014, from 1:30 to 3:15pm.

Framed image found in Mike Kelley’s “Mobile Homestead,” (2013).

My presentation, Your Land and Mine: Propriety and Debasement in Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, will focus on Mike Kelley’s private/public art project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. I will focus on the property issues raised by Kelley’s project; the intellectual property issues raised by this ongoing collaborative project; as well as the relationship between “the repressed” in Kelley’s work and its relation to the notion of community, a key subject in property law.

The section for which I was asked to participate deals with A2A (Access to Art). A2A is an umbrella term for the trend seeking to make art more accessible to the general public in a variety of ways: through technologies enabling the reproduction and distribution of works; through the creation of new transformative works, such as remixing and sampling; through new museum models; and through individual projects such as the Google Art Project.  The consequences of A2A are of interest to a broad segment of society, including both producers and consumers of content.  The legal issues associated with A2A can be complex, and participants in this panel will seek to explore those issues as they relate to intellectual property laws and limitations.