I’m on a roundtable discussion on Friday, November 30, at 2pm at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation concerning damaged art and the regulation of its financial, aesthetic, and social value.

The roundtable discussion will focus on salvage art and on questions of damage and value with art historian Alexander Dumbadze, poet, novelist and critic Ben Lerner, architectural historian Andrew Herscher, artist Elka Krajewska, artist and art lawyer Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento, anthropologist Michael Taussig, certified appraiser and valuation specialist Renee Vara, Director Of Exhibitions Mark Wasiuta. Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, Columbia University.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, November 14th at 6:30 PM in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in Buell Hall. Very timely!

Here’s more on the exhibition and talks:

Salvage art, a term borrowed from the art insurance lexicon, refers to work removed from art circulation due to accidental damage. Founded by artist Elka Krajewska, the Salvage Art Institute provides a refuge for salvaged work while offering a platform for confronting the regulation of its financial, aesthetic and social value.

In spring 2012 the institute accepted a gift of its first salvage art inventory, a group of objects related primarily through their “total loss” status. This inventory is the core of No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute. The exhibition engages an actuarial logic that delivers a series of curious reversals. Foremost among these is the annulment of the value of total loss objects. Once a work has been declared a total loss and indemnification has been paid, insured objects are officially considered devoid of value. Left in the limbo of warehouse storage, these objects belong to an odd nether world, no longer alive in terms of the market, gallery or museum system, but often still relatively intact. The survival of salvage art even past its total devaluation confronts our common understanding of where art ends, disturbing the distinction, organization, and separation of art from non-art.

Ouch. Artinfo just published a sizzler, which basically asks a key question of agency.

What exactly is a dealer’s duty to his client? In his deposition, Gagosian said, “As a matter of practice, art dealers frequently represent the buyer and the seller.” His gallery has often done so, he admitted, without disclosing his relationship to both parties. “That’s the way dealers work,” he said. But [the adverse party’s] lawyers argue that this practice is illegal.

The article notes that Gagosian is currently involved in another lawsuit, against the seller.

Margaret Mettler, of the University of Michigan Law School, has just published a student note, Graffiti Museum: A First Amendment Argument for Protecting Uncommissioned Art on Private Property, in the Michigan Law Review concerning graffiti, city ordinances, and the right of private property owners to keep uncommissioned graffiti on their property.

Here’s the abstract:

Graffiti has long been a target of municipal legislation that aims to preserve property values, public safety, and aesthetic integrity in the community. Not only are graffitists at risk of criminal prosecution but property owners are subject to civil and criminal penalties for harboring graffiti on their land. Since the 1990s, most U.S. cities have promulgated graffiti abatement ordinances that require private property owners to remove graffiti from their land, often at their own expense. These ordinances define graffiti broadly to include essentially any surface marking applied without advance authorization from the property owner.

Meanwhile, graffiti has risen in prominence as a legitimate art form, beginning in the 1960s and most recently with the contributions of street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Some property owners may find themselves fortuitous recipients of “graffiti” they deem art and want to preserve in spite of graffiti abatement ordinances and sign regulations requiring the work’s removal. This Note argues that private property owners who wish to preserve uncommissioned art on their land can challenge these laws under the First Amendment, claiming that, as applied, regulations requiring removal are unconstitutional because they leave the property owner insufficient alternative channels for expression.

As part of her ongoing eminent domain, nyc project and in conjunction with an exhibition of her eminent domain, nyc project at The Law Office of Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Bettina Johae will lead a walking tour of selected sites of eminent domain in Brooklyn.

The walking tour will take place on Saturday, December 8th, 2 pm-4:30pm. Participants will meet at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade @ Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn Heights.

The tour starts at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and will end at the Atlantic Yards in Prospect Heights. During the tour, the use of eminent domain for the creation of certain Brooklyn sites will be discussed. Among the sites are: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Brooklyn Civic Center /  Cadman Plaza Urban Renewal Project, NYCHA housing projects such as the Farragut Houses, the Fort Greene Slum Clearance Title 1 Project, the planned Willoughby Square Park, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and the just opened Barclay Center and the planned Atlantic Yards project.

Register Now

The tour will last approximately 2.5 hours and will be limited to 25 participants.

Art in America just published a great article by Brian Boucher explaining the damages to art and galleries caused by Hurricane Sandy. Of particular note, Boucher spoke with David Genser, a Boston-based insurance broker who serves many galleries in the New York area. Genser:

“Unless you buy flood insurance, which is hard to come by and prohibitively expensive, flood coverage is typically not included in commercial liability policies, which cover everything in your gallery other than the art[.]”

That an “ordinary art thief would probably not even recognise it as art.”

The official five-member Graffiti Panel is made up of city staffers with backgrounds in “the arts, urban design, architecture and other relevant disciplines[.]”

Via The Art Newspaper.