A controversial project to build a homeless remembrance sculpture in Victor Steinbrueck Park can move forward, after a city hearing examiner reversed an earlier decision by the Pike Place Market Historical Commission.

On Tuesday, examiner Anne Watanabe said the Commission had wrongly denied the application to build a bronze, 13-foot-high “tree of life” sculpture in the northeast corner of the park. Commissioners had said the project, which includes landscaping and a glass-paneled base, would block views and overly alter Seattle’s famous downtown park. They voted it down 8-0 in January.

The decision had touched off accusations of nimbyism and fear of homeless people from the project’s organizers, the Homeless Remembrance Project Committee.

Via SeattlePI.

A Manhattan Court ruled today that a Canadian art collector, David Mirvish, who claims title to a 1,100-pound sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz waited too long to file his court action.  Justice Leland DeGrasse wrote in Mirvish v. Mott, that Mirvish’s claims were governed by the three-year statute of limitations for conversion and replevin, but Mirvish did not file his action until almost five years after the limitations period had run.

Via Law.com.

We still haven’t heard from the 7th Circuit regarding the long-awaited Chapman Kelley vs. Chicago Park District decision. However–and to keep the suspense going–two new law review articles on the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (“VARA”) have just been published.

Michelle Moran, law student at Marquette University Law School, contends that quilt artists should receive the same intellectual property protections as other artists in her article, “Quilt Artists: Left Out in the Cold by the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990.”

The United States Copyright Act with the inclusion of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) gives sculptors, painters, and photographers a bundle of rights that include the moral rights of attribution and integrity. However, the artistic efforts of artists who create quilts, whether the original purpose was to hang the quilt on the wall or to provide warmth and comfort on a bed, are not included in VARA due to the exclusion of applied art from VARA. This Comment contends that the Congressional intent to protect the highly personal connection artists have to their creations supports extending the rights of attribution and integrity to quilt artists.

Virginia Cascio, of DePaul University Law School, takes the Chapman Kelley vs. Chicago Park District case and argues that “the district court’s narrow interpretation of VARA and its hostility to the plaintiff’s claim illustrates that the courts, fearing the restriction of property rights, have mistakenly limited the scope of VARA to the point that it is no longer a viable source of protection for site-specific artists.”

You can access Cascio’s article,  “Hardly a Walk in the Park: Courts’ Hostile Treatment of Site-Specific Works Under VARA,” here, but it’s not free.

Banksy Mural, Detroit, MI

A famous and rare Banksy mural, originally housed in the derelict Packard Plant in Detroit and later moved to a nonprofit gallery without the artist’s knowledge, has been taken off view after the gallery received numerous phone and e-mail threats that it might be defaced or destroyed. The 7-foot-by-8 foot work, a painting of a boy with a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees,” is attached to a 1,500-pound cinder-block wall.

Publicity stunt? Via Freep.com.

Not sure where this is going, but according to the Boston Herald, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, presiding over the Shepard Fairey vs. Associated Press lawsuit, said today at a hearing in New York that “he has a feeling that ‘whether it’s sooner or later, The Associated Press is going to win’ the case.”

With this in my back pocket, and I’m the AP, I don’t think I would settle. In fact, it’s surprising that Fairey doesn’t take the “hint” that he’s likely to lose, and lose badly in terms of monetary damages. Not only that, but for those that are looking for a restriction or narrowing of the already loose fair use standards, this case could be a gift from heaven (and a nightmare for the “free culture” tea party movement).

Seems like the AP is on a similar wavelength. The AP’s lawyer, Dale Cendali, “says the news organization wants to make it clear that the AP owns the copyright to the photograph that Fairey used to create the ‘HOPE’ poster and that he violated the copyright.”

Via the Boston Herald. More from the Village Voice here.

Update: June 1, 2010

Shepard Fairey lawyer says fair-use case isn’t over yet.

The US Copyright Office stated Monday at the New York State Bar Association gathering at Fordham Law School that they have a significant backlog of pending copyright registrations. Although Congress has given the US Copyright Office over 50 new staff members, paper registrations can take up to two years. Electronic registrations can take up to eight months at worse.

With this in mind, should artists and art law practitioners be concerned?

Read the rest of this entry »

This art law story hasn’t received very much media attention, but according to John Viramontes and Sam Blain, it definitely should.

The Dallas Museum of Art is under scrutiny. Viramontes puts it quite succinctly and on-point: “Has the not-for-profit Dallas Museum of Art instead become a SHOPPING MART to offer its art straight off the museum walls as mega-millionaire David Martinez did when he picked the Rothko and in a secret deal, purchased it for a cool $31M ?” D Magazine’s Peter Simek wonders the same thing, “the collector who purchased the Rothko from Hoffman in 2007 essentially went shopping at the DMA during the museum’s Fast Forward exhibition. Does the DMA become art mart?”

Simek asks an even more disturbing question, “What if the DMA passed up the opportunity to purchase a piece by Jeff Koons because they assumed they had one in the Rachofsky collection, but then Rachofsky sells the Koons, and now the DMA is left without one? [T]his is a hypothetical situation, but it is a much more likely one, and it presses the point that the donations may compromise the museum’s ability to curate its own contemporary collection.”

Does this exhibition-cum-shopping gesture by a nonprofit 501(c)(3) institution pass legal and ethical muster?

Sam Blain says, “it gets better than that.” According to the website ArtSeek, the worries of most art museums in shipping and handling of priceless artworks is a thing of the past for The Dallas Museum of Art. “The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has named the museum a certified cargo screening facility. The designation means the DMA doesn’t have to worry about who is handling the artwork it’s shipping out to other institutions since it will be handling the packing and screening.”