Frankfurt’s Staedel Museum has investigated its role in the Third Reich. Its art history expert and provenance researcher Nicole Roth told Deutsche Welle in an interview how she goes about examining the museum’s collection for stolen pieces.

In 1999, Germany’s Representative of the Federal Government for Culture, Michael Naumann, sent a letter to the directors of all the museums in the country, requesting that they determine and reveal the origin of any works acquired between 1933 and 1945. Shortly before Naumann’s appeal, the German federal government and state and municipal leaders had pledged to return to the rightful owners any works of art dispossessed by the Nazis. In order to make that happen, many museums hired provenance researchers, experts specially trained in critically examining the history behind works of art.

A stuffed tiger standing on its hind legs with bared teeth was wrestled out of London’s SHOWstudio gallery by police.

Via The Telegraph: “Police believe the tiger was shot and killed at some point in the last 20 years and they are investigating whether a crime has been committed under the Endangered Species Act.”

What do artists want? They want other artists to stop ripping them off. Here’s a great example of how a group of artists could have (and should have) licensed the use of an image from another artist. This isn’t about asking for permission, it’s about compensating another artist for their mental and manual labor, especially when the secondary artist (Green Day) can very well afford to pay for the use.

The example, Los Angeles-based artist Dereck Seltzer initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against rock-band Green Day for copyright infringement, violation of the Lanham Trademark Act, unfair competition and injury to business reputation for misappropriation of Seltzer’s original art work titled Scream Icon. According to JD Journal, “In August of 2009, Seltzer was made aware that Green Day was using Scream Icon as their stage backdrop at their Los Angeles concert, in promotional materials and at other concerts.”

More from JD Journal here.

A finance company owned by Bank of America demands that Christie’s auction house and the Paul Kasmin Gallery turn over more than 100 artworks that belonged to CNET founder Halsey Minor – or the money from selling them. ML Private Finance says it holds a $21.6 million judgment against Minor and the Halsey McLean Minor Revocable Trust.

Via Courthouse News Service.

I’ve been thinking about whether or not artistic production is headed into a “permission-based” or “license-based” practice; one which would somehow undermine and increase the cost of artistic production.

Last night, while reading Rebecca Tushnet’s blog entry concerning journalism, the internet, and permission culture, a few thoughts concerning the perceived current threat by copyright owners against creative individuals (artists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, etc) came to mind. This perceived threat is guised as encompassing (and coming into being as) permission-based and license-based structures which artists would have to abide by in order to produce art works and other creative projects. This fear would be true only if artists continue to give up on the challenges posed by creativity and gave in to facile and lazy intellectual hyperbole. Why then is this threat being promulgated, and by whom?

Read the rest of this entry »

For those following the Cassirer v. Kingdom of Spain case, this may come as good news. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday announced it will offer remote viewing in Pasadena next week of en banc proceedings in San Francisco, including arguments in the Cassirer Case. The Ninth Circuit said it will broadcast live video and audio of arguments in four cases to viewers at the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Courthouse—and at Ninth Circuit courthouses in Seattle and Portland, Ore., from March 23 to the 25th.

Via Metropolitan News-Enterprise. For background on the Cassirer case, click here.

Seems like the day of recovered stolen artworks. Last year a couple of masked robbers stole a Dali painting from the Scheringa Museum for Realist Art in Spanbroek, a village north of Amsterdam. Well, today, police arrested two suspects in that art theft. Check it out here.