Another great conference coming up:

Techniques of Hope: How Professionals and Professionalism can Stabilize the Markets and Change the World

How do we sustain hope in the economy? Hope—usually indexed by terms like consumer confidence, or market optimism—is the engine of market stability and growth.  And yet most of the current techniques for producing confidence in the economy—from stimulus packages to new regulatory architectures—are at best limited solutions. How these policies translate into individual market participants’ hope in the market remains unclear, and most policy makers and market participants are at best uneasy about how effective existing approaches will be and what unintended consequences they might bring with them.  

This conference aims to set in motion what we call a “market movement”—an analog to recently successful social or political movements.  One of the hallmarks of recent political movements has been the understanding that each of our actions have larger consequences. “Think globally, act locally” is the slogan of the environmental movement, or “the personal is political” has been the slogan of the feminist movement. In the recent presidential campaign, Barack Obama called this move “hope”: hope for him is the realization that each of us has power to effectuate real change. So our question is, if this is true for politics and society, could it also be true for the market? 

The conference will bring together professionals and experts in the financial markets with social scientists and lawyers who have studied hope in other legal, political and social movements to define a new agenda for market stabilization and reform from the ground up.

The conference will take place on Friday, March 26, 2009, at The Levin Institute in New York City.

For more information and registration, please click here.

About a year ago I mentioned Tino Sehgal’s work and how it highlights and problematizes law. Last week’s NY Times Magazine contains a review of his work and mentions a bit more on the legal gymnastics.

Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,” says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. “If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”

"Good Law is the Best Art"

Clancco has printed 50 limited-edition posters, Good Law is the Best Art, based on Andy Warhol’s now-famous quote, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

These limited-edition posters are for sale, with all profits after shipping costs going to UNICEF. UNICEF Promises that 100% of donated money will go to saving children’s lives in Haiti. Although the earthquake happened on January 12th, there is still much need for donations of all kinds to help Haiti rebuild. The AP reports:

The world still can’t get enough food and water to the hungry and thirsty one week after an earthquake shattered Haiti’s capital. The airport remains a bottleneck, the port is a shambles. The Haitian government is invisible, nobody has taken firm charge, and the police have largely given up.

We’re putting up the artwork; you help children in Haiti get food, water, medicine and clothing while getting a limited-edition Clancco poster.

Each poster is $20.00 (USD), and measure 19″ x 25″ on 110lb white paper. Clancco is also donating the cost of mailing tubes. If you’d like to buy a poster, please send a check to:

Sergio Munoz Sarmiento
1 East 53rd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10022

Please include the following information:

1. Name / City / Country
2. Mailing address
3. Number of posters requested
4. If you would like your name included in our donation letter to UNICEF. With consent, all donor names will also be listed on Clancco.com. Those not wishing to have their names listed will be listed as “Anonymous.” These posters make great gifts, so you may also buy a poster in behalf of someone else. If so, please indicate name of recipient and mailing address.

If you’d like me to reserve one for you, e-mail me at sergio_sarmiento@clancco.com

Please feel free to forward to friends and colleagues, post on Twitter and Facebook.

Interesting event coming up on March 10, 2010 on the debates concerning copyright and its effects on art, society, technology, and law. Panelists include William Patry and Virginia Rutledge.

From the website:

More problems for the Warhol estate.

Susan Shaer claims that the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board routinely defaces authentic Warhol artworks with a “DENIED” stamp, thereby creating “artificial scarcity” and inflating the value of the art owned by the foundation. According to her complain in Federal Court, Shaer claims that the Andy Warhol’s estate is behind an “insidious” conspiracy to monopolize the authentication and sale of the late artist’s work.

Shaer seeks treble damages and an injunction against Fremont and the Warhol foundation, estate and authentication board, alleging antitrust violations, collusion and fraud. Via Courthouse News Service.  For the other related authentication case involving the Warhol estate, click here.

Annie Leibovitz has settled a copyright lawsuit with an Italian photographer Paolo Pizzetti, who accused her of stealing his pictures for a coffee campaign. Although the suit was for $300,000, Pizzetti now praises Leibovitz, calling her “one of the great photographers of our times.” Seems a bit odd.

Deborah Wythe and Arlene Yu of the Brooklyn Museum write of the painstaking process of making their art collection available online. They speak of the dual challenges the Museum faces as they try to make their art available to a wider audience while simultaneously respecting the intellectual property rights of artists and copyright holders. It’s a highly-commendable approach, endorsing institutional accountability and transparency.

What’s our answer? It’s not perfect. We’ve opted to take what we consider to be a conservative approach: even though some would argue that our posting of images of works online is an example of fair use, we’re seeking explicit permission from artists, in the form of nonexclusive licenses, in order to post anything bigger than a thumbnail.

So we’ve decided to consider anything created after 1922 to be under copyright, even though many works may not actually still be protected. We’ve also decided to approach artists and ask for blanket permission for works created after 1922—again, even though many works may not actually still be protected. Deb is going to blog a bit more about this coming up next.

With these guidelines, we were able to whittle down the number of works needing clearance to about 19,000, and the number of artists/heirs to about 4,300. Since January 2008, six part-time interns have worked on getting clearance, and each intern was allowed to define the artist pool she tried to reach. The intern before me, for example, focused on artists from the early 20th century with more than 50 works in our collection, while I researched artists who were included in our 2007 acquisitions. We’ve cleared about 2,500 works to date.

You can read their comments on the Brooklyn Museum Blog.