Yale Information Society Project Fellow Charles Cronin has just written a lengthy expose on conceptual art and the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 entitled, Dead on the Vine: Living and Conceptual Art and Vara (click to download pdf version).

Here’s the abstract:

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA), arriving in the wake of U.S. adherence to the Berne Convention, provides moral rights of integrity and attribution to artists who have created certain copyrightable physical works of visual art. Since – and before – the time of VARA’s enactment, however, many artists have been working with genres and media to produce art that is not comfortably accommodated within the scope of protected works contemplated by VARA. An increasing number of recent works of Conceptual and Appropriationist Art raise questions about fixation and original expression that are required for copyrightability that, in turn, is required for protection under VARA. This article discusses the uncomfortable fit of VARA and many contemporary works of art, and particularly those that incorporate to a significant extent living works in their natural state. The discussion focuses on the recent decision in a dispute involving a VARA claim in a living landscape (Chapman Kelley v. Chicago Park District, N.D. Ill., 2008). It concludes that works of art in which nature and chance play a dominant role are Conceptual works in which the artist’s contribution is limited to ideas that should not be protected by copyright or VARA.

NY City police say they arrested 26-year-old Kathleen “K.C.” Neill for posing naked for a photographer, and in full view of visitors, in the Metropolitan Museum’s arms and armor department on Wednesday. Neill faces a charge of public lewdness.

A Pennsylvania State Police recruit has made a constitutional issue of a tattoo. Ronald Scavone says the police refused to hire him, after he successfully completed interviews and a background check, because he refused to “physically alter (his) body” by removing a tattoo, which he says could be easily covered up with clothing.

(Oil and wax on canvas. 64.5 x 78.4 in., 1969)

Brice Marden’s 1969 painting, Au Centre, was headed to Sotheby’s in NYC for auction. En route, it came loose inside its crate when a forklift operator smashed into it at Frankfurt airport in Germany. Gagosian Gallery’s insurance carrier, AXA Art Insurance Corp., filed suit against Lufthansa Airlines last Friday.

A Nebraska man who stole a painting of the Virgin Mary to finance an abortion for a teen he was accused of raping has been convicted of first-degree sexual assault and felony theft.

Pasquale Iannetti, 69, was indicted Thursday by a grand jury in San Francisco on charges of wire and mail fraud for shipping prints purportedly authorized by Miro, the renowned Spanish Catalan painter and sculptor who died in 1983.

He was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud for allegedly shipping fake Miro prints to customers across the country from 2001 to 2008. He was also indicted on seven counts of wire fraud for credit-card transactions at his gallery or wire transfers in amounts ranging from $3,600 to $17,902, the indictment said.

Yesterday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down a 2002 California law giving owners and heirs to artworks looted by the Nazis extra time — until the end of 2010 — to sue for their return. The 9th Circuit found the California law unconstitutional.

Echoing the lower court’s ruling, the 9th Circuit found that “California officials overstepped their authority when they passed the state’s Holocaust art-restitution law, because they intruded on what is strictly a federal government prerogative to shape policies on war and foreign affairs.”

However, according to the LA Times, the 9th Circuit ruling did not settle the specific legal issue at hand, whether or not the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena really owns “one of the most prized works hanging in its galleries, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, moments before the Fall — or should the paintings on two wood panels be handed over to the daughter-in-law of a Jewish art dealer who left the panels in Holland when he fled the invading Germans in 1940?”

The LA Times has the full story here.