October 31st, 2008 by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento in
Repatriation
From yesterday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
After 10 years of detective work, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has concluded that a $2.8 million painting it has owned for decades was stolen by the Nazis. The museum has returned the 1911 painting, Fernand Leger’s “Smoke Over Rooftops,” to the French heirs of a Jewish art collector who died in 1948.
“Having researched this to the end of the road, we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do,” said Art Institute Director Kaywin Feldman.
According to today’s NY Times, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says:
he wants to outlaw graffiti, making it a crime to write or draw on city walls and public buildings in Italy without permission. Mr. Berlusconi said on Wednesday that measures to discourage “people who spoil walls and shops” would be introduced by decree at a cabinet meeting on Friday. Penalties could include fines and even prison sentences, the prime minister said. Early this month, Mr. Berlusconi said that he wanted to eliminate graffiti “because in some of our cities, it looks like we’re in Africa rather than Europe.”
October 28th, 2008 by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento in
Criminal
The CBC reported today that last Friday French plain-clothes officers removed artist Oleg Kulik’s photo works from display at Paris’s Grand Palais exhibition hall after a customs official expressed concern that they may run afoul of French obscenity laws. In the photos, Kulik is depicted nude in suggestive poses with a variety of animals.
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The Westminster City Council has ordered a Banksy mural, entitled One Nation Under CCTV (CCTV is short for closed circuit television), to be removed from a building on Newman Street as a message to graffiti artists that graffiti will not be tolerated. The mural has the words “One Nation Under CCTV” stencilled above two painted people.
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According to Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, artist Maya Lujan:
participated in UCLA’s 2008 Wight Biennial exhibition, titled “Group Effort: Collaboration as Process and Form,” which opened Sept. 25 and closed Oct. 9 at the New Wight Gallery at UCLA’s Broad Art Center. Lujan’s large scale artwork “White Magic and Xanadu,” appeared in the show — but not the way the artist had in mind.
[A] symbol on the wall was installed Sept. 23 along with the sculptural pieces, but was removed before the show opened — according to the artist, without her permission. “It’s just sort of unheard of for them to handle it without the artist’s permission,” she said.
Although the student curators did not provide Culture Monster with their reasons for taking down the symbol, which Lujan calls a “mandala,” Russell Ferguson, chairman of the UCLA art department, confirmed that the decision probably had something to do with the fact that the form resembles a swastika.
If the facts as stated above are correct, and aside from the ethical and professional issues raised, the main issue at hand is what legal recourse(s) Ms. Lujan will have against UCLA, the Museum, and the curators, and whether or not she will opt to enforce her rights. We’re doing some research now, but without having waived her Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), Ms. Lujan may have that recourse as a viable option.
Here’s a bit of Lessig’s op-ed piece in today’s NY Times:
Copyright law has become a political weapon because of a statute passed a decade ago: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law tells carriers like YouTube that unless they quickly remove material posted by users that is alleged to infringe copyright, they themselves could be liable for the infringement.
The digital copyright act gives the alleged infringer an opportunity to demand that the content be restored. But in the height of a political campaign, even a few hours of downtime can be the difference between effective and ineffective. The law thus creates a perfect mechanism to censor political speech during the only time it could matter. Recognizing this, campaigns and their allies are beginning to exploit this weapon.
Lessig concludes:
It would be far better if copyright law were narrowed to those contexts in which it serves its essential creative function — encouraging innovation and ensuring that artists get paid for their work — and left alone the battles of what criticisms candidates for office, and their supporters, are allowed to make.