NY lawsuit asks: Is graffiti art protected under federal law?
latimes.com
latimes.com
No matter how much we may appreciate street art, in it's most common medium, it's technically vandalization. I think it's in poor taste for building owners to tear down walls and sell them to art dealers, but that's what happens when you paint all over someone else's property.
Furthermore, you can't even be bothered to spend 5 seconds Googling your belief, rather you just blindly stick to your incorrect assumption and post a one word completely nonconstructive reply.
Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith.
I know the real question the judge must answer is whether or not a law was broken, but I assume since they're humans they often act from a sense of personal justice and then rationalize backwards to a sensible legal argument.
Why should any public artist have an expectation of their art being preserved? Just because a property owner grants permission, I would assume that property owner reserves the right to change their mind at any time, no?
If it was a sculpture in the parking lot, would we feel the same way? Can the property owner demolish that without the 90 day heads-up?
Can previous artists at that site turn around and sue the last wave of artists for doing the exact same thing?
I consider it one of the unique constraints of the form.
Of course, in this instance, there was an inviting space for it. As laws go, 90 days to come and preserve the art is pretty reasonable to the property owner, but I can also see that given the unique form, he assumed it could be destroyed.
I'm with you... the ephemeral quality of graffiti is a defining attribute. Without that, it's not graffiti any more. Not sure that invalidates the legal argument - it could still be art.
Thinking locally... there's a ton of redevelopment in my area (Reston, VA). If I were a NIMBY, could I doodle on a few walls, throw paper at the courthouse, and bring it all to a stop?
Well, you could make arrangements with the owner to cut the section of the wall. I think some Banksi works have already been sold like that.
Assuming you want to keep art on both side of the wall: attach some sort of steel support to one side of the wall, then cut out the section with a concrete saw, I've seen blade diameters go up to four feet. You'd just need to have the blade on rails.
The owner rented out the interior of the building to tenants as studio space and the exterior to 5Pointz as gallery space while claiming the building was empty and writing it off for tax purposes.
He wanted to sell the land to a developer to demolish it and put up a high-rise. When there were murmurings that the building might get declared a protected landmark, thereby preventing him from demolishing it, he hired people overnight and in secret to whitewash the exterior and destroy the graffiti art. That way, there's be nothing left to protect.
If that's not bad faith, I don't know what is.
There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art. Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case.
That's not true. Some of the works were permanent installations, including tribute and memorial works from artists who have died. Only some spaces were designated for temporary installation.
> There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art.
There's no need to put "canvas" in scare quotes. There's plenty of case law that helps define what an installation is, in the context of art. This isn't a novel concept.
> Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case.
The owner agreed to let them use the space (and even charged them for it, along with double-dipping into tax write-offs for the building). Legally, that gives them a pretty strong claim to the space.
The entire point of 5Pointz and their argument is that it's not an inherently impermanent art form, any more than other installation art (which is already established legally not to be impermanent).
Regarding 5pointz, the only part that I find interesting is the debate around the owner benefiting from tax breaks.
As I understand the situation; the owner was claiming the building was art to get tax cuts, then decided to sell and argued the building was not art. I feel graffiti is irrelevant here.
The alternative view is that the owner allowed graffiti artists many years of free usage of the space and they're trying to penalize him for it by preventing him from rescinding that offer. The tax status of the building isn't relevant. Every graffiti artist that tagged that building knew it could come down at any time. They knew they could be either replaced or entirely removed. To claim some ownership to the exterior now that he wants to tear it down is ludicrous.
If anything, I see this type of litigation to have a chilling effect on landlords allowing public usage of their property. I wouldn't want to open myself up to future litigation just because I allowed some artists to paint a mural.
It wasn't free
> they're trying to penalize him for it by preventing him from rescinding that offer.
No, they're suing because he destroyed installed art.
> The tax status of the building isn't relevant.
It is, because it does imply he was acting in bad faith, especially given the broader context.
> Every graffiti artist that tagged that building knew it could come down at any time. They knew they could be either replaced or entirely removed.
This is not the legal standard that installation art is held to.
> This is not the legal standard that installation art is held to.
It is not unreasonable that it should be, absent any agreement to the contrary. At least, it is not unreasonable that the standard could be reexamined.
It actually is, and if you're interested in understanding why, I'd invite you to read up on installation art and the copious case law surrounding it, both in New York City (where a lot of that precedent was initially set, incidentally) and across the country (since this is a federal lawsuit).
> At least, it is not unreasonable that the standard could be reexamined.
That's not how common law works. When there's a clear legal precedent (which there is, in this case), it's not the responsibility of the judge to legislate from the bench and overturn existing standards (either codified standards - like this one is - or standards set by case law).
The question in this suit is whether the legal standard applies; the jury determined that it did.
That's a pretty great distance to move the goalposts. The original comment questions legal matters (whether the owner acted in bad faith, whether the law was broken, and which side the judge [should] decide to be correct). Hence why we're discussing the legal standards.
If you want to discuss ethical issues, I'd suggest a new comment thread, because that hasn't come up at all in this one.
One of my fraternity brothers has an album full of pictures of all the places he travelled in the world and did some graffiti. It is so cool.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't like graffiti, but I also think we should "enforce" the law so that not every part of the city gets plastered in graffiti. I think the appeal of seeing graffiti in grungy, underground places is a lot more authentic.
It's pretty short and the undefined terms stand out strongly. This was a useful overview for me to understand why the law exists: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.h...
> The lawsuit hinges on a federal law called the the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990.
> A subsection of copyright law, the act grants visual artists the right to claim or disclaim a work and to protect their work from mutilation or distortion that would harm their honor or reputation. And if the art is of “recognized stature,” the act can be invoked to prevent their work from being destroyed.
That's not at all how art works, and thankfully we have plenty of case law and common law tradition to the contrary.
This apology is rather off-base. It's not like property owners generally permit artists to paint on their buildings in the first place.
5Pointz was a different case in that the landlord permitted the use of the building as a museum and charged for its use. It wasn't an illicit or secret subversion of the property; it was the agreed-upon, intended use for about two decades.
There's lots and lots of case law for this. It's not new. It's not like ruling in favor of 5Pointz would create some new, anti-artist precedent. (Yes, that may be what the lawyers representing the landlord want you to think, but it's very demonstrably wrong.)
First of all, a contract doesn't need to be in writing. Any time you buy a pack of gum, you enter into a contract–no signatures necessary.
If any conflicts arise from a contract, courts have to find a way to elucidate the respective rights and obligations. A naive view of property rights usually doesn't help.
In this case, it's not entirely clear who owns what. If I let you put a statue on my front lawn, does that mean I now own the statue? If not: why should a mural be different? It's entirely possible that the wall is one person's property, yet the art remained with the artists–even though the two cannot be physically separated.
If you insist on a materialistic view where the artists gave up all rights to the property owner's benefit, I'd argue that the art was possibly worth more than the building, and there's an argument to be made that if you consider the rights as inseparable as their physical embodiments, it should be the artists now owning the building, not the other way around.
It simply comes down to one fact. The art was all temporary with artist after artist replacing some of those before them. Their work is not being exploited by others for profit. Hence they are not owed anything, nothing was done under commission and it had been they would have been paid at the time.
this is a money grab with a group attempting to play the victimization card. if those demolishing the buildings had no money there would never have been any issue raised nor if the buildings had been torn down for safety issues.
They all spraypainted over other people's work that came before them
The owner will let them come back and graffiti more with a contract detailing ownership
The informal agreement is outmoded and should therefore default to the property owner, even in the world where it doesn't, the artists forfeited their right to say otherwise when they did the exact same actions to the prior artist's works on the wall
This law doesn't protect works made for hire--and presumably the monuments would have been. It also only gives standing to sue to the author of a work, so the general public couldn't rely on it and if the author is dead the right to sue likely died with him/her. Finally, it doesn't prevent taking something down--only mutilation or destruction, etc. of an artist's work.
Grafitti is beautiful vandalism. Paradoxical, controversial, illigal yet defensible, vexing and captivating at the same time. Under the protection of the law, only half of these remain, leaving grafitti with the artistic content of the common tattoo. Illigal, controversial and vexing now replaced with vulgar, crass and stupefying.
(not to put down tattoos as an artistic medium, i'm just saying nobody's impressed with your sick sleeve, George)
E.g. if a large number of facebook users "like" a photo of the artwork, then it can be considered art.
If someone wants to know if something is art, they can take a picture, and submit it to facebook, and they can then photo-id it and determine its "art" status.
Proof by absurdity: Imagine a skyscraper that is, according to your own definition, definitely art, and specifically art that falls under the protection of free speech in the first amendment.
Now try building that skyscraper in downtown San Francisco.
You'll quickly find that even constitutionally protected rights can be abridged for reasons not protected by the constitution.