
NY lawsuit asks: Is graffiti art protected under federal law? - lnguyen
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-5pointz-graffiti-art-2017-story.html
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fortythirteen
I say this as an active collector of pop and street art. If you want to retain
total ownership of your art then you should probably own the surface you
create it on.

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.

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hamitron
*vandalism

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cantrip
Yeah honestly it's annoying enough already to pick out one specific word from
a whole thoughtfully written comment and point out that it's incorrectly used,
but you're not even right in that.

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.

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menacingly
Like most interesting stories, I find myself without a clear opinion as to
which side is correct. It would be annoying to be a judge.

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.

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chimeracoder
> Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith.

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.

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koolba
I don't consider any of that to be bad faith.

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.

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chimeracoder
> the owner allowed graffiti artists many years of free usage of the space

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.

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mannykannot
> 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.

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.

~~~
chimeracoder
> It is not unreasonable that it should be

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.

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mannykannot
You are repeatedly quoting the law to avoid discussing whether there are any
ethical issues here, but if this were purely a matter of the law, it would be
uninteresting.

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chimeracoder
> You are repeatedly quoting the law to avoid discussing whether there are any
> ethical issues here

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.

~~~
mannykannot
You might have taken a look before you wrote that, as the original post in
this thread is pretty clearly about the ethical issues beyond the narrow facts
of the law.

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cbr
The quote "These individual artists may be compensated, but what is going to
be the long-term effect [is] buildings don’t allow public art because they
don’t want to face damages" looks right to me.

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syphilis2
I was wondering what federal law could support the artists here. Answer:
"Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 A subsection of copyright law"

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...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.htm)

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theandrewbailey
Mentioned in the article:

> 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.

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golemotron
This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use
the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail.

~~~
chimeracoder
> This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to
> use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights
> prevail.

That's not at all how art works, and thankfully we have plenty of case law and
common law tradition to the contrary.

~~~
golemotron
What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist
wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their
buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a
permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and
destroy an art form..

~~~
chimeracoder
> What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist
> wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their
> buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a
> permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and
> destroy an art form..

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.)

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Shivetya
Initially I was concerned that someone was copying and reselling the works of
others. However once reading I have to side with the developers and/or owners
of the property. Those being sued are simply being sued because they have the
means to pay.

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.

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ringaroundthetx
They should have had a contract

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

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trothamel
Random musing: By the logic of this case, would taking down confederate
monuments be illegal?

~~~
GuB-42
I suppose most confederate monuments are not copyrighted, unless they have
been created after Mickey Mouse.

~~~
albedoa
Not most, but it might be closer than you think:
[https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_...](https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf)
[PDF] (Pages 12–13)

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TheAdamist
Better have an artists contract with your house painter, otherwise if you
decide to repaint with another firm you are destroying their Monochrome
painting in the style of Klein and others.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting)

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ggggtez
I know your comment was supposed to be sarcastic, but it has nothing to do
with what is being discussed.

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anonyx69
For anyone that's interested in this, I'd like to recommend an awesome
documentary called Vigilante Vigilante. It's about anti-graffiti vigilantes
that take it a little too far.

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subzidion
Saving Banksy is another really good one, talks about some of the struggles in
preserving street art.

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enord
Ah hah! Now _that's_ a conundrum... How can it be grafitti if it's not
subversive? Grafitti as _art_ would vanish in a puff of logic.

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makapuf
Well the same could be said of most forms of art which were often created as a
reaction to established order only to become the new established order. See:
rock, rap, jeans, snickers, German language opera, abstract modern art.

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leereeves
Snickers?

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delinka
Perhaps “sneakers.”

~~~
makapuf
Lol right. Not a native speaker, sorry.

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amelius
Perhaps technology can help answer this.

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.

~~~
lr4444lr
1000 years from now, do you want our distant descendants to judge our
aesthetic merits by the Kardashians?

