Posted on: July 19, 2017 by Alexander Herman
Yesterday, the IAL held a successful afternoon seminar on art and insolvency at the London offices of Lipman Karas LLP. This area doesn’t get talked about often, so we felt the time was right to begin an examination of what can happen to works of art when the company or individual that owns them becomes […]
Posted on: July 7, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A warning for museums? There have been two interesting recent developments relating to antiquities: one regarding allegedly looted antiquities, the other regarding artefacts at the centre of a legal storm that has been brewing for some 15 years; both involve the United States of America. The first is the action brought by US District Attorneys […]
Posted on: June 30, 2017 by Alexander Herman
Yesterday, during what appears to be the near-conclusion of the battle for Mosul in Iraq, Iraqi forces moved further into the centre of the old town and, as they did, came across the ruins of the famed al-Nuri Mosque. The 12th century mosque, the same holy site where the ISIS caliphate had been proclaimed in […]
Posted on: May 24, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A number of issues arise when we use images of artistic works online. Here, I am referring to copyright and to the specific treatment of images of older works that may – or may not – have fallen into the public domain. Of course, once copyright has expired in a work, that work will enter the public […]
Posted on: May 17, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A friend Debbie Hicks is undertaking a massive cycling challenge in memory of former IAL Academic Principal Norman Palmer. Debbie will be cycling for three days this June from one tip of Wales to the other, along the way climbing its three tallest peaks, Snowden, Cadair Idris and Pen Y Fan. The total height of these three mountains is […]
Posted on: April 28, 2017 by Alexander Herman
An excellent show has begun today at the British Library in London called ‘Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths‘. It offers a view into some of the most important – and iconic – texts and visual images of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that marked not only Russia, but also the world. Instead of focusing solely on […]
Posted on: April 25, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A story has been brewing over the past few weeks involving the famed Charging Bull sculpture that sits in the middle of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. The sculpture was made by Arturo di Modica and installed without permission near Wall St as a Christmas gift from the artist to New Yorkers in December 1989. […]
Posted on: April 8, 2017 by Alexander Herman
Well done to all the students on our Diploma in Law and Collections Management course (DipLCM) that finished last week in Sydney. We were happy to see that participants hailed from a variety of institutions throughout both Australia and New Zealand. A very good dynamic within the group; and we probably learned as much from the class […]
Posted on: February 28, 2017 by Alexander Herman
In Yasmina Reza’s 1994 play ‘Art‘, three male friends spend much time discussing the question, ‘What is art?’ The reason is that one of the characters, Serge, has bought a work from a popular contemporary artist that is more or less just a white canvas. More or less, because there is some debate as to whether […]
Posted on: February 20, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A 16th century painting by Jacopo Pontormo, Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, which had been subject to an export deferral beginning in December 2015, is now stuck in cultural export limbo. This is because the owner of the portrait, American billionaire J. T. Hill, has refused a matching offer from a British institution, The National Gallery, […]