Steve and Katie talk with Professor Stephen Urice and Judge Simon Frankel about their careers in art law, art law teaching, and their authorship of the 6th edition of the renowned art law textbook “Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts.” They talk about art law as an academic subject, how to teach and present art law to students, and the experience of updating and rewriting an iconic textbook originally written by the founder of art law teaching, John Henry Merryman.
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An Update on the Manhattan DA’s Turnover Proceeding against the Art Institute of Chicago
Katie and Steve discuss the recent decision by the New York Supreme Court granting the Manhattan District Attorney request for a turnover order directing the Art Institute of Chicago to return a drawing by Egon Schiele, “Russian War Prisoner,” that the museum acquired in 1966. Katie and Steve review the history of the ownership of the drawing by Fritz Grünbaum, a cabaret singer who was killed by the Nazis in 1941, and the legal proceedings involving his art collection leading up to this controversial decision.
The Problem of Sleepers
Steve and Katie speak with Swiss art lawyer Anne Laure Bandle about the subject of her book “The Sale of Misattributed Artworks and Antiques at Auction” – the problem of “sleepers,” or misattributed and undervalued works of art sold at auction. We all dream of buying a painting at a yard sale that we later discover to be worth millions of dollars. On this podcast, we discuss the market incentives and structures that prevent discovery of sleepers.
Updates on Art, Free Speech, and Government Censorship
Steve and Katie welcome back Professor Amy Adler to discuss the First Amendment’s free speech protections as they apply to artistic expression in the context of several recent incidents. Specifically, they discuss the police seizure of certain Sally Mann photographs from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in the context of obscenity and child pornography laws, the removal of the For Freedoms billboard depicting the march on Selma in Montgomery, Alabama, and the lawsuit about the Nirvana “Nevermind” album cover depicting a naked baby.
The Law of Stolen Art in Germany
Katie and Steve speak with renowned German art lawyer Dr. Katharina Garbers-von Boehm about the law of title in Germany as it applies to art, including the concepts of good and bad faith in considering ownership, the legal primacy of possession, and the doctrine of adverse possession that allows possessors of stolen property, like Nazi-looted art, to take good title after a certain number of years. They discuss differences under U.S. law, particularly with respect to stolen property, soft laws that encourage voluntary actions that the law may foreclose, and recent German law developments surrounding Nazi-looted art.