Welcome to Art and Artifice

Art and Artifice is a weblog dedicated to those areas of law that interface with the world of art. These areas include, but are not limited to, the following zones of interest:

Life Before Blogs 1:
the cave painting

• art as intellectual property
• art valuation for legal purposes
• artists' resale rights
• recovery of stolen artworks
• planning permission for architectural and installation art
• import/export and customs regulations
• artists' moral rights
• art and traditional knowledge
• commercial exploitation of art
• art in galleries, museums and archives
• self-expression issues including obscenity and public decency

The blogging team consists of lawyers who love art and who can view law itself as an art form, with its own symmetry, culture and aesthetics. We invite you to share our enjoyment, our interest and our thoughts by visiting this site when the mood takes you. A more regular drip-feed of art law information can be derived by signing up to receive our posts by email (just follow the instructions in the side bar) or by RSS feed (ditto). and do feel free to share your ideas with us. Few lawyers, if any, make money from art law -- but we are all the richer for your thoughts.