Kindness or Catastrophe? Australia's experience of resale royalty rights

"Artist’s Resale Royalty in Australia: Strong evidence of a catastrophic decline in both sales and prices: Australia's Art Market Down 50%" is the title of an article in AAD (Art Antiques Design) by Australian artist and artists' resale royalty agitator John R. Walker. According to the abstract:

In this article, I shall give an overview of the highly corrosive impact, which the Artist’s Resale Royalty (ARR) has had, and is having on Australia’s Art market. The impact of ARR also appears to have had an entirely adverse reaction on the UK’s Art Market; with trade in a large proportion of valuable secondary market Art works now, quite obviously, taking flight to places like New York, Switzerland and Miami. Below, as you will see, many reputable, and governmental sources have been cited. Due to the implementation of this scheme, we, in Australia, have sadly seen our indigenous Art sector virtually wither away right in front of our eyes since the ARR was introduced back in 2010.

I’m an Australian Artist, I’m not being paid to write this, and the below is an honest appraisal of what we are facing here due to the ARR, and it is written based on my personal experience, and on factual publicly available information.

This article powerfully and persuasively puts the case for taking an urgent look at a scheme which, however well-intentioned its implementation may have been, appears to be in need of careful reappraisal.

To read this article in full, click here

Artists' resale royalties: a piece of pie, or not even that?

Chart and extrapolations by Prof Paul Fritjers, UQ

"Artists Resale Royalties: a piece of pie…", which you can read in full here, reflects some diligent digging by John Walker and which was posted earlier this month in Club Troppo ("The suppository of all centrist wisdom since 2002").  To give you some idea of what it's about, John opens with some facts and a question which he then discusses:

"The ARR scheme so far has cost taxpayers just over $2.2 million and as of December 2013 has delivered a total of 7,800 royalty payments, to 800 artists (or estates) with a median value of about $105 per payment. The scheme has, in three and a half years, only generated a total of less than $200,000 in management fees. It is unlikely that the scheme will be self-funding any time soon, if ever. And what has this costly public art project delivered?"

John's conclusion?

"The millions of dollars of public money that has been wasted on this scheme, is money that was not spent on helping emerging and lesser known artists gain access to public exhibition and potential markets. It is all those lesser known artists that have been really ripped off by the funded lobbyists for their pet ‘art project’".

Readers may wish consider whether the Australian ARR scheme is (i) right in principle and right in practice, (ii) right in principle but wrong in practice, (iv) wrong in principle and wrong in practice or, improbably but not impossibly, wrong in principle but right in practice.  Do let us know!