‖‖ Reviews / Recensions
Edited by Dominique Garingan, Julie Lavigne, and Leanne Notenboom Art Law: Cases and Controversies. By Paul Bain. Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2022. xxii, 362 p. Includes illustrations, table of cases, and index. ISBN 9780433509653 (softcover) $170.00. As author Paul Bain writes in his introduction to Art Law: Cases and Controversies, the last time a new book on Canadian art law was published was 1980. At the time, Aaron Milrad and Ella Agnew’s The Art World: Law Business and Practice in Canada identified the “photocopy machine” as the next big threat to copyright protection. How the art world has changed! Forty years after the publication of Milrad and Agnew’s book, the law has—in addition to the classic legal issues of copyright and moral rights—newer matters like NFTs (non-fungible tokens), rapidly advancing technology, social media, and changing social mores to contend with. Looking at this assortment of issues, it is clear that art law is not one cohesive body but is woven through several areas of law, including intellectual property, taxation, copyright, fraud, and censorship, as well as being a reflection of the current social environment. This text provides a modern look at these issues and how they affect artists, collectors, and cultural institutions.
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The author is a lawyer who specializes in entertainment, media, and intellectual property law, and is also active in the visual arts community, having served on the boards of several arts organizations and galleries. Eleven other experts, comprised of experienced practitioners and academics, each with a particular knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject, have also contributed chapters. Each contributor’s biography also mentions their own favourite work of art.
Despite this text being entitled Art Law: Cases and Controversies, its scope is limited to the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and photography—and does not include issues specific to the performing or literary arts. The text focuses on the Canadian and American experience, although there are some references to British and European perspectives for history, context, and comparison. Each chapter begins with a vignette from popular culture or a leading case that draws the reader into that chapter’s topic. These include the question of who owns the copyright in a photograph of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, whether the Eaton Centre had the right to install Christmas ribbons on Michael Snow’s Canada geese installation (called Flight Stop), and whether Naruto, the “selfie” macaque, has the right to copyright in his own image. Banksy’s failed attempts to copyright his work and Gustav Klimt’s stolen Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I also make an appearance. These examples and their accompanying images are very effective in illustrating, both figuratively and literally, the unique legal issues being discussed, creating a narrative thread that makes the text engaging, accessible, entertaining, and, to some extent, gossipy. However, this does not mean the text is frivolous. On the contrary, historical context, case law, and legislation provide a serious, practical, and academic examination of the issues at hand. The text begins with a clear and comprehensive overview of the two traditional aspects of art law in Canada and the United States. The first is copyright. In the Canadian chapter, Bain traces the history of copyright, from its origins in 18th century England to the modern-day Copyright Act, and looks at how to establish copyright, how it is protected, and
2023 Canadian Law Library Review/Revue canadienne des bibliothèques de droit, Volume/Tome 48, No. 3