Art Law Blog : New York Art Law Lawyer & Attorney : Fox Rothschild Law Firm : Theft, Intellectual Property, Institutional Negotiation : Manhattan, New York City

In July this blog reported that a recent ban on the number of art vendors in New York City Parks had been upheld by Judge Richard Sullivan.

As the New York Times has reported last Thursday, Justice Martin Schoenfeld of State Supreme Court in Manhattan granted a temporary restraining order that prevented the parks department and the city from enforcing the rules until today, when artists and the city are due in court for a hearing.

According to the Times, the new rules, which went into effect on July 19, set off a firestorm among the city’s vendors, who say the measures are unnecessary and create a chilling effect on self-expression in the city.

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Recent headlines highlighted the auction of the valuable art that once graced the halls of former investment banking titan Lehman Brothers.

Now a recent article in the Associated Press asks whether the continued downturn in the economy will lead to other -- solvent -- corporations to divest themselves of their art assets.

Of course many corporations purchase art for a variety of reasons: as the article points out, some companies purchase art for the apparent purpose of helping young artists, some companies for the purpose of cheering up their employees, and some companies to create a public image that may whitewash an otherwise troubled reputation.

Whetever the reason for purchasing the art, as no less an authority than Judd Tully points out, a major sell-off is unlikely because corporations don't want the public to think they are heading the way of Lehman.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art said  that its recent exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso was its seventh highest-attended show in the museum’s history.

The exhibition drew over 700,000 visitors, making it the museum’s best-attended show since 2001.

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Here is a link to a recent New York Times artciel describing two recent alleged attempts to separate motivated art purchasers from their dollars.

In the first, the article describes a recent attempt to sell 65 photograph negatives claimed to be the work of the late Ansel Adams.  According to the article, David W. Streets, is trying to sell a the negatives — found ten years ago at a garage sale in Fresno, Calif. — as the long lost work of the landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Streets, who according to The Times was “convicted of passing bad checks, fraud and petty theft over a seven-year period,” and the man who bought the negatives in 2000, Rick Norsigian, insist that they are Adams’s work “beyond a reasonable doubt” and are collectively worth $200 million. The two men are selling prints made from the negatives at between $1,500 and $7,500 each.

The second is the recent discovery of a group of 74 plasters allegedly made from wax and clay sculptures crafted by Edgar Degas. The plasters, in turn, are being used to cast a set of bronzes that are being marketed and sold for around $20 million even though, according to the article, Degas is thought to have only displayed one wax sculpture in his life.

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According to this August 4, 2010 report in the Wall Street Journal, the art market appears to be on a firm road to recovery.

As a basis for this report, among other things, the article cites to the following information:

* Christie's International PLC said it sold $2.57 billion of fine and decorative art in the first half, up 43% from a year earlier and the second-highest in the company's history.

* Christie's total includes $274.1 million in art it sold privately, up by more than a third from a year ago;

* Sotheby's said it auctioned $2.2 billion of art in the first half, more than double a year ago;

* At Christie's, overall prices were up for nearly all of the auction house's major art categories., including $853 million of Impressionist and modern art, up 37.4%; $460.7 million of postwar and contemporary art, up 139%; and $368.2 million of Asian art, up 120.6%.

These statistics do appear to show that the market has made a significant turnaround in one year.

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According to Bloomberg News, New York’s American Folk Art Museum, which has defaulted on $29.9 million of tax-exempt bonds, saw its deficit almost double from 2008 to 2009, according to its latest tax return.

The article states that the deficit increased to $7.23 million during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, up from $3.79 million in 2008. The return also shows that revenue from admissions at the nonprofit institution, whose collection includes folk art and works by self-taught artists, fell 13 percent to $306,054 in 2009.

The article alsoo states that, in July 2009, the 49-year-old museum stopped paying into a reserve fund for tax-exempt bonds issued by New York City’s Trust for Cultural Resources to finance construction of a new home next to the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street. It became the first institution to default on its loan agreement with the city trust since its inception in 1980.

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Fisk University in Nashville wants to sell a 50 percent share of an art collection donated to Fisk by Georgia O' Keefe in order to keep the school afloat, according to an article in Business Week.

According to the article, the contemplated sale would be for $30 million to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark. The school and the museum - founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton - would each house the collection and pay for its maintenance.

The school apparently hopes the infusion of cash will lead to more donations, and that Fisk could raise $150 million for its endowment.

The state says O'Keefe donated the prized collection for the benefit of Fisk students and local citizens, not to leverage money.

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