A visitor to Van Gogh's bedroom in Second Life. Versions of the original painting are in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris

via The Art Newspaper, May 22, 2008:

Copyright, conflicts of interest, and how to deal with Uncle Sam

US museum lawyers met last month to discuss the most pressing issues they are currently facing

Martha Lufkin | 22.5.08 | Issue 191

Over 200 museum employees, lawyers and interested parties convened in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the 36th annual conference on Legal Issues in Museum Administration in April.

The course, which brings legal know-how to museums without lawyers on staff, is offered by the American Law Institute-American Bar Association, and is co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution with the cooperation of the American Association of Museums (AAM).

In an address on the state of museums, AAM president Ford W. Bell told the group that museums are facing challenges including tight government budgets, a perception that charities serve the rich and negative press about perceived abuses at certain museums. The conference discussed new ways of dealing with intellectual property in the digital age, museum policies on corporate governance and conflicts of interest under increasingly probing government scrutiny.

The Second Life syndrome

Sharon Farb, associate university librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles, said that as museums put more images and content online, more users will ask to use it; she advises that museums not require licences for everything. Instead, they should make clear on their websites which content can be reproduced without permission, and should post all licence forms for those objects which require them. Virginia Rutledge, Vice President and General Counsel of the non-profit Creative Commons, San Francisco (CC), described the CC licence which piggybacks on existing copyright law to let copyright holders "signal when it is just fine" for a user to copy, or even alter, a work. The New Museum in New York, for example, uses CC licences to permit copying. The CC website posts six different licence forms to choose from, and tells you how to mark your content so users will know what copyright rules apply (http://creativecommons.org).

As web users find new applications for museum images, including those possibly obtained without permission, how should museums respond? Phoenix lawyer Connie J. Mabelson described websites which regularly violate copyright laws, although the usual copyright enforcement steps still apply. At Second Life or similar sites, virtual art--the hard copies of which may be owned by real museums--is being bought and sold by paying participants for virtual money, which can be exchanged for real dollars.

Visitors create an avatar which can enter a virtual, 3-D rendition of a famous bedroom scene painted by Van Gogh or buy furniture inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. If the original work is protected by copyright, Ms Mabelson asks, should a museum take steps to enforce it, or do the virtual reworkings fall within a "fair use" exception to copyright infringement? (Perhaps the issue will be debated at Second Life's virtual bar association, which does exist.) Ms Mabelson advises that a museum's fair use policy should address what the museum should do if a museum image appears on a wiki, an online site where any user can add content.

The museum comes first

Recent scandals over alleged misconduct by top US museum officials have caused museums to review their conflicts of interest policies regulating board members and employees. Conflicts arise when a trustee's duty of loyalty to the museum is compromised, says Lori Fox, acting vice president, general counsel and secretary at the J. Paul Getty Trust; she advises that museums have a well-written conflicts of interest policy that defines the trustees' duties, prohibits potential conflicts, and provides a way to resolve them.

For example, conflicts can arise if a trustee collects art that the museum might collect; trustees should be forbidden to buy deaccessioned art, or to use inside information for their own benefit, such as to buy an artist's work before the museum announces its purchase of art by the same artist, which could drive up prices. Museums should also require annual disclosure forms from trustees and some employees to identify possible conflicts, including asking about the trustee's art acquisitions and whether the trustee has received gifts from museum staff or anyone the museum does business with. For example, trustees may seek favours from museum staff, such as asking a conservator to restore a privately owned manuscript, which would take the conservator away from his duties. While this may be a way to cultivate donors, the Smithsonian Institution prohibits using staff time and services for private uses.

When a conflict with a board member arises, the trustee's interest in a possible transaction should be disclosed and the trustee must be excluded from the decision, which the board's audit committee or even the state attorney general can be asked to review. The board must still ask whether the proposed transaction is in the museum's best interests, which it might be, says Frederic Goldstein, general counsel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Each situation should be reviewed on its facts: while an exhibition of a trustee's collection of local maps by a small museum may increase the collection's value, the benefits to the museum and its community may be so great that the display is still in the institution's best interests.

Government scrutiny

Congress is seeking to stop perceived abuses in the non-profit world, and is using the tax law to do so. The new revision to the annual tax return for non-profit organisations, Form 990, seeks significantly more information about how museums are run. Organisations will first file the return for tax years beginning this year. The form "shows the government's increased role in governance and conflicts of interest", says Marsha Shaines, deputy general counsel to the Smithsonian Institution. The information that charities provide on the forms will be publicly available. The museum must summarise its missions and activities, changes in its programmes and its achievements of its exempt purpose.

New questions about governance and management mean that the museum should have policies in place before the form is filed, Ms Shaines advises. For example, the form asks whether the board and committees contemporaneously documented their meetings during the year, whether the organisation has a written conflicts of interest policy, and whether officers, trustees and key employees are required to disclose annually any interests that could give rise to a conflict. The form asks whether the charity enforces its conflicts policy, and whether it has whistleblower protection and document retention and destruction policies. Museums must further disclose whether they determined director compensation using an independent review and comparability data, and contemporaneously substantiated their decision-making process. The form also requests the dollar details on first class travel, travel for companions, and housing allowances for directors and trustees.

While it is not clear whether the Internal Revenue Service will be able to process all this information, the public and press will now be able to review it.

Don't get political

US charities are prohibited from participating in political campaigns, and cannot attempt to influence legislation. The rules are complex, and stiff penalties can apply. For example, museums cannot tell people to urge their congressmen to vote in favour of art funding.

A conference participant asked anonymously if a museum can host an exhibition on the anti-war movement within the Democratic Party? Under the law, a "facts and circumstances" test applies. The test is used to determine whether a non-profit is participating in a political campaign, and one factor could be how close in time the activity is to the campaign. The anti-war exhibition could raise an issue if it includes present-day events and differentiates between political parties. Both political parties should be covered, or the subject should be restricted to the past, says Marcus Owens, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC. "If you think a political statement is going to pop out of a visiting artist's mouth at a lecture, you might want to start the programme with a disclaimer."

The 2008 course book "Legal Issues in Museum Administration," containing licence forms, conflicts of interest policies, employee standards of conduct and other materials, can be obtained from ALI-ABA at www.ali-aba.org or tel: +1 800 253-6397

via BMA :

Beyond the Waves

Panel: Beyond the Waves, Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations

3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Forum, 4th Floor

Presented with feminist cooperative gallery A.I.R. as part of a month of events sponsored by Art W, this panel features feminist artists and critics Carolee Schneemann, Mira Shor, Brynna Tucker, Susan Bee, and Emma Bee-Bernstein, and explores connections between generations of feminist artists.

@ The Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at The Brooklyn Museum

Free and open to the public.

The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY        
          Telephone: (718) 638-5000; TTY: (718) 399-8440
Subway: Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC. Bee has had four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery and has been a member since 1996. She is co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke, 2000) and co-edits M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Granary Books has published six of her artist's books. She teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism and Writing program. Her website is: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee

Emma Bee Bernstein is a photographer and writer. She has a BA from the University of Chicago in Visual Arts and Art History. She wrote her thesis on feminism in contemporary photography. She has shown her photos at A.I.R. Gallery, the Smart Museum in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. The New York Times featured her work in Vita Excolatur, a University of Chicago erotica magazine. She has written about feminism in M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Bernstein is currently co-writing with Nona Willis-Aronowitz, GirlDrive, a book on young women and feminism, based on their cross-country roadtrip.

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist who ransformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Painting, photography, performance art and installation works shown at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled "Up To And Including Her Limits". Film and video retrospectives Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Film Theatre, London; Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recipient of a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1997, 1998); 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship; Gottlieb Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME. Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association, 2000.

Schneemann has published widely; books include Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976), Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997). Forthcoming publications include Imaging Her Erotics, from MIT Press. A selection of her letters edited by Kristine Stiles is also forthcoming.

Mira Schor is a painter and writer. Her honors include awards in painting from the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, and the 1999 College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.

Schor participated in the CalArts Feminist Art Program’s project Womanhouse. She frequently addresses feminism in art and issues of gender representation and power relations in her painting and her critical writing. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/. Her essay "I am not now nor have I ever been..." appeared in the February 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches in the MFA Program in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design.

Brynna Tuckerlives and works in Brooklyn, NY as an artist, independent curator, and as Career Counselor/Internship Coordinator at Pratt Institute. She studied Sculpture with a minor in Art History at the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth (BFA, 1999) and studied Fine Arts and Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (MFA/MS 2001). She is currently working on a photographic project called tentatively called Brooklyn Block Portrait stemming from her previous project called Cracks in the Concrete Jungle, a series of site-specific works throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Her recent exhibitions include w25thbtwn10thand11th, a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, NY as part of her 2006-2007 Fellowship. Her recent curatorial projects include Artists in Contested Spaces which happened November 2006 at Pratt Institute, as part of the Art in the Contested City Conference.

Four programs will take place in the lower level conference room on Sunday, March 30th, at 11:00 AM, 12:30, 2:00 and 3:30 PM.  Lectures are free with regular fair admission, no reservations required.

Bloggers, you'll get in free as members of the press if you show a printout of your most recent post.

Sunday, March 30th
11:00 AM

Bloggers and Their Impact on the Art World.

There's now more art coverage in the blogosphere than in conventional publications. Do we handle this responsibility with conventional journalistic standards or something that's faster and looser as befits an instantaneous medium? How do we manage the formidable network that has developed around and because of us? Where do we go from here?

Moderator:
Joanne Mattera, painter, Joanne Mattera Art Blog.

Panelists:
Edward Winkleman, Winkleman Gallery and Edward_Winkleman blog;
Carol Diehl, painter and critic, Artvent;
Paddy Johnson, blogger, Art Fag City;
C-Monster, freelance writer whose identity will be revealed at the event;
Sharon Butler, artist/writer/professor, Two Coats of Paint.

[continue to full program schedule]

Park South Hotel, 122 E. 28th Street, between Park and Lexington. Look for the "Art Bloggers @ Red Dot" sign in the lobby to direct you to the conference room.

via ExitArt.org:

E.P.A.

March 15 – May 3, 2008

Opening Saturday March 15, 7-9pm

ARTISTS // CURATORS// EVENTS // SUPPORT // INFORMATION

Exit Art is pleased to announce the opening of E.P.A. (Environmental Performance Actions), the first project of S.E.A, a large-scale program dealing with current environmental concerns and the way artists respond to them. E.P.A is a group exhibition surveying recent performance work from around the world that addresses current environmental crises. The exhibition will consist of videos, photographs, texts, related ephemera and a film program documenting recent performances. For this opening project we have invited curator, Amy Lipton, and founder/co-curator Patricia Watts of ecoartspace, a leading international environmental arts organization, to collaborate with Exit Art on the organization and presentation of this material. E.P.A. will include performance documentation from more than 30 international artists. These works, created in the public sphere, draw attention to and engage the public in a dialogue about issues such as climate change, watersheds, urbanization and, ultimately, human survival. E.P.A. will set the precedence for future exhibitions of S.E.A. dealing with environmental issues including The End of Oil, about the global oil crisis and alternative energy, and Consume, about food production, agricultural and sustainable living practices. An exhibition of historical social-environmental art works is also planned to place this work in context.

ARTISTS
Brandon Ballengée, Vaughn Bell/Sarah Kavage/Nicole Kistler, Mark Brest van Kempen, Carissa Carman/Joanna Lake, Susanne Cockrell/Ted Purves, Xavier Cortada, Carrie Dashow/Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Erica Fielder, Ozzie Forbes, Futurefarmers, The Center for Tactical Magic, Fritz Haeg, Amy Howden-Chapman, Basia Irland, Scot Kaplan, Carolyn Lambert, Robin Lasser, Kathryn Miller, Miss Rockaway Armada, Matthew Moore, Eve Mosher, EcoArtTech: Cary Peppermint/Christine Nadir, Andrea Polli and Joe Gimore with Dr. Patrick Market, Rapid Response (Cobb/Fend/Fischer/Meyer), James Reed and Social Sculpture Research Unit/Earth Agenda Projects, Austin Shull, Brooke Singer/Brian Rigney Hubbard, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Chris Sollars CURATORS
Jeanette Ingberman
Papo Colo
Amy Lipton
Patricia Watts

PUBLIC EVENTS
Wednesday, March 26, 7pm
HUMAN/NATURE:

Panel discussion with:
Eve Mosher, artist
David Van Luven, climate change scientist and Hudson River program director at

The Nature Conservancy

Moderator:
Patricia Watts, founder and co-curator of ecoartspace

Presented in collaboration with ecoartspace and The Nature Conservancy

Human/Nature's fifth installment is presented in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy and features the artist Eve Mosher in discussion with climate change scientist David Van Luven and Patricia Watts. Mosher's yearlong public art project HighWaterLine involved the artist marking ten-feet above sea level along the New York waterfront with a chalk line to bring attention to the dangers of flooding brought on by climate change. Join us as we discuss the implications of climate change on New York City's landscape and community – and explore how art can connect human beings with the awareness of larger environmental issues. A reception will follow the panel discussion.

GENERAL INFORMATION
Exit Art is located at 475 Tenth Avenue at 36th Street. Exit Art is open each Tuesday through Thursday, 10 am – 6 pm;  and LATE Friday, 10 am – 8 pm AND

Saturday, noon – 8 pm Closed Sunday and Monday.  There is a suggested donation of $5.  For more information call 212-966-7745.

Ecoartspace is one of the leading international ecoart organizations established as a non-profit in 1999. Providing a platform for artists addressing environmental issues, Ecoartspace promotes a diverse range of artworks that are participatory, collaborative, interdisciplinary and educational. Their philosophy embodies a broader concept of art in its relationship to the world and seeks to connect human beings aesthetically with the awareness of larger ecological systems. For more information, visit http://www.ecoartspace.org.