Artists Have Been Attempting to Secure Royalties on Their Work for More Than a Century. Blockchain Finally Offers Them a Breakthrough
There s a through line from attempts to reform the art market in the 60s to artists like Simon de la Rouviere s work today.
The Artwork Is Always on Sale V2 (2020).
Amid all the recent backlash against NFTs, the real and exciting possibilities that blockchain technology offers for solving longstanding flaws in the art market could be lost. The great promise of blockchain is something more than just letting people buy and sell digital art. This new technology holds the potential to give artists of all kinds equity in their work.
Featured in Can Artists Use Their Sale Contracts to Game the System?
50 years ago, a manifesto by Seth Siegelaub reimagined what economic justice could look like in the arts
Graphic for KADIST’s new Artist Contract, 2020. Courtesy: KADIST
In March 1971, a broadside boldly labelled
The Artist’s Reserved Rights
Transfer and Sale Agreement rolled off an independent press in New York. Across the poster’s front was a manifesto by Seth Siegelaub, the innovative conceptual art curator-publisher and former dealer, outlining ‘some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world’. Its verso, drafted by the young lawyer Robert Projansky, contained 19 clauses in heavy-handed legalese promising to remedy those ills. Among the terms was the right for artists to refuse exhibitions of their work, the right to know who purchased it and, most controversially, the right to claim 15 percent of any resale profits, giving artists a voice in how their work is used an
Commonwealth and Council gallery family portrait at Elysian Park, Los Angeles. Photo: Ruben Diaz
Covid-19 has laid bare the unsustainable expectations of an increasingly stratified market and the narrowing margins of both creative and financial success it yields. But the Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth & Council has revised its business plan to rethink how small and mid-level galleries can turn a profit and support their artists in both lean and flush times going forward.
Started by Young Chung over a decade ago as an apartment gallery in LA’s Koreatown, Commonwealth & Council quietly announced via its holiday newsletter last week that it has started the Council Fund, an initiative that would help support artists’ financial needs that are normally outside of the scope of a traditional gallery, like health insurance, personal emergency aid and the development of non-commercial projects.