Law Commons^™

The Threat Of Termination In A Dematerialized Art Market, Peter J. Karol

Law Faculty Scholarship

Conceptual and video artworks generally resist reduction to a single, material object. Nevertheless, there remains a robust market for them. Buyers of conceptual pieces will often acquire plans and certificates of authenticity, essentially instructions for realizing the work, rather than a particular physical article. Collectors of video art, for their part, generally attain a copy of the video embedded in a disc or file of some sort. In other words, they attain digital information. Because these artworks lack a core tangible object, however, they depend heavily on copyright licenses to be realized, performed or shown. This, in turn, makes them …