Articles and news about recent issues involving litigation, new and upcoming artists, art pieces and the business that surrounds the art world.
Law Office of Stephen J. Goldberg
Business & Entertainment Attorney Los Angeles
Stephen Goldberg’s Art Law Column
in Artillery Magazine
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Art Brief: Trump Gives Arts the Hook
President Donald Trump is no fan of the arts. His first budget proposed entirely eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Congress saved both agencies by funding them in the current budget, but their future is still murky considering Trump’s contempt for and ignorance of the…
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New Chief For Moca (Again)
Does New Director Mean a Calm in the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum This week’s announcement that Klaus Biesenbach, director of New York’s PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite in Queens, was chosen to be the new MOCA director was greeted by mixed notices among the LA art community including: “He never smiles.” True…
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Art Brief: The Whitewash
Graffitist Scrawl New Rights For All Whenever I mention the V.A.R.A to artists, I’m invariably met with a blank stare. The Visual Arts Rights Act, passed by Congress in 1990, grants artists a form of Droit Moral or moral rights, intended to protect artists’ control over the fate of their works. Moral rights have been…
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Art Brief: Fending Off Censorship Today
Censorship of art must always bear a high burden—especially after an entire generation of work was nearly destroyed by the Nazis’ war on Modern Art (which they labeled “degenerate art”), involving confiscation of thousands of artworks, including those of Beckmann, Kirchner, and Picasso in the 1930s (which I have examined in a previous “Art Brief”…
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The Mona Lisa of the Middle East?
Salvator Mundi, a portrait of Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was sold to a Saudi Arabian prince for $450 million (including fees) at Christie’s New York auction last November, smashing the previous art sale record by more than a factor of two. Christie’s placed it in the middle of a major contemporary art auction…
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Ed Moses: A Remembrance | 1926-2018
Last Tuesday night (January 16, 2018), a day before he died, Ed Moses had an art opening of his latest work at a gallery space next to the new Hal’s restaurant in Playa Vista (where you can see a remarkable installation of his painted sliding door screens). Ed wasn’t at the reception which was unusual,…