Lauren van Haaften-Schick

The intersections of art and law are rarely considered. Yet, every jurisdiction has laws limiting the rights of collectors and granting protections to artists (and vice-versa), and contractual terms can impact how art is made, acquired, and exhibited. Artists have also engaged the law in order to critique and reform it. In the 1960s-’70s, as artists in the U.S. challenged accepted aesthetic forms through conceptual practices, they also questioned property and power relations concerning art by experimenting with agreements and dematerialized media, advocating for artists’ rights laws, and protesting inequity. My dissertation examines this period of legal experimentation and activism by following the circulation of the iconic The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, developedby conceptual art curator-dealer Seth Siegelaub and lawyerRobert Projansky in New York in 1971. “The Artist’s Contract” was envisioned to become thestandard agreement between artists and collectors when works are sold. Its aesthetic and linguistic form was influenced by conceptual art certificates that challenged art as commodity and as the property of collectors, and its purpose was spurred by artists’ activism to control who could own their work and how. It also emerged in tandem with the rise of the women’s movement in art. The Artist’s Contract has been seen by many as a failure, for its uptake was minimal and it did not yield an equitable art market. Nonetheless, it is an emblem of artists’ rights, foundational within the adjacent field of Art Law, and continues to be reanimated by artists today. My dissertation alters art history’s narrative that the Contract failed by tracing its circulations to reveal unmapped afterlives, as artists invoked it to advocate for resale royalties legislation, to critique the market, and to promote equal rights for women. By exposing these overlooked intersections of art and law, the Contract emerges as a vehicle for imagining how relations of ownership, authorship, equity, and power in art, law, and culture could be reconceived.