Artists' Rights in the work of Art during the period of Contemporary Art

The foundation of my study stems from the decision to deepen the topic of Artists’ rights in the work of art during the period of Contemporary Art relating it to the legal context. The reason I decided to examine such an argument has a dual nature. My interest in art has certainly been transmitted to me since childhood due to the context in which I grew up, being my father an Art dealer. Secondly, I was passionate about Law & Art course, which is, therefore, the basis on which I founded my research.  The goal of my thesis is therefore to deepen the rights of authors and provide a very accurate analysis, emphasizing especially their characteristics, and contextualizing them in the legal context. The thesis is divided into five chapters: the first one provides a detailed description of Art considered an open concept, considering a series of definitions made by law, to try to understand how this situation of openness is managed by law. The second chapter will focus on the concept of artists and the principle of copyright. I will describe what copyright is, who has the right of copyright when it was created and other requirements, focusing on the Berne Convention for the Protection of Artistic Work and the International Agreement Governing Copyright of 1886. The third chapter deals with the Authors’ Moral Rights, describing and contextualizing them within the legal context, providing for accurate differentiation between the Moral Rights in Europe and the United States. In the fourth chapter, the analysis focuses on the Artist’s contracts, the charm of the contract to trace Artworks, as a tool to go against the copyright, doing illegal actions, and the concept of Contract in terms of a Work of Art. Then the discussion moves on to the Artists’ reserved rights transfer and sale agreement (Siegelaub-Projanski Agreement) describing in detail the terms of the Agreement and then the Phenomenon of Conceptual Art. In conclusion, in the fifth chapter, we will discuss the concept of Contemporary Art by referring to a very specific and practical subject namely the preservation, conservation, and restoration of contemporary artworks, which is something that proves to be a problem due to the many strange ways of producing art.