What Do Artists Give Up in Museums?

Artworks with their wall texts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (credit: pxhere)

By Priya Shah

What does an artist give up in a museum? More specifically, when their art is on display, can artists effectively control or even influence how their work is displayed? Unsurprisingly, the answer is complicated. Courts have only begun to define what the law protects, even in disputes that have nothing to do with ideology. Today’s political climate has only made the stakes of that legal gap harder to ignore.

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA), 17 U.S.C. § 106A, gives living authors of a work of visual art the express ability to both claim authorship of that work and to prevent the use of their name as the author in cases of “distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation.”^[1] As a result, visual artists have rights both to attach their names to artworks publicly and to prevent an explicit association with others. However, in the case of museums, the story becomes a bit more complex.