Art & Law Workshop: Fiduciary Duties of Art Advisors
October 24, 2024
About this Event
The Center for Art Law joined attorney Richard Lehun, Founding member of Stropheus, t0 delve into the complex world of fiduciary duties in art advising. This workshop explored the fiduciary duties of art advisors. It addressed key legal concepts, contrasting fiduciary responsibilities with contractual obligations. It examined the advisor’s role as an agent, exploring duties such as loyalty, prudence, and the handling of property, as well as the potential for conflicts of interest and liabilities for losses or breaches.
The workshop also covered agency costs, the authority to conduct transactions, warranties, and ethical standards like the APAA Code of Ethics, providing a comprehensive overview of both mandatory and persuasive guidelines in art advising.
About the Speaker
Richard Lehun is a Founding member of Stropheus, a New York-based legal and business collective for the arts. He is responsible for transactions involving fiduciary duties and conflicts of interest, particularly those relating to artist-gallery relations, artist commissions, art advising, consignor-auction house relations, gallery, museum, auction house, and non-profit ethics. He also works in the area of arts-related intellectual property issues, including copyright and trademark. Richard Lehun completed his JD and then moved directly to the SJD program at McGill University. He gathered practical legal experience with Léger Robic Richard, Montréal’s respected intellectual property practitioner. While a teaching fellow at McGill’s law faculty, Richard Lehun was cross-appointed as a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School.
Richard Lehun studied under Jürgen Habermas at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main on a DAAD Scholarship and completed his Magister Artium on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. During his studies in Frankfurt, he was admitted to the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie (dffb) for studies in film and television directing. His self-financed graduating film, Fetisch, was awarded the German National Film Prize (Bundesfilmpreis).
He also teaches art law and lectures at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
