In recent years, the number of conflicts related to the misuse of street art and graffiti has been on the rise around the world. Some cases involve claims of misappropriation related to corporate advertising campaigns, while others entail the destruction or 'surgical' removal of street art from the walls on which they were created. In this work, Enrico Bonadio brings together a group of experts to provide the first comprehensive analysis of issues related to copyright in street art and graffiti. Chapter authors shed light not only on the legal tools available in thirteen key jurisdictions for street and graffiti artists to object to unauthorized exploitations and unwanted treatments of their works, but also offer policy and sociological insights designed to spur further debate on whether and to what extent the street art and graffiti subcultures can benefit from copyright and moral rights protection.
'Copyright law has always somehow managed to adapt to new technological and social developments as well as to new artistic and creative practices. However, every time such a development occurs, the legitimate question arises if the system is adaptable or if the breakthrough is so gigantic that a new system needs to be elaborated. In any case, new scholarly reflections are needed in regular intervals and that is exactly the purpose of this fascinating edited collection by Enrico Bonadio and Nicola Lucchi on non-conventional copyright, exploring from various angles the copyright issues of all sorts of creations ranging from unconventional art forms, new music and atypical cultural practices to new advances in technology, not forgetting to investigate the delicate issues around copyright on illegal and immoral works.' - Christophe Geiger, University of Strasbourg, France Copyright law constantly evolves to keep up with societal changes and technological advances. Contemporary forms of creativity can threaten the comfortable conceptions of copyright law as creative people continually find new ways of expressing themselves. In this context, Non-Conventional Copyrightidentifies possible new spaces for copyright protection. With current copyright law in mind, the contributions explore if the law should be more flexible as to whether new or unconventional forms of expression - including graffiti, tattoos, land art, conceptual art and bio art, engineered DNA, sport movements, jokes, magic tricks, DJ sets, perfume making, typefaces, or illegal and immoral works - deserve protection. Vitally, the contributors suggest that it may be time to challenge some of the basic tenets of copyright laws by embracing more flexible ways to identify protectable works and interpret the current requirements for protection. Additionally, some contributors cast doubts about whether copyright is the right instrument to address and regulate these forms of expression. Contemporary in topic, this thought-provoking book will be essential reading for intellectual property law scholars, practitioners and policymakers. Creative people and those involved in the creative industries will also find this book an engaging read. Contributors include: E. Bonadio, S. Burke, C. Cronin, T. Dagne, T.W. Dornis, F.J. Dougherty, T.M. Gates, M.P. George, E. Haber, S. Karapapa, Y.M. King, T. Iverson, N. Lucchi, G. Mazziotti, J. McCutcheon, L. McDonagh, M. Maggiore, P. Mezei, M. Mimler, A.G. Scaria, C.Y.N. Smith, X. Tang
Bonadio brings together experts to provide the first comprehensive analysis of issues related to copyright in street art and graffiti. This book sheds light on the legal tools available for artists and offers policy and sociological insights to spur further debate. It will appeal to legal scholars and law practitioners around the world.
The Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art integrates and reviews current scholarship in the field of graffiti and street art. Thirty-seven original contributions are organized around four sections: History, Types, and Writers/Artists of Graffiti and Street Art; Theoretical Explanations of Graffiti and Street Art/Causes of Graffiti and Street Art; Regional/Municipal Variations/Differences of Graffiti and Street Art; and, Effects of Graffiti and Street Art. Chapters are written by experts from different countries throughout the world and their expertise spans the fields of American Studies, Art Theory, Criminology, Criminal justice, Ethnography, Photography, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Visual Communication. The Handbook will be of interest to researchers, instructors, advanced students, libraries, and art gallery and museum curators. This book is also accessible to practitioners and policy makers in the fields of criminal justice, law enforcement, art history, museum studies, tourism studies, and urban studies as well as members of the news media. The Handbook includes 70 images, a glossary, a chronology, and the electronic edition will be widely hyperlinked.
For someone who shuns the limelight so completely that he conceals his name, never shows his face and gives interviews only by email, Banksy is remarkably famous. From his beginnings as a Bristol graffiti artist, his artwork is now sold at auction for six-figure sums and hangs on celebrities’ walls. The appearance of a new Banksy is national news, his documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop was Oscar-nominated and people queue for hours to see his latest exhibition. Now more National Treasure than edgy outsider, who is Banksy and how did he become what he is today? In the first attempt to tell the full story of Banksy’s life and career, Will Ellsworth-Jones pieces together a picture of his world and unpicks its contradictions. Whether art or vandalism, anti-establishment or sell-out, Banksy and his work have become a cultural phenomenon and the question ‘Who is Banksy?’ is as much about his career as it is ‘the man behind the wall’. 'Britain's unlikeliest national treasure' Independent ‘A fascinating portrait that elicits admiration for a man who, despite his increasingly unconvincing efforts to retain some shred of his vandal status, has had an undeniable impact on art’ The Times
What is the relationship between street art and the law? In A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law, Andrea Baldini argues that street art has a constitutive relationship with the law. A crucial aspect of the identity of this urban art kind depends on its capacity to turn upside down dominant uses of public spaces. Street artists subvert those laws and social norms that regulate the city. Baldini shows that street art has not only transformed public spaces and their functions into artistic material, but has also turned its rebellious attitude toward the law into a creative resource. He aims at elucidating and arguing for this claim, while drawing important implications at the level of street art’s metaphysics, value, and relationship with rights of intellectual property, in particular copyright and moral rights. At the other end of the spectrum of contractual art, street art is outlaw art.
First published in 2001, Art and Copyright has established itself as a leading text in the field. Revised and updated, this third edition includes additional coverage of the following topics: - The relationship between designs law and artistic works; - EU and Brexit developments; - AI-created works; - graffiti and other non-conventional works; - blockchain and rights management; - orphan works; - new exceptions to copyright; and - digital copyright, art databases and online platforms. This book remains an invaluable work for all those involved in art law and for intellectual property lawyers involved with the exploitation and/or sale of artistic works, as well as for intellectual property academics, researchers, law students, curators, publishers, artists, gallery owners, auction houses, and those developing and running online art platforms, databases and technology to transact in art.
“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
What is the relationship between street art and the law? In 'A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law', Andrea Baldini argues that street art has a constitutive relationship with the law. A crucial aspect of the identity of this urban art kind depends on its capacity to turn upside down dominant uses of public spaces. Street artists subvert those laws and social norms that regulate the city. Baldini shows that street art has not only transformed public spaces and their functions into artistic material, but has also turned its rebellious attitude toward the law into a creative resource. He aims at elucidating and arguing for this claim, while drawing important implications at the level of street art's metaphysics, value, and relationship with rights of intellectual property, in particular copyright and moral rights. At the other end of the spectrum of contractual art, street art is outlaw art.
What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.
