Tag Archives: sell

Done right, selling museum pieces can work – but probably not with Michelangelos

Posted on: October 1, 2020 by Alexander Herman

This comment first appeared on The Art Newspaper website on 25 September 2020. It has been reproduced with the editorial staff’s kind permission. Is the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) going to sell its Michelangelo? It seems a preposterous proposition, but these are rather preposterous times. The idea, apparently floated by a handful of Royal […]

Mixed fortunes for art in the UK’s regions

Posted on: June 6, 2019 by Emily Gould

“Interesting and challenging times” was how the UK Museums Association Director, Sharon Heal, described the current climate for the sector in her introduction to the Association’s Annual Report last year. No more acutely are those challenges felt than by the UK’s regional museums, many of which are run by local authorities. Over half of these […]

Talk by Alexander Herman on museums, ethics and deaccession

Posted on: March 13, 2019 by Kiri Cragin Folwell

Last week, our Assistant Director Alexander Herman gave a talk at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, on the topic of museums, law, ethics, deaccession and restitution. The talk was entitled “Values & Art: Ethics in the Management of Culture” and was part of Ryerson’s Business Ethics speaker series at the Ted Rogers School of Management. […]

The Spies-Ernst case: Art experts in France can breathe a sigh of relief

Posted on: January 27, 2016 by Judith Bouchardeau and Mathilde Roellinger

The discovery of the art forgery scandal perpetrated by Wolfang Beltracchi has given rise to a number of legal proceedings. The recent decision of the Court of Appeal of Versailles, involving art expert Werner Spies and a painting attributed to Max Ernst, is among them. The facts are as follows. At the 2004 Paris Biennale […]

UK Government extends export ban on Sekhemka statue

Posted on: October 27, 2015 by Alexander Herman

This is a short update on our piece from this summer about the export ban placed on the £15 million Sekhemka statue. While it may have seemed doubtful that a UK entity would be willing (or, more importantly, able) to buy the statue and keep it in the country, there does now appear to be interest in doing so. […]

The Moral Rights in a Banksy?

Posted on: September 14, 2015 by Alexander Herman

As reported far and wide, last Friday a High Court decision was rendered in a case involving a piece of Banksy street art called ‘Art Buff’, which had been stripped off a wall in Folkestone, England, and sent to the US for sale. The work had been added to the side of a building in 2014, in conjunction with a town […]