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Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation v. Christoph Büchel: An Appellate Perspective on the Visual Artists Rights Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

Anastasia Telesetsky
Anastasia Telesetsky
Affiliation:
University of Idaho College of Law. Email: [email protected]
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Extract

When the U.S. Congress passed the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) in 1990, no legislator really anticipated that courts would be applying the act to art installations that were only half-finished. But this was the very challenge that the U.S. Appellate Court for the First Circuit faced in Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Christoph Büchel. Deliberating over a failed football-field-sized art installation wryly entitled “Training Ground for Democracy,” the appellate court was asked to determine whether VARA protected Swiss artist Büchel's moral rights in his half-finished work that if completed would have given viewers “training to be an immigrant, training to vote, protest, and revolt, training to loot, training [in] iconoclasm, training to join a political rally, training to be the objects of propaganda, training to be interrogated and detained and to be tried or to judge, training to reconstruct a disaster, training to be in conditions of suspended law, and training various other social and political behaviors.”

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , May 2011 , pp. 255 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2011

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References

ENDNOTES

1. Pub L. No. 101-650; 104 Stat. 5089

2. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Christoph Büchel, 593 F. 3d 38 (1st Cir. 2010) (“Appellate Decision”).

3. Id., at 43 (Quoting an affidavit submitted by Büchel to the district court.)

4. Id., at 44.

5. Id., at 46. (Quoting MASS MoCA's complaint.)

6. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Christoph Büchel, 565 F.Supp.2d 245 (D.Mass.,2008)

7. Id. at 248.

8. VARA, supra note 1at 17 U.S.C. §106A(a)

9. Appellate decision, supra note 2 at 51 (Citing 17 U.S.C. § 101.)

10. VARA, supra note 1at 17 U.S.C. § 101.

11. Appellate decision, supra note 2 at 51, fn. 11 (Noting that the Second Circuit exempted the sculpture in the Carter case from VARA because it was a “work for hire.”)

12. Id. at 54.

13. Id. at 55.

14. Id. at 58.

15. Id. at 61.

16. Id. at 62.

17. 17 U.S.C. § 106(5).

18. Appellate Decision, supra note 2 at 61.