For Artists: copyright, trademark, and contract issues

Hamiltonian Artists in DC is hosting their next talk in the Artist Speaker Series Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 14, 2009, at 7:00pm at Hamiltonian Gallery.

Copyright questions? Art legal issues? John D. Mason has got your answers! Mason is an art and entertainment attorney and intellectual property attorney at The Intellectual Property Group, PLLC, and is on the Board of Directors of the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts. He will be discussing legal matters related to art and artists, including copyright, trademark, and contract issues.

Congratulations

My good friend Professor Chawky Frenn is one of the recipients of the Teaching Excellence Award at George Mason University.

Frenn is without a doubt one of the toughest political painters of his generation, and his beautiful classical paintings use the brush of the masters to bring forth devastating political and social commentary on paintings often too controversial (as Dartmouth found out a while back) for galleries and museums to offer in a conventional way.

“The classroom is a place of dialog, learning, trust, and growth. I find in teaching an experimental field to develop strategies that promote critical thinking and creative research. At the heart of my teaching performance is the enthusiasm I share about life, art, and the development of self and identity. My comments bridge the understanding of art and life, and my critiques provide intellectual and emotional insights into the purpose, meaning, and value of self-discovery and development through one’s art and work.

I am fortunate to do what I love: teaching and painting. I am also fortunate to work with amazing students with diverse disciplines, cultures, goals, and passions. Their creativity and commitment continue to inspire the best in me.

I present the award to my students, my teachers, my family, and my friends who believed in me when I could not believe in myself. As a teacher, I am a gardener who nurtures and cares for the seeds and passions in my students’ soil. I encourage and help them to develop and grow and bear their finest fruits.”

- Chawky Frenn

New York art dealer accused of being Bernard Madoff's middleman

A prominent New York financier and art collector, Ezra Merkin, has been charged with a $2.4bn fraud for collecting money from clients under false pretences and secretly handing it to the jailed fund manager Bernard Madoff.

Read the NYT story here.

2009 Guggenheim Fellowship Winners Announced

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowships.

Ranging in age from 29 to 70, the hundred and eighty U.S. and Canadian artists, scientists, and scholars were selected from a group of almost three thousand applicants on the basis of outstanding achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.

For a complete list of this year's fellows, visit the Guggenheim Foundation Web site here.

Artists Websites: Sophie Tuttle

Sophie Tuttle is one of those hard-working artists who puts her creative energies into every facet of art: sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, illustration, etc.


You can check out her stuff online here or see it in person at the Warrenton Wine and Arts Festival in Warrenton, VA. There are going to be lots of artists selling their work and prints there (including Sophie)... in fact they're still looking for artists, so contact them if you are interested. It's allfor a good cause (benefiting St. John's School). It's going to be on April 25th and 26th and details are here.

The Gray Arm of the Law

If you take a photograph in a public place, and then publish it commercially, can the people in the photo successfully sue?

See the answer (or lack thereof) here.

Painting Bread Correctly

If you ask the guards at the NGA which painting in the collection they think is the most popular, often you will hear many of them point out Dali's The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

"People are always asking 'where is it?'"

The reason for this could be that the Last Supper, in a typical act of perhaps arrogance, for many years was hung in the NGA's coat check room, and currently is at the exit of the old wing, just before the connecting tunnel to the newer East wing.


I say arrogance because I once asked a guard (often the best sources of info in any museum) the reason for the placement. "This wing is for masters," he said, "and this Dali painting was donated to the NGA as part of the Dale Bequest in the 1960s, but with the condition that it had to be placed with the old masters."

The NGA complied, but couldn't or wouldn't cross the line and instead of hanging the Dali in one of the galleries, for years hung it in the coat room, where it attracted too many crowds and made that room a mess, and subsequently moved it to its present location, technically in the West building, but not really "in it."

A few years ago I asked the NGA for confirmation of this story, but my request was never answered.

But this post is not about Dali or the NGA, but about most "Last Supper" paintings that I recall seeing. More specifically about the bread in the paintings.

This week I was invited to a Seder meal by a friend who is also quite a well-known Philly area artist and an even better known curator. Somehow the conversation turned to Christ's Last Supper, which of course was a Seder meal and she observed how most paintings depicting The Christ's last meal showed regular bread instead of the unleavened bread required by Jewish tradition to celebrate the passover.

This is very interesting to the pedantic part of me, already troubled by the fact that nearly every depiction of The Christ that was presented to me in art school depicted mostly Northern European-looking Christs, rather than the Semitic Middle East Israelite that He was.

And now I wonder, are there any contemporary depictions (or any depiction) of the last supper which depict this last Seder for Christ in a more historically correct perspective? I want to see The Christ as a Semite and I want to see the middle of the matzot on the Seder plate broken in two with the larger piece hidden, to be used later as the afikoman.