Ken Brown[SMTP:k.brown@ccs.bbk.ac.uk] wrote: "Trei, Peter" wrote:

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As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was "site specific", and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm

But the important point about that is that the artist lost! According to the website the tried "breach of contract, trademark violations, copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment rights" and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other than to give a few days work to some lawyers.

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http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic.

Serra's work was moved in 1989, about a year before VARA went into effect. I suspect that 'Tilted Arc' affair was one of VARA's motivations (though any legislator who voted for it should have been condemned to have a Serra sculpture placed in front of his house for a year). Peter