Museum-commissioned works

I thought that this was a pretty interesting article that I found. I read with great interest the article published in November 2008 in The Art Newspaper (p62) about the dealer Emmanuel Perrotin’s new business venture, Artists’ Dreams. According to Mr Perrotin, the primary goal of Artists’ Dreams will be to create a private investment pool to finance the production of large-scale works by his and other dealers’ artists for commercial and museum exhibitions. An elaborate sliding scale has been established to calculate the percentage of profit a gallery will make in relationship to the investors based on the length of time it takes to sell the work—the shorter the sales time, the better the gallery does; the longer the sales time, the better the investor does.
Perrotin’s Artists’ Dreams, although a purely commercial project, directly addresses one of the most complicated and thorny issues in the museum world today. Who owns a work of art that is produced, developed and partially or fully paid for by an institution? At the end of the exhibition, should the work be given to the artist with no strings attached to sell later in a commercial gallery? Should galleries be able to “invest” in these works and at the end of the exhibition back out of their investment and profit without paying back the institutions? Or should museums expect their production costs to be recouped by taking a contractual position that they have an ownership stake in the work?

I am a member of an ad hoc group, the Contemporary Art Museum Directors’ Association (CAMD). At our recent meeting in Baltimore, this issue of who owns museum-commissioned work came up many times. There was no clear consensus about what criteria should be put into place to deal with the “ownership” problem. Several institutions in the group primarily support the production of new works of art. At the end of the artist’s residency or exhibition at these institutions, the ownership reverts to the artist and he is allowed to do whatever he likes with his work. However, for the vast majority of non-collecting institutions in CAMD whose missions are not focused on supporting new artistic production, these commissions result in the creation of works of art with commercial value that they may or may not have an ownership stake in.

Original Article