Keith Urban versus Keith Urban seems more like the stuff of psychodrama than a problem of trademark law, although back in 2007 the well-known country-rock singer brought a lawsuit against a Wayne, New Jersey, painter with the same name for creating a KeithUrban.com web site that displays his artwork but...

Artists are open to all sorts of renown (commercial success, succès de scandale, their art and faces in books and magazines, their names known far and wide), but Rick Rush and Daniel Moore may be as famous in the annals of law as in the field of sports art. Perhaps...

Artists and craftspeople may receive money in a variety of ways, including awards and prizes at shows, project grants, scholarships and fellowships. The prize money or the monetary value of an award (the cash value of a gift certificate, for instance) that a craftsperson receives at a show is taxable...

On both sides of the Atlantic, the issue of artists' resale rights has jumped to the fore. (What are artists' resale rights? We'll get there.) In the past 15 months, several lawsuits by artists have been filed against collectors, art galleries and auctioneers Christie's, Sotheby's and even eBay for failing...

Go to any number of art fairs and art galleries, and you will find prints for sale among the paintings and sculptures. They are prints, because they were printed by some means, but after that it may not be clear at all how they should be described, and we quickly...

Beauty, it is often said, is in the eye of the beholder, and so might be copyright infringement.

Artist Richard Prince never denied that he made use of some photographic images he found in a 2000 book by Patrick Cariou called Yes Rasta, documenting the community of Rastafarians the...

What could seem more natural and time-honored? An artist takes an easel and paint set out to a field (a park, a beach, the woods, a city street -- whatever) and paints the view. What could seem more representative of a litigious society? The same artist rushes around to every...

Back in the early 1980s, painter Linda Hartough of Okatie, South Carolina was flailing about in the art world for a place in which she could make her mark. "I was looking for a niche, looking to concentrate on one subject," she said. She painted landscapes -- there must be...

It was several years after the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh opened in 1994 that the museum's trustees and administrators knew the institution needed to make a big change. "When it opened, it was conceived of as an Andy Warhol museum, exclusively showing the work of Warhol, arranged largely in...

In 1949, Life magazine published an article whose title asked the question, "Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Although the article's tone seemed to ask readers to answer in the negative -- which, based on the letters to the editor that were published, they did...

The neighborhood is going down. The rent is going up. My wife got a job in another city. There is an endless variety of reasons for moving from one place to another, and some people do it often enough that they just keep the cardboard boxes in storage.

Many people...

Deciding what price to put on artwork is one of the most difficult problems for lesser-known or "emerging" artists, since there is no obvious point of reference. (Artists who have had a history of sales, on the other hand, will have a better idea of prices that are more suitable...

Sure, everyone likes Jan Vermeer now, three hundred-plus years after the seventeenth century Dutch artist's death, but most art dealers want little to do with artists who can only produce two or three paintings a year -- Vermeer created fewer than 40 in his lifetime.

"There are lots of difficulties...

Beth Kantrowitz, director of the Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, tells her mostly emerging and mid-career artists the same thing before a show and after a show. "I always say, the show will be the best we can do," she said. "I can't promise that we will sell anything....

Considering this the other shoe dropping. Last March, artist Dana Melamed brought a lawsuit alleging fraud against her Manhattan art gallery, Priska Juschka Fine Art, for selling a group of her mixed-media works at Art Basel in 2009 to a single buyer for $143,650 but informing her that...

For 14 years, Morgan Weistling was doing very well, painting movie posters for Hollywood producers ("occasionally for a 'Police Academy,' but mostly for B-movies"), but then "God knocked me on the head and told me to stop wasting my talent and use it for better purposes." He became a fine...

Let's lay out all our ideas about who and what fine artists are: They are by and large unemployed, and their professional training prepares them to be unemployable. As an income category, they are poor, and by temperament they are alienated and resentful of middle-class values. For some things we...

When she first moved to New York City from Alexandria, Va. in 1997, Barbara Ratchko was "lonely and wanted to be part of a group of other artists, to talk about what's going on with our work." In the classified section of the magazine, Art Calendar, she found an advertisement...

It was an exhibition opening at Seattle's Greg Kucera gallery, and the artist whose works were on the walls was doing what artists do in these situations, accepting congratulations, chatting up visitors, being agreeable. Another artist (a sculptor as it turns out, but that hardly matters) approached him, wanting to...

A lot may happen to an artist or artisan in a career: Important sales, prestigious awards, museum exhibitions, write-ups in major magazines. They may also lose much of their work in a studio fire or fall off a ladder while creating a mural. The glamour part of the arts and...