Like most years in the art world, 2024 saw a slew of lawsuits wind their way through the courts.
There were, of course, the professional relationships that went sour and the family drama that spilled into open court. But there were also stranger disputes, like a discrimination battle over an art installation in Australia. There were also cases that could have long-lasting legal consequences, like the artist who is challenging the U.S. Copyright Office’s rejection of his copyright for an artwork created with the help of A.I. and a class-action lawsuit filed against Philadelphia’s now-defunct University of the Arts. Some cases, like Mary Miss’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Art Center, landed the parties right back where they started. And, with many of the cases undecided, the stage is already set for 2025.
Below, for your reading pleasure, this year’s ten most interesting legal cases in the art world.
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Sotheby’s Cleared of Accusations of Aiding and Abetting Fraud in Rybolovlev Case
Image Credit: Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images After weeks in court in January, Sotheby’s was cleared of accusations from Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev that the auction house served as an accomplice to a large fraud involving a Swiss art dealer and art adviser and the true value of 38 works of art. The case brought to light processes into the art world that called into question what constituted conflicts of interest, ethics, and breaches of compliance.
After five hours of deliberations, a jury of ten New Yorkers in Manhattan federal court cleared Sotheby’s of the claims the auction house helped art dealer Yves Bouvier overcharge for the works by $1 billion. (Bouvier has separately contested those claims.)
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MoMA Faces a Lawsuit Over a Marina Abramović Show
Image Credit: Photo Benett Raglin/WireImage Late last year, New York’s Adult Survivors Act brought a raft of lawsuits accusing high-profile celebrities of sexual assault or misconduct, among them Sean “Diddy” Combs, Russell Brand, and others. But as the one-year “lookback window” for survivors expired, one case drew in an art world institution. John Bonafede, a New York–based painter and performance artist who participated as a nude performer in the 2010 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present,” sued the institution, accusing MoMA of failing to prevent sexual assaults against him by museum attendees. The museum has denied that it was culpable for Bonafede’s allegations. The case, however, is still ongoing.
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Art Collector Ron Perelman’s $410M Insurance Claim Will Head to Trial
Image Credit: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival In May, a New York State Supreme Court Justice ruled the case between businessman Ron Perelman and a group of insurance companies will go to trial. Perelman’s lawsuit, filed through a holding company called AGP Holdings, claims a group of insurers have refused to honor his claim for coverage on five paintings that were in his East Hampton home during a 2018 fire. Perelman claims the incident robbed the “oomph” from two artworks by Andy Warhol, two by Ed Ruscha, and one by Cy Twombly.
The insurance companies have argued that the works had “not sustained any detectable damages”.
Judge Joel Cohen said the lack of clarity over whether or not the five paintings were actually damaged was what swayed him to move forward with a bench trial.
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Artist Sues Over Copyright Rejection for Award-Winning Artwork Generated by AI
Image Credit: ©2022 Jason M. Allen In October, an artist filed a lawsuit requesting a federal court in Colorado reverse a decision by the US Copyright Office Review Board rejecting copyright protection for an award-winning image made using the text-to-image generator Midjourney.
Jason M. Allen’s lawsuit claims that his piece Théâtre d’Opéra was an expression of his creativity and deserved copyright protection. The image of a futuristic royal court won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in 2022.
Allen used Midjourney to create Théâtre d’Opéra after testing hundreds of written prompts and then making changes with Adobe Photoshop. But after Allen refused to disclose which parts of the image were generated by Midjourney, the copyright office rejected his application. The decision was affirmed by a copyright office tribunal last year.
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Philadelphia’s UArts Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit After Sudden Closure
Image Credit: Photo Lisa Lake/Getty Images Just a few days after Philadelphia’s University of the Arts announced it was abruptly closing on June 7, a class-action lawsuit was filed by nine of its employees in the city’s federal court.
The lawsuit accuses the 150-year-old institution, commonly known as UArts, of violating the 1988 federal law requiring most employers with at least 100 employees provide a 60-day notice of mass closings of layoffs. The lawsuit also accuses UArts leadership of not paying wages for hours worked and unused vacation time, a violation of the state’s Wage Payment And Collection Law.
UArts gave its approximately 700 faculty and 1,100 students only a week’s notice of its closure after losing its accreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
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Dealer Pierre Levai Was Held ‘Captive’ by His Lover Before His Death, Lawsuit Claims
Image Credit: Photo Zach Hyman/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Even after death, Pierre Levai, the art dealer who ran the New York operations of the now-defunct Marlborough Gallery, still became the subject of a lawsuit. Levai passed away in June at the age of 87 in Miami. In a lawsuit filed in December, Levai’s son Max alleged that Marcia Levine, a beneficiary to his father’s trust and “a long-time paramour”, kept the art dealer “sick, starved, and physically incapacitated so as to better misappropriate his assets and the assets of the trusts with which he was associated.” The lawsuit filed in New York is focused on whether Levine “recklessly caused” Levai’s death prior to his hospitalization in Florida, in which medical records noted he had not eaten in three weeks. The lawsuit filed by Max Levai also aims to prevent Levine from receiving funds from a $1 million trust set up by Pierre.
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New York Supreme Court Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing Helen Frankenthaler Foundation of Exploiting the Late Artist’s Legacy
Image Credit: Getty Images In September, a New York Supreme Court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation by one of its former board members, Frederick Iseman. The judge cited Iseman’s absence of standing, meaning they were not the right party to be in court. The lawsuit involved multiple family members of the late Frankenthaler, with Iseman being the artist’s nephew and a member of the Foundation’s board for two decades until he was thrown off in 2023. In the lawsuit, Iseman accused his family members Clifford Ross, also Frankenthaler’s nephew, stepdaughter Lise Motherwell, and board director Michael Hecht of taking advantage of the artist’s legacy and exploiting the foundation “to advance their own personal interests and careers.”
Iseman told ARTnews he planned to appeal the court’s dismissal.
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Mary Miss Sues Des Moines Art Center Over Planned Destruction of Land Art Installation
Image Credit: Photo Sydney Royal Welch/Courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation In April, the artist Mary Miss filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the planned demolition of her outdoor installation Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996) at the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC). The museum commissioned the installation in 1994, a series of walkable structures built in dialogue with the wetland ecosystem of Greenwood Park, which abuts DMAC. But the museum claimed the 30-year-old installation’s materials had eroded due to weather exposure, and reengineering it was “not financially feasible” after spending $1 million in repairs.
In May, a judge in Iowa concurred with the artist that demolition of the installation could not take place without her permission. The judge also determined that Mary Miss’ contract with DMAC allowed the museum the right to refuse to repair Greenwood Pond: Double Site if a judge deems the cost too expensive. ““The end result is therefore an unsatisfying status quo: the artwork will remain standing (for now) despite being in a condition that no one likes but that the court cannot order anyone to change,” Judge Stephen Locher wrote.
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Restitution Lawsuit Over Guggenheim’s Picasso Portrait Woman Ironing Dismissed
Image Credit: Courtesy, court documents A lawsuit over Pablo Picasso’s 1904 painting Woman Ironing was dismissed by a Manhattan court in June. Thomas Bennigson’s complaint was that his relative, German Jewish art collector Karl Adler, sold the painting under duress in 1938 to fund his family’s escape from the Nazis. The painting, now has an estimated value of between $150 million and $200 million, was gifted to the Guggenheim Foundation by Parisian art dealer and Picasso expert Justin Thannhauser. The lawsuit was dismissed by the court on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to show any specific duress or malice suffered by the Adler family that would have prompted the sale of Woman Ironing.
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‘Final Judgement’ For Copyright Cases Between Richard Price and Galleries
Image Credit: Photo by Dave M. Benett/Getty Images In January, a New York court issued a “final judgement” in the case of Richard Prince and his galleries, Gagosian and Blum & Poe. The blue-chip galleries were the subject of two copyright lawsuits brought by photographers whose images were used without permission by Prince in his “New Portraits” series. A judge wrote that there would be ‘no future reproductions, modifications, distribution, promotions, or sales’ of two artworks by Prince featuring appropriations of photographs by Eric McNatt and Donald Graham. Both McNatt and Graham were awarded expenses amounting to five times the retail price of Prince’s artworks and costs incurred. The judgements came after years of Prince and his parties’ attempts to get the lawsuits dismissed.
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Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art Sued For Barring Men From Exhibition
Image Credit: COURTESY MONA American artist Kirsha Kaechele’s “Ladies Lounge” installation at Mona prompted a discrimination lawsuit from a man because the installation only allowed women to enter. After a judge initially ruled that the exhibition needed to allow men, the museum announced plans to install a toilet in the gallery to circumvent the ruling, and later installed multiple works by Pablo Picasso on the walls of a women’s bathroom stall. Those works were later revealed as fakes made by Kaechele and her manicurist’s niece. In September, the Tasmanian supreme court ruled “Ladies Lounge” was not discriminatory. The reversal prompted the museum to reopen the installation earlier this month. While men are still barred from the “Ladies Lounge”, they can enter if they participate as domestic servants.
