Intellectual Property Law

Mass Moca Loses to Buchel Under VARA

By Lee.Gesmer

Nice post title, eh?  Mass MoCA is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation a contemporary art museum in North Adams, MA.  Chrisoph Buchel is a Swiss ?installation artist.?  ?Think very big, very avant-garde.  The New York Times describes his work ?dense, fraught creations, which compress masses of material and objects into historically charged labyrinthine environments through which viewers walk, climb and crawl.  Wow.  Sounds just right for good old, left-leaning western Mass.  Not.

VARA is the Visual Artists Rights Act, a section of the U.S. Copyright Statute that gives grants artists ?moral rights.?   For example, part of the law provides that an author of a ?visual work? has –

the right to prevent the use of his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation

The First Circuit held that the Museum violated this right when, after installation of a work that called for, according to the Times, ?a burnt-out fuselage of a 737 airliner.?  After the artist stormed off, the museum prepared to present the work, entitled ?Training Ground for Democracy,? like or not.  Buchel sued, lost in U.S. District Court, but prevailed in the First Circuit, which is (I guess) a lot more sympathetic to moral rights than was Judge Posner had been.

This was a rare chance for the First Circuit to be the first circuit to issue a decision under VARA, and their 60 page decision in favor of Buchel is linked in full directly below.

Mass Museum v. Buchel

Full post as published by Mass Law Blog on March 09, 2010 (boomark / email).