Museum Deaccessioning Panel at Kernochan Center

Press Contact: Erin St. John Kelly

Office 212.854.1787; cell: 646.284.8549

 

March 4, 2008 (NEW YORK) — Is art worth more as cash than the implied cultural riches of possessing it? Experts from the art and museum world will discuss museum deaccessioning — as part of Columbia Law School’s Intellectual Property Speaker Series, which brings together distinguished speakers from across the country to discuss current issues facing the artistic community. 

 

Participants, including renowned scholar Patty Gerstenblith and Sotheby’s Senior Vice President and Worldwide Compliance Director Jane Levine, will discuss why some of the country’s museums are trying to deaccession portions of their collections and why challengers allege the sales are unethical and even illegal. Speakers will also address the uses of the proceeds, and the consequences of deaccessioning to the institutions and the broader communities they serve. 

WHEN: March 11, 2008, 6 p.m.

WHERE: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall, Room 103, Amsterdam at West 116 Street; Via subway: #1 train to 116 Street (Broadway)/Columbia University.

WHO: Professor Patty Gerstenblith is director of the DePaul College of Law’s Center for Art and Cultural Heritage Law and founding president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. She serves senior advisor to the International Arts and Cultural Property Committee of the ABA Section on International Law.

 

Jane A. Levine (moderator) is senior vice president, worldwide director of compliance for Sotheby’s, and teaches the Law and Cultural Property seminar at Columbia Law School. She was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where she was the lead prosecutor in numerous cases involving art crimes.

C. Michael Norton is president of the law firm of Bone McAllester Norton, PLLC, whose clients include the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, a non-collecting art museum in Nashville, Tenn., and Fisk University which is attempting to obtain court approval to sell an interest in or specific works from its Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

Lee Rosenbaum is an arts journalist and critic for the Wall Street Journal, a contributing editor of Art in America magazine and a regular arts commentator for New York Public Radio (WNYC). Her blog, CultureGrrl, is widely read by museum directors, curators, dealers and collectors worldwide. She holds an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Seton Hall University.

 

Ronald D. Spencer is counsel at Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP and heads the firm’s art law practice group, which covers the legal aspects of art authentication and advising, buyers, sellers, and advising owners on due diligence with respect to provenance and attribution of works of art. Spencer is also legal counsel to and has helped establish a number of art foundations. He has written extensively on art law matters and lectured at many law schools and museums.

 

Click here for more extensive biographies.

 

The program is sponsored by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts; the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and the Horace S. Manges Lecture and Conference Fund.

 

Columbia's Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts was established to contribute to a broader understanding of the legal aspects of creative works of authorship, including their dissemination and use. The Center has encouraged the development of instruction at the Law School in topics such as intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, the regulation of electronic media, and problems arising from new technologies.

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, and criminal law.