Paintings such as Marie-Therese Walters by Pablo Picasso can be expensive to reproduce. Photograph: Michael Stephens/PA.
It's good news that the Victoria and Albert Museum will no longer charge fees for reproductions in scholarly publications of artefacts in their hands. Let's hope other museums and galleries worldwide follow suit.
The crisis in the world of fine art publishing is real. When £500 or more can be charged for a colour illustration, a book with 200 plates becomes hideously expensive for the publisher (and the buyer).
Copyright law is a mess. The estates of artists or creators hold copyright in their works for 75 years after death. A museum does not hold copyright in any object it holds. It can only levy charges through the control of the photographic or digital images of items. If I take a photograph of an item, I hold the copyright for that. Effectively, museums charge though a system of bluff, particularly now that high-quality digital reproductions proliferate on the internet.
When I was chair of the Association of Art Historians, we obtained legal advice to the effect that any action by someone who claims to hold copyright on a work of historic art would be successful only if they could prove "substantial damage". But publishers seem scared to call the museums' bluff.
And when I edited the Oxford History of Western Art (735 plates), the choice of illustrations (and thus of the visual shape of the history) was significantly shaped by costs. As one of the section openers I wanted one of Picasso's versions of Velasquez's Las Meninas, having used the original to open an earlier section. But the Picasso estate charges monstrous fees. So we settled for a Matisse instead. The other nonsense was the operation of the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS). Living artists whom they represented were too expensive. So we dropped most DACS artists. Given the choice of a fee or representation in major reference books, I think I know which most artists would prefer.
In my experience DACS is self-serving and bureaucratic. Here are a few bits of data from their 2005-06 accounts. Using figures from sections 2 and 3 of their report, Payback, their main scheme netted £2,674,708 for 7,217 creators. The total looks quite impressive, but the average is under £400; one recipient gained £6,402 so it appears that a small minority of creators are taking the lion's share of the payments. In any event, 7,217 creators (of whom 61% are photographers), represent a tiny proportion of professional artists, photographers and designers in the UK. "Artist's resale rights" benefited a miserly total of 173 artists. The average payment seems to be less than £70. Individual rights payments average almost £1,000, but to only 847 recipients.
The benefits brought to the artistic community in the UK by DACS are, I think, extremely modest, while the damage done to art publishing is significant. What do you think?
