ᐧArtists’ rights and laws expert and PhD Candidate Lauren van Haaften-Schick talks about:

 Her first big experience with the secondary market via the runaway auction sale of a work by an artist showing at Nicole Klagsbrun – where Lauren was working at the time – and how it set her on a course re-considering artists’ contracts, resale royalties and activism for artists’ rights; how many of the resale royalties going to artists in the U.K., where they actually have a law supporting artists this way, have been on the small side, supporting the premise that resale royalties don’t only benefit big-name artists in big auctions; the Scull Auction of 1973, which marked the first time that contemporary American art was sold in such a brazenly speculative way, and led to a famous encounter between Robert Scull and Robert Rauschenberg; how activism works in artists’ rights in terms of potential redistribution, and ‘smart’ contracts; how big-name artists in the past (Robert Mangold, Jenny Holzer, Hans Haacke) showed up at congressional hearings for artist’s royalties, whereas recent generations of big-name artists have been relatively absent; and the ‘Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, Seth Siegelaub’s 1971 contract which has had a long-lasting effect in this realm of the art world, despite the lack of awareness of its existence.