Amineddoleh and Associates LLC is excited to announce that our recent summer associate and current student intern, Lawrence Keating, has won the Phil Cowan–Judith Bresler Memorial Scholarship Writing Competition. The competition is sponsored by the New York State Bar’s Entertainment, Arts & Sports Law Section. His submission, An Artwork by Any Other Name: An Examination of Authenticators’ Role in the Art Market and Suggested Legislative Improvements, describes current issues faced by art authenticators and a market atmosphere that undermines consumer confidence.
As auction house prices continue to break records, the role of authenticators in the market has never been so vital; simultaneously, these experts have never faced as much scrutiny. “Buyers with an art-as-asset-class mentality rely on connoisseurship in the place of due diligence to help understand and mitigate risk; however, connoisseurship’s academic roots and imprecise nature have caused growing pains for art investors,” writes Mr. Keating. Today, millions of dollars can hang in the balance of an attribution, and the fear of litigation over a negative attribution has caused many authenticators to cease offering their services.
The paper parses through a century of caselaw to understand authenticators’ liability for their attributions, and under which circumstances they are most vulnerable. Specifically, the paper examines three classifications of connoisseurs whose services bolster the market: academics, artist institutions, and financially interested intermediaries. The paper goes on to recommend changes to the New York Arts and Cultural Affairs Law with the aim of balancing additional protections for authenticators with incentives to educate consumers about the nature and reliability of art authentications. The recommended approach seeks to more accurately reflect the imprecise, and occasionally indecent, nature of the art world, and the difficult reality that it is often the market, rather than the courts, that has the final say in artwork attribution.
The other winner of the competition (the award is given to two students each year) is Deanna Schreiber, another Fordham Law student. (Both the winners were students in Leila Amineddoleh’s Art Law Seminar at the law school.) Her paper focused on the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The competition is a competitive one as it is open to all law students in NY and NY-area law schools, and it awards a $2,500 scholarship for each of the winners.
Congratulations Lawrence and Deanna!