We know about copyright – that’s when you get to sue the likes of a government, a big tech company or your local fish wholesaler for using one of your images without permission for up to seventy years after your death, should you have the resources or time. But moral rights? Different kettle of fish.

As artists we spend considerable time trying to persuade people to buy our work. If like Seurat, you are selling the piece that took you a year to complete [all those tiny dots of colour] it is not just time investment. Any work you produce is a fragment of your being manifest, a testament to your unique way of looking at the world. As you wrap it up and hand it over there is always this qualm…do you really want to part with it at all and what will happen to it in the future when someone decides to write a monograph and seeks it out. And then you look around the studio at the mountains of canvasses leaning against the wall or in the rack and reluctantly say goodbye to it in the belief that it is going to a better home and that the owner will treat it with the respect that it deserves.

And then there is this. You are invited to produce a site-specific work – a sculpture, a mural, an installation. Depending on scale, another considerable investment of time and creative energy only this one will be seen by a lot of people. Ego massage x 10….and your bank balance isn’t complaining either.

Then! Your site-specific piece gets moved by the local council because someone complained about its artistic merit; the mural is painted over by mistake; the precious painting is consigned to the rubbish after the owner tried to clean off an accidental wine stain with bleach. Under copyright law all you have control over is the reproduction rights – not of much value if the work no longer exists. So, do you have any rights or recourse at all? Your artistic legacy and acumen are down the drain. The trade-off may be that you get your name in the papers and become a focus for debate for a day but that may not be much consolation. There is always moral right to fall back on.

It happens to the best of us. In 2010, one year before his death, Cy Twombly painted a 3,770-square-foot painting on the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salle des Bronzes in Paris. The light colored, airiness of the gallery was what inspired Cy. Taking as his starting point the white stone walls that reflect natural light, Twombly conceived a ceiling that is a light floating canopy in subtle colors,” Nicola del Roscio, chairman of the Twombly foundation, said in a statement.

But the museum decided to renovate the space adding a black dado around the perimeter, replacing the marble floor with parquet and painting the walls a deep red – hardly subtle. The Cy Twombly Foundation, up in arms, threatened legal action – ‘a breach of the artist’s moral rights as well as a breach of the contract from 2007’.

Ah, moral rights. A tricky area. You have the right to be identified as the author of the work even if the building has been renovated or your once public sculpture now stands proudly behind the local supermarket, a roost for pigeons…..and the work should not be subjected to derogatory treatment, which could harm your honour or reputation…..bit late after the fact.

Richard Serra had similar problems….. as did Michaelangelo without even knowing it. In 1979 Serra was chosen to erect ‘Tilted Arc’ in front of the Javits Federal building in NY, by all accounts a truly difficult site. This monumental work [some 120 feet long and 12 feet high] cost the state a fortune. In 1985 A federal Judge decided that its siting and very presence was inappropriate. The work was moved. Serra complained for all the good it did him

Michaelangelo, though, was somewhat different. Half a millennium after he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling the then pope decided to have the accumulated candle soot cleaned off. What the cleaning revealed was intense colour. Michaelangelo, being long dead, might well have insisted on having it cleaned sooner if he’d known how little care the Catholic church was going to take of it. However, the history books were full of pictures of the soot-encrusted surface and this was the public perception. You can’t argue with public perception or media-generated artist myth. I don’t know whether the cleaning went ahead or not but as a story it joins the one about a box of marble genitalia hacked off the statuary around the Vatican and stored in the basement as moral rights were trampled by moral indignation.

Moral rights notwithstanding, the owner seems to have carte blanche when it comes to your precious work of art – including appropriating 70% of it if the other 30% has been substantially altered. Turning it into a NFT would qualify. All is not lost though. Under the  Berne Convention, the international agreement governing copyright, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) was enacted in the USA and elsewhere. It grants two rights to authors of visual works: the right to prevent distortion, mutilation or other modification which would damage an artist’s reputation; and the right to prevent the intentional destruction of a work of “recognized stature.” No doubt that would include cutting a painting into three parts to increase its resale value or even cutting it out of its frame to stuff into a tube as you walk out of an art gallery with it under your arm.

What artists may also not know is that as of 9th June 2010, a 5% royalty is payable to visual artists on certain commercial sales of their work under the Australian Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009. That’s good news at least – if the new owner/gallery/museum bothers to contact the artist with the aforesaid bag of money in hand or if you can break into the blockchain of the NFT and convert crypto play money into something more substantial that will pay the bills next month. Of course you need to be alive for any of this to matter.