Artists’ Rights Bill Awaiting Bush’s Signature : Congress: The precedent-setting statute would protect artworks from unauthorized mutilation and change.

An obscure amendment to a bill that Congress passed minutes before it adjourned has established, for the first time in federal legislation, the right of artists, photographers, sculptors and printmakers to protect their work from unauthorized mutilation and change.

The legislation, which had been sought by arts groups for six years before it was tacked onto a bill creating 85 new federal judgeships in the waning hours of the 101st Congress, parallels existing statutes in 11 states--including California and New York.

But the proposed statute supersedes the maze of sometimes contradictory protection for artists even in states that had such protections. Under this existing patchwork, it has been illegal to display a work in New York that was mutilated in California but not against the legislation to show art in California that was altered in New York.

In granting artists the right to control the use of their names as the creators of work and giving them the ability to fight in court against anyone who destroys or alters it, the congressional action extends the state protections nationwide. Most European countries have had such national statutes for decades--part of an international trend toward recognition of so-called “intellectual property rights.”

“It’s not exactly what we wanted, but it is a major step for visual artists in the United States,” said George Koch, vice president of the Artists Equity Assn., a 43-year-old Washington-based group that had been working for passage of the legislation since 1984.

“It gives us rights to exercise in the United States that artists in Europe have had since the 1920s. This allows us to use the courts to enforce a basic right that other professions already have.”

The proposed federal statute, which establishes a legal concept called “artist moral rights,” applies to all original artwork--though there may be some question about the extent of the protection to some craft media, including pottery and furniture. It also applies to prints, multiple-cast sculptures and photographs in numbered editions of 200 or fewer in which each piece is signed by the artist, as well as to murals. That provision extends a protection to California that, a state judge in Los Angeles ruled several months ago, had apparently been omitted from California’s landmark artists’ rights act by state legislators.

It requires the U.S. copyright office to set up a national directory in which artists can register so that their current addresses are known in the event the owner of a building proposes to remove or destroy an artwork--such as a sculpture or mural--years after an artist has relocated from where he or she lived when the work was created.

“I’m absolutely delighted,” said Santa Monica artist Tom Van Sant, the creator of a mural in a downtown bank building destroyed in 1982 by the new owners of the structure in a case that remains a prominent symbol of the plight of artists.

Van Sant, who testified in favor of the legislation in a unsuccessful attempt at passage last year, said on Friday that “this will be in the service of the entire art community of the country. It is one of the most important events in the history of the relationship of the federal government to the art community.”

The new legislation includes no provisions to regulate motion picture colorization--another key artist moral rights issue. But while earlier attempts at passing such legislation had nominally linked colorization and visual artists rights, the two issues had diverged by the end of the congressional session and the movie issue was not included in the bill pushed through Congress in the early morning hours of Oct. 28.

Although President Bush has not yet signed it, the measure is seen as virtually veto-proof since the artist provisions are an amendment to a criminal justice reform act--including the new judgeships--supported by the White House, said a spokesman for Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeir (D-Wis.), one of the co-sponsors of the bill with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.)

There are no criminal penalties in the new legislation, which restores to artists the right to disassociate themselves with work that has been changed in ways of which they disapprove. Artists can also force termination of attribution to them of work they did not create. An artist who believes his/her work has been changed or mutilated in violation of the proposed statute can sue the person or organization responsible.

The proposed statute does establish civil fines--$10,000 for each incident of mutilation or unauthorized association of an artist’s name with a work whose authorship may be in dispute, according to the Artists Equity Assn.

Earlier this year, the then-pending federal legislation played a role in the most prominent artist moral rights case of 1990--a lawsuit by multimedia artists David Wojnarowicz against the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn. Wojnarowicz prevailed in a federal court lawsuit against Wildmon under the provisions of the New York state artist moral rights act. Koch and John Podesta, a Washington lobbyist hired by the Artists Equity Assn., noted that the proposed statute does not apply to work sold by artists before the effective date of the new act--scheduled for next spring. Initially, artist groups had hoped to gain protection for the life of an artist plus 50 years, but the period was cut to the artist’s lifetime only. It was one of a series of concessions made in political negotiations over the bill to attract support of members of Congress concerned that giving visual artists control over their work might infringe on the property rights of people who purchase it.

The artists failed, said Podesta, in a parallel attempt to win passage of a separate bill that would award artists resale royalties any time their work changes hands after it is first sold. However, the resale royalty provisions prompted opposition even among some artists. Two years ago, when Congress was considering an earlier version of the bill, 40 artists--including Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein--opposed the provision, arguing that the resale royalty issue was an elitist provision whose enactment might make it even harder for unknown artists to attract the interest of collectors.