Contracts for New Forms of Art

The contracts discussed in this chapter could as easily be included in Chaper 14
because they are essentially contracts for collectors' use in understanding their rights and responsibilities when purchasing certain types of art forms, as well as giving them what they would need if they wanted to resell them or donate them to a museum. We separated them into their own chapter because of the highly technical issues involved in some new forms of art (that is, as a courtesy to dealers who do not work in any "new" forms of art and who might appreciate the contracts in Chapter 14 being discussed in their own context). In 2008, selling a video prompted perhaps the most complex questions from a collector the average contemporary art dealers had ever had to answer about terms, conditions, and technology. Much of that complexity revolved around how the technology or platform in which an artist had created their work would invariably become obsolete, or how the means to copy and redistribute or present artwork in ways that may have violated the artist's copyrights or been counter to their intentions were being used by collectors who simply were unaware of the issues involved.