Category: Art Law

A Whale of a Moral Rights Claim in Dallas

Aerial view of a cityscape featuring tall skyscrapers, a large blue mural on a building, and a parking lot with several parked cars.
Julio Cortez/Associated Press

A large mural depicting dolphins swimming in the ocean, located on the side of a building. The mural showcases a blue water scene with clouds and marine life, set against an urban backdrop with a parking lot filled with cars.
History of the Dallas, Texas Wyland Whaling Wall 82
-Ocean Life
Whaling wall 82
Texas Utilities Building
505 Akard Street Dallas, Texas
Back: 164 Feet Long x 82 Feet High
Side: 50 Feet Long x 78 Feet High
Dedicated April 16, 1999

For nearly three decades, Wyland’s Whaling Wall 82, also known as Ocean Life, covered two sides of a downtown Dallas parking garage at 505 N. Akard Street. Painted in 1999, the mural showed blue whales and other marine life swimming across a landlocked city. Then, ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the whales began to disappear under blue paint.

The plan, apparently, was to replace Wyland’s mural with World Cup-related images. Dallas and North Texas are preparing to host nine matches, more than any other World Cup host city. The problem is what had to be erased to make the gesture possible.

The reporting has been especially grim because the loss seems to have resulted less from one dramatic act of hostility than from a chain of institutional shrugging. Someone identified the wall as a good site. Someone noted that the mural was old. Someone checked whether it was part of the City of Dallas public art collection. It was not. Someone apparently assumed that was enough. And then, as Robert Wilonsky wrote in the Dallas Morning News, “someone said: Here’s a wall you can probably paint over. And because no one else said: No.”

Wyland says he was not consulted before the work was painted over. His lawyers have reportedly issued a cease-and-desist letter invoking the Visual Artists Rights Act, the federal moral rights statute that protects some works of visual art from intentional destruction, distortion, mutilation, or modification. The legal questions will turn on facts that are not yet fully public: whether there was any waiver, what agreements governed the original installation, who controlled the wall, and whether the mural qualifies as a work of recognized stature.

But if public recognition matters, the reaction to the erasure is itself part of the story. A work does not have to be in a city collection to matter to a city.

That distinction is important. Public art is not only the art a city formally owns. It is also the art a public comes to know. A mural can become part of a place even if it sits on private property.

The World Cup angle makes the whole episode sharper. Mega-events arrive wrapped in the language of unity, celebration, legacy, and global connection. They also arrive with deadlines, sponsors, temporary beautification, and a tendency to flatten local meaning into marketable spectacle. Cities are asked to show off for outsiders. Too often, that means clearing away the awkward, faded, beloved, or locally specific thing and replacing it with something smoother.

There is also a wider unease surrounding the U.S. hosting of the World Cup this year. Reports suggest that hotel bookings in many U.S. host cities are softer than expected. AP reported that hotel demand has been lighter than anticipated in most of the eleven U.S. host cities, with operators pointing to international travel concerns, visa delays, high ticket prices, and transit costs. Al Jazeera, citing an AHLA survey, reported that many hotel operators saw bookings below initial forecasts, with visa barriers and geopolitical concerns among the cited reasons.

That matters because the World Cup is supposed to be an invitation. Yet the United States is hosting it at a moment when many people have good reason to ask what kind of invitation is being extended.

Immigration enforcement is part of that anxiety. The federal government has reportedly left open the possibility that ICE activity could occur around World Cup events. And this tournament is arriving after a the brutality of immigration enforcement in which the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis became symbols of state violence.

So when Dallas paints over a beloved mural to make room for World Cup imagery, the episode lands in an already uneasy atmosphere. It is not only about marine conservation. It is about the strange promise that a mega-event will showcase local culture while the machinery of preparation helps erase it.

There were obvious alternatives. Caitlin Clark at D Magazine asked the simplest question: why not use a vinyl banner? The World Cup lasts 39 days. The mural had previously been covered by advertising and later re-emerged. A temporary covering would have allowed Dallas to celebrate the tournament without permanently destroying a work that had become part of the city’s visual fabric.

Instead, Dallas now has a legal controversy, an angry artist, national attention, and a half-erased mural. Organizers have said that a portion of Wyland’s mural will be preserved as a tribute. But preserving a remnant after painting over the work is a strange kind of tribute. It is a bit like knocking down a historic building and saving a doorknob.

This story may become an important VARA dispute. It may tell us something about murals, private property, public memory, and the continuing importance of moral rights in the United States. But even before the legal issues are resolved, the cultural lesson is clear enough.

If a city wants to host the world, it should begin by paying attention to what its own people already value. The whales were not just old paint. They were part of Dallas’s public memory. And in trying to manufacture a legacy for a global event, the city may have destroyed one it already had.

Caitlin Clark, The Downtown Dallas Whale Mural Drama, Explained (updated May 18), D Magazine (last visited May 21, 2026).

Dallas Express, Cease-and-Desist Issued As Crews Cover Dallas Landmark Whale Mural For World Cup, Dallas Express (May 20, 2026).

Jesus Jiménez, A Beloved Whale Mural in Dallas Is Painted Over Ahead of the World Cup, The New York Times (May 19, 2026).

Robert Wilonsky, All the Mistakes that Led to the Extinction of Wyland’s Dallas Whale Mural, Dallas Morning News (May 18, 2026).

Jamie Stengle, An Outcry Erupts as a Whale Mural Beloved by Many in Dallas is Replaced with Art for the World Cup, AP News (May 19, 2026).

Urgent Legal Battle: Wyland Fights Dallas Mural Paint-Over, NewsRadio 1080 KRLD (last visited May 21, 2026).

Philip Marcelo, U.S. Hotel Operators Say Promised Boon from Hosting World Cup Hasn’t Materialized Yet, AP News (May 12, 2026).

AFP, Low U.S. Hotel Bookings Paint Grim Hospitality Picture at the World Cup, Al Jazeera (May 6, 2026).

Melissa Hellmann, Eight People Have Died in Dealings with ICE So Far in 2026. These Are Their Stories, The Guardian (Jan. 28, 2026).

Maanvi Singh & agencies, ICE Officer Charged over Shooting of Venezuelan Man in Minnesota, The Guardian (May 18, 2026).

Reuters, Minnesota Officials Charge ICE Agent in Shooting of Venezuelan Immigrant, Reuters (May 18, 2026).

What will happen to art made for the Black Lives Matter movement?

A BLM Mural painted on what I think are plywood panels at the Station Museum in Houston’s 3rd Ward.

Art works with and through social movements. It informs; works to inspire; and just generally supports collective action. In our current digitally connected age it is easier than ever now to document and share the proliferation of art meant to protest, encourage, and criticize the current state of institutional racism in the United States and elsewhere. I snapped a picture with my phone on a walk earlier this week in front of the Station Museum. We are in a way fortunate that so much of this art can be preserved, perhaps in only a limited way, by cell phone cameras and drones. But the physical objects may be left without a good means of preservation. What will happen to all these sanctioned and unsanctioned murals on plywood and buildings?

In July volunteers painted a Black Lives Matter mural on the street outside the site of the original Burns BBQ (Photo by: Godofredo A. Vásquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer)

Alex Brady has written a thoughtful piece for Salon thinking about some of these questions. In Oakland, California, a handful of organizations like Oakland’s Black Cultural Zone and others are working to preserve some of these panels by storing the mural panels when they have been taken down:

Alongside other Black-led organizations and Black artists, BCZ is working with Oakland Endeavors, Oakland Art Murmur, and the Oakland Museum to de-install panels and store them in facilities throughout the city. And while many museums throughout the country are making efforts to highlight African-American history, the Oakland Museum and other ally organizations are taking their orders from BCZ when it comes to the influx of plywood murals and other street art in the city.

“We wanted to set it up such that we [BCZ] could create the infrastructure because the institutions typically have the infrastructure,” [Randolph] Belle said.

The BCZ is neither curating nor collecting but is currently storing 20 de-installed panels and anticipating more. The group has an online form for businesses, developers, and landlords to identify murals and artwork, and to notify BCZ when the panels get taken down so that the group can track the work, safely store it, and contact the artist(s) about desired next steps.

Oakland Endeavors, one of the organizations working with BCZ (Endeavors also worked with Wolfe-Goldsmith on Oakland’s downtown Black Lives Matter street mural) is standing by to store more, along with the other partner organizations.

Eventually, BCZ anticipates cataloguing and storing hundreds of panels.

Of course because artists and those who view it are a diverse group, some do not even want the art preserved or preserved in an institutionalized way. That of course means much of this art will be lost or destroyed.

Another interesting angle to consider is that much of this art is reproducing many of the same ideas, themes, and images. They seem to me to be working to use the tragic deaths and murders of people of color to advance collective action and effect a more just and equitable society. That seems to be the real overarching goal, and preservation of the artwork does seem to be a secondary consideration. But the art speaks to the moment, and it would be a shame if we are not left with the physical reminders of this social movement. As more and more cities are making the long-delayed and sensible decision to remove the racist symbols of the confederacy, these murals have taken their place in many cities. There are BLM murals and symbols of hope and solidarity all over my city, Houston, as the last few handful of confederate monuments are slowly being removed.

One remedy for artists who create these murals with permission, and if they achieve the nebulous status of “recognized stature” as the Visual Artists Rights Act requires may be entitled to certain rights of integrity and attribution should the murals be threatened with intentional destruction or mutilation. Those remedies are taking on increasing importance as arts lawyers and street artists slowly litigate life into the idea that artists are entitled to certain important rights that follow the significant works of art they create.

Clowney on corruption in the art market and in prostitution

Maddalena penitente (Mary Magdalene Penitente), By Caravaggio, c. 1594-1595, currently hanging in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome

Professor Stephen Clowney of the University of Arkansas School of Law has written an interesting article examining the role of markets in certain special categories: things like organs, human lives, sex, and works of art. He has an interesting summary of the scholarship critical of markets; and he suggests I think that markets are not inherently corrupt. He ably points out flaws in the scholarship which criticizes commodification, yet he makes his own grave errors in relation to the role of the market on the art trade and its allied fields and disciplines. His approach is a kind of ethnographic study of art appraisers and prostitutes. The article is well-written and entertaining, but I just don’t think you get a complete picture of the art market by only talking with appraisers. He also ignores large areas of helpful scholarship from criminologists, totally ignores the Knoedler forgery scandal, and does not acknowledge the problems presented by the antiquities trade. But if you want an entertaining read, I can recommend it.

Clowney, Stephen (2020) “Does Commodification Corrupt? Lessons from Paintings and Prostitutes,” Seton Hall Law Review: Vol. 50 : Iss. 4 , Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/shlr/vol50/iss4/3

Victory for 5Pointz Artists in the Second Circuit

5pointz artworks being whitewashed in 2013

In a ruling which will likely feature in future art law coursebooks, the Second Circuit has affirmed a $6.75 million judgment against a real estate developer for whitewashing a number of murals at 5Pointz. This is a rare victory for artist’s moral rights in an American court.

The site became known as a prominent aerosol art haven in 2002 when the developer Gerald Wolkoff asked Jonathan Cohen to install some art on a warehouse in Long Island City in Queens. Cohen curated the space and had a rotation of various artists use the building. It attracted worldwide attention. It also displayed itself to passengers every time a 7 train would pass by:

As is often the case with moral rights cases that have been litigated under the Visual Artists Rights Act, changed circumstances for the building led to the deveoloper seeking to capitalize on the new-found gentrification of the neighborhood. In 2013 artists learned that Wolkoff was planning to destroy the warehouses to build a condominium complex. The artists sought landmark status and asked for an injunction under the Visual Artists Rights Act. That injunction was not granted, and rather than wait for the legal process to play out, or wait to let the artists preserve their works, Wolkoff whitewashed the art. That act probably did more harm to Wolkoff’s argument than any thing, with the district court finding the art had achieved recognized stature and imposing the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work (45 works in total) of art in order to sanction Wolkoff’s conduct and to vindicate the policy supporting the moral rights act.

Donn Zaretsky in commenting on the ruling wrote that the damages may have been the most interesting part of the ruling:

Now, it may be the facts of this case were so unique and so egregious that it won’t have a wider impact — basically what happened is that early in the litigation the artists got a TRO preventing the demolition of the site, it expired, and, while the district court was considering their application for a preliminary injunction to replace it, the developer had the work painted over, “without any genuine business need” to do so, “simply, as the district court found, an ‘act of pure pique and revenge.'” But the idea that significant statutory damages can be awarded in a VARA case even where actual damages can’t be proven could be a big deal.

The Art Law Blog

Moral rights are rights that have been around for a very long time. They originated in the French Revolutionary idea of ‘droit moral de l’auteur’, stemming from the idea that if art is harmed, the artist also is harmed.

I am always surprised when I encounter art lawyers and academics who are critical of the idea of moral rights. They will often make the argument that artists do not want or need moral rights, and developers like Wolkoff will not allow art anywhere near their buildings ever again. But this elides the reality, these condominium developments have as I understand it been built to take advantage of the newly gentrified neighborhood, and the new ‘luxury’ development will still be called 5 Pointz, and feature aerosol art. The art will happen no matter what, this ruling just gives the artists vindication for the personality of these artists that was bound up and integral in these images. Developers like Wolkoff claim that these moral rights damage their property rights; but a moral right is not an economic right. Instead it accounts for the psychological suffering which takes place when an artist’s art has been harmed in some way.

The IFAR Art Law & Cultural Property Database

This is an unsolicited plug—I have no doubt that many folks are very familiar with the good work that the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) has done for many years. But one of its most remarkable accomplishments is its Art Law and Cultural Property Database. If you are a student, attorney, art professional, or cultural heritage advocate and not availing yourself of this resource, you are likely duplicating work and failing to account for much of the advocacy and scholarship which has come before. I encouraged my own librarians to secure a subscription for my work, and the work of students in my Art Law Seminars. I’ve used this terrific resource many many times in preparing lectures and informing my own scholarship, and I encourage you to consider adding a subscription for your own firm or institution.

Information on the database is available here.

Essay on Financial Innovation and the Market for Pop Art

Jasper Johns ‘Flag’ (1954-55) Museum of Modern Art, New York. The work was included in an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958.

The art market owes much of its success to tax policy. A new essay in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts examines many of the financial structures used by Pop Art gallerist Leo Castelli in the middle of the 20th Century. The Essay is authored by Michael W. Maizels (visiting researcher at the Harvard metaLAB) and William E. Foster (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Arkansas School of Law)

This essay focuses on the efforts of an enterprising art gallerist, Leo Castelli, to aggressively promote his stable of Pop artists through the development of several financial structures, including some designed to leverage the relatively generous income tax deductions and anemic enforcement regime of the time. In doing so, Castelli not only seeded the ground for the international ascendance of American visual art, but also engineered financial arrangements that fostered the development of a lucrative and resilient art market that endures to this day. With the aim to provide insights into both the legal-political and the art historical registers, this essay describes a tax law framework that provides a key piece missing from the art historical puzzle.

Maizels, Michael and Foster, William E., The Gallerist’s Gambit: Financial Innovation, Tax Law, and the Making of the Contemporary Art Market (November 21, 2019). Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2019. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3491207 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3491207

Supreme Court waiting on Solicitor General before deciding on certiorari in the Guelph Treasure dispute

The arm reliquary of St. Sigismund

The Art Newspaper has a useful update on the current state of the Guelph Treasure dispute. The Supreme Court has asked the Executive Branch, specifically the Solicitor General of the United States for an opinion on the case, in order to aid in its decision over whether or not to hear an appeal of the case from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here’s a quick background on the dispute. The Welfenschatz, or Guelph trove, a collection of 42 objects dating from the 11th-15th centuries is currently in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and has been claimed by successors of art dealers who were fleeing the holocaust. These objects were originally housed in the cathedral in Braunschweig, owned by the House of Guelph. During the First World War, the House of Guelph lost reign over Braunschweig and in the 1920s the pieces were sold to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers, including 82 items in 1929. Later in 1935 the Prussian state, led by Hermann Goering, bought the remaining pieces of the hoard in what the claimaints allege was a “genocidal taking”. In 2014, a German government commission found that the transaction was not a forced sale.

The claimants then brought suit in the United States. The current possessors, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have defended that action on the grounds that as a Foreign Government, they are immune from suit in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Claimants have argued that the actions of the Prussian government fall under one of the exceptions to that law, that the actions of the Prussians was a violation of International law, namely genocide.

For some further helpful background from the perspective of the claimants, Nicholas O’Donnell, counsel for the claimants, has an excellent blog where he often updates this dispute.

Martha Lufkin, Supreme Court Delays Guelph Treasure Appeal so US Government Can Add Its Views to Case, The Art Newspaper, Jan. 21, 2020, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/supreme-court-delays-guelph-treasure-appeal-so-us-government-can-add-its-views-to-case [https://perma.cc/3UGP-SCJ2].

Gerstenblith on Provenance

John Myatt forged a number of prominent Old Masters, and his conspirator John Drewe invented provenance for many of the works.

Prof. Gerstenblith has a new Piece in the International Journal of Cultural Property titled “Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable“. Here’s the abstract:

Provenance, the ownership history of an artifact or work of art, has become one of the primary mechanisms for determining the legal status and authenticity of a cultural object. Professional associations, including museum organizations, have adopted the “1970 standard” as a means to prevent the acquisition of an ancient object from promoting the looting of archaeological sites, which is driven by the economic gains realized through the international market. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), one of the museum world’s most influential professional organizations, requires its members to list the ancient artworks and artifacts that they have acquired after 2008 that do not conform to the 1970 standard in an online object registry. The study presented here of the AAMD’s Object Registry for New Acquisitions of Archaeological Material and Works of Ancient Art analyzes the extent to which AAMD member museums do not comply with the 1970 standard and, perhaps of greater significance, the weaknesses in the provenance information on which they rely in acquiring such works. I argue that systematic recurrences of inadequate provenance certitude are symptomatic of the larger problem of methodology and standards of evidence in claiming documented provenance. A museum’s acceptance of possibly unverifiable provenance documentation and, therefore, its acquisition of an object that may have been recently looted, in turn, impose a negative externality on society through the loss of information about our past caused by the looting of archaeological sites.


Gerstenblith, P. (2019). Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable. International Journal of Cultural Property, 26(3), 285-304. doi:10.1017/S0940739119000171

Two Moral Rights Suits over Public Murals

The now-destroyed Community Faces mural in Pittsburgh depicting artists, their relatives, and people from the community. Multiple artists created the work.

Artists have brought suit in Pittsburgh and Memphis over the destruction of public murals. Both suits involve the use of blighted buildings and spaces which have come under development. As these areas character changes, or as attitudes about the public art shift, City officials and landowners have removed, distorted, or even destroyed public murals.

In Memphis, as part of a 135 mural installation organized by Paint Memphis, seven murals drew the attention of Memphis City officials, and were painted over near the end of January in 2018 as part of a “miscommunication”.

Memphis City Council officials say they have received complaints about some of the murals, and want to allow residents to vet the murals before they are erected in public spaces.

A similar dispute involving mural artist Kyle Holbrook has taken place in Pittsburgh. Holbrook alleges that property owners, the city of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and others have destroyed eight of his murals on walls and buildings.

Both suits use the federal moral rights law, the Visual Artists Rights Act as a basis for remedying destruction of murals and even attempting to enjoin further destruction.

Ryan Poe, Artists sue Memphis for failed attempt to scrub “satanic” murals, Commercial Appeal, April 26, 2018, https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/government/city/2018/04/26/artists-sue-memphis-failed-attempt-scrub-satanic-murals/555788002/ (last visited May 17, 2018).

Torsten Ove, Artist sues Pittsburgh, Allegheny County for destroying murals he created on their buildings, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 30, 2018, http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/art-architecture/2018/04/30/Mural-artist-Pittsburgh-Kyle-Holbrook-lawsuit-federal-Allegheny-County-destruction-contract/stories/201804300177 (last visited May 17, 2018).

Tree painting, moral right or an environmental message?

In 2013 the Houston Arts Alliance (HAA) commissioned artist Konstantin Dimopoulos to create an installation called “Painted Trees” in Houston. The installation used a series of crepe myrtles embedded in one of Houston’s traffic cloverleafs at Waugh and Memorial. Dimopoulos has undertaken similar blue tree projects internationally, hoping to raise awareness for deforestation and draw attention to trees we might otherwise ignore. Here’s a short video of the artist describing the art advocacy project:

Well the artist has been surprised to discover that the work has been reprised/plagiarized/re-celebrated/repeated. Many like me had likely assumed that the artist was repeating the project. Not so, this project was an initiative of the Houston Parks and Recreation department. They painted the same grove of trees, and another grouping, blue and green.

Here’s my own photo of one of the groups I took a few weeks ago:

The Houston Parks and Recreation department painted these crepe myrtles, image from March, 2018.

The art project was a popular surprise to most five years ago. Though It always struck me as odd that the artist and City invited selfie hunters to an area without sidewalks, where you had to dodge unfriendly cars to get a close look.

According to the City, the new project was meant to draw attention to wildflower and prairie plantings that have been done in the area.  The city plants wildflowers in the area most years, and this summer red phlox should bloom amid the green and blue trunks when the crepe myrtles are also blooming. A great thing to look at, and an improvement certainly over a sad strip of roadside mown grass. But has the city of Houston managed to violate the moral rights of Dimopoulos? Or will most of the attraction be owed to the work of mother nature? Texas arts blog Glasstire noted that Dimopoulos’ wife noted in a facebook comment that:

It’s Adele Dimopoulos here, Kon’s wife and business manager. We most certainly do know about the blue trees being copied by city Parks and we are in the process of addressing this through various channels.

We are aware that there is a much bigger issue of copyright and IP for all artists at stake here. So sit tight and let’s see what shakes down.

The artist claims to own rights in the special paint formula that he developed, which is temporary, harmless to the trees, and bright blue. In response Abel Gonzales, the parks department’s deputy director of greenspace management is quoted in the Houston Chronicle this morning that: “We thought we did our homework”, noting he cleared the paint project with parks department planners. And the formula was a new creation of a city employee, combining lime wash and pigment. The artist Dimopolous is quoted in this morning’s Houston Chronicle, and is not a fan:

“It looks horrible, and it really has no relevance anymore here”.

It seems mainly what Dimopoulos wants is an apology from the city, perhaps even removal of the pigment. ON the one hand I can certainly appreciate his position, but if his art was intended to bring attention to deforestation, the amount of water and harm to the trees perhaps shows he wasn’t all that interested in the environmental aspects of his projects. He really wanted individual attention as an artist. Nothing wrong with that of course, but when you have a relatively straightforward idea, that many other artists have likely had, perhaps you should be a little magnanimous when others attempt to carry forward your vision. Am I wrong, is the artist wrong? Let me know in the comments.