CONTESTED HERITAGE: REMOVING ART FROM LAND AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS.
| Author | Gould, Emily |
CONTESTED HERITAGE: REMOVING ART FROM LAND AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS
by Richard Harwood QC, Catherine Dobson and David Sawtell
Law Brief Publishing, 2022, Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-914608-25-4, 240 pages
Disputes involving works of art and heritage assets frequently revolve around or involve elements of land and property law, in its broadest sense. Whether a work of art is, or is part of, a listed building, whether it has become part of the land on which it sits and what ownership interests subsist in it are questions which often feature in disputes about works of art. (1) The answers to these, and related questions, might determine, for example, who owns artworks claimed by both a landlord and a tenant at the end of a tenancy, which works are inherited by the beneficiary of a heritage property, and whether a heritage asset such as a statue or public monument can be removed or altered.
In this fascinating and topical book, barristers Richard Harwood QC, Catherine Dobson and David Sawtell (all of 39 Essex Chambers (2)) explore these complex questions of ownership and control over heritage assets and explain the regulatory regimes which govern them. These have long been issues of immense importance to all those who deal in art or participate in the art market, but they have entered the wider public discourse in recent times, especially in relation to statues and other monuments memorialising individuals with controversial histories. Indeed, it is these objects, around which political or moral debates have arisen either because of who or what they represent, or because of the manner in which they were acquired, which probably most often spring to mind as exemplifying 'contested heritage'. Here, the focus of the authors is on art and other heritage assets associated with buildings or land. Disputes in this context have increasingly arisen over the appropriateness of the memorialisation of controversial characters, often in a very prominent manner in statuary or other public art in the centre of towns and communities. Calls for the removal of memorials to those involved in activities abhorrent to contemporary society, most notably the slave trade, have become ever louder in recent years, particularly since the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence following the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in May 2020 in the US city of Minneapolis. (3)
In essence, the authors seek to explain how the conventional approaches...
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