10 ms·

NY lawsuit asks: Is graffiti art protected under federal law?

51 points by lnguyen 9y ago

menacingly 9y ago
Like most interesting stories, I find myself without a clear opinion as to which side is correct. It would be annoying to be a judge. Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith. I know the real question the judge must answer is whether or not a law was broken, but I assume since they're humans they often act from a sense of personal justice and then rationalize backwards to a sensible legal argument.
- alistairSH 9y ago
  Totally agree. It's an interesting case - I never would have expected to see laws interpreted to protect public art such as this. Why should any public artist have an expectation of their art being preserved? Just because a property owner grants permission, I would assume that property owner reserves the right to change their mind at any time, no? If it was a sculpture in the parking lot, would we feel the same way? Can the property owner demolish that without the 90 day heads-up? Can previous artists at that site turn around and sue the last wave of artists for doing the exact same thing?
  - menacingly 9y ago
    It actually robs some of the ephemeral mystique of graffiti. It's really gutsy to put effort into art you know someone can destroy the next day. I consider it one of the unique constraints of the form. Of course, in this instance, there was an inviting space for it. As laws go, 90 days to come and preserve the art is pretty reasonable to the property owner, but I can also see that given the unique form, he assumed it could be destroyed.
    - alistairSH 9y ago
      Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Can the artist force the reconstruction of the wall? If so, that's completely bonkers. I'm with you... the ephemeral quality of graffiti is a defining attribute. Without that, it's not graffiti any more. Not sure that invalidates the legal argument - it could still be art. Thinking locally... there's a ton of redevelopment in my area (Reston, VA). If I were a NIMBY, could I doodle on a few walls, throw paper at the courthouse, and bring it all to a stop?
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Well, you could make arrangements with the owner to cut the section of the wall. I think some Banksi works have already been sold like that.
      - ChoGGi 9y ago
        Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Assuming you want to keep art on both side of the wall: attach some sort of steel support to one side of the wall, then cut out the section with a concrete saw, I've seen blade diameters go up to four feet. You'd just need to have the blade on rails.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith. The owner rented out the interior of the building to tenants as studio space and the exterior to 5Pointz as gallery space while claiming the building was empty and writing it off for tax purposes. He wanted to sell the land to a developer to demolish it and put up a high-rise. When there were murmurings that the building might get declared a protected landmark, thereby preventing him from demolishing it, he hired people overnight and in secret to whitewash the exterior and destroy the graffiti art. That way, there's be nothing left to protect. If that's not bad faith, I don't know what is.
  - mc32 9y ago
    However, the artists would paint over previous works, so it's not like they were permanent installations, they lasted from days to on occasion a year. There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art. Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > However, the artists would paint over previous works, so it's not like they were permanent installations, they lasted from days to on occasion a year. That's not true. Some of the works were permanent installations, including tribute and memorial works from artists who have died. Only some spaces were designated for temporary installation. > There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art. There's no need to put "canvas" in scare quotes. There's plenty of case law that helps define what an installation is, in the context of art. This isn't a novel concept. > Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case. The owner agreed to let them use the space (and even charged them for it, along with double-dipping into tax write-offs for the building). Legally, that gives them a pretty strong claim to the space.
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
- juicy-fruit 9y ago
  Basquiat, who's paintings are some of the most valuable, started off as a graffiti artist. One of my favourite artists, Kaws, started off as a graffiti artist. In fact a lot of companies liked Kaws' vandalism of their ads. One of my fraternity brothers has an album full of pictures of all the places he travelled in the world and did some graffiti. It is so cool. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like graffiti, but I also think we should "enforce" the law so that not every part of the city gets plastered in graffiti. I think the appeal of seeing graffiti in grungy, underground places is a lot more authentic.
amelius 9y ago
Perhaps technology can help answer this. E.g. if a large number of facebook users "like" a photo of the artwork, then it can be considered art. If someone wants to know if something is art, they can take a picture, and submit it to facebook, and they can then photo-id it and determine its "art" status.
- bfuller 9y ago
  Seriously?
- matt4077 9y ago
  The question is almost never "is this art?" Because "art" isn't a two-valued logic, and the legal protection of art is similarly gradual. Proof by absurdity: Imagine a skyscraper that is, according to your own definition, definitely art, and specifically art that falls under the protection of free speech in the first amendment. Now try building that skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. You'll quickly find that even constitutionally protected rights can be abridged for reasons not protected by the constitution.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  1000 years from now, do you want our distant descendants to judge our aesthetic merits by the Kardashians?
- tehlike 9y ago
  on fb, everybody likes everything.
enord 9y ago
Ah hah! Now _that's_ a conundrum... How can it be grafitti if it's not subversive? Grafitti as art would vanish in a puff of logic.
- makapuf 9y ago
  Well the same could be said of most forms of art which were often created as a reaction to established order only to become the new established order. See: rock, rap, jeans, snickers, German language opera, abstract modern art.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Snickers?
    - delinka 9y ago
      Perhaps “sneakers.”
      - makapuf 9y ago
        Lol right. Not a native speaker, sorry.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      Snickers is the Reese's counterculture.
  - enord 9y ago
    Indeed, but the art component (as in: relevance within the zeitgeist, social commentary, emotional message etc.) of these movements, while subversive, didn't hinge on the express illigality of the act itself. Grafitti is beautiful vandalism. Paradoxical, controversial, illigal yet defensible, vexing and captivating at the same time. Under the protection of the law, only half of these remain, leaving grafitti with the artistic content of the common tattoo. Illigal, controversial and vexing now replaced with vulgar, crass and stupefying. (not to put down tattoos as an artistic medium, i'm just saying nobody's impressed with your sick sleeve, George)
golemotron 9y ago
This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail. That's not at all how art works, and thankfully we have plenty of case law and common law tradition to the contrary.
  - golemotron 9y ago
    What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and destroy an art form..
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and destroy an art form.. This apology is rather off-base. It's not like property owners generally permit artists to paint on their buildings in the first place. 5Pointz was a different case in that the landlord permitted the use of the building as a museum and charged for its use. It wasn't an illicit or secret subversion of the property; it was the agreed-upon, intended use for about two decades. There's lots and lots of case law for this. It's not new. It's not like ruling in favor of 5Pointz would create some new, anti-artist precedent. (Yes, that may be what the lawyers representing the landlord want you to think, but it's very demonstrably wrong.)
  - raverbashing 9y ago
syphilis2 9y ago
I was wondering what federal law could support the artists here. Answer: "Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 A subsection of copyright law" It's pretty short and the undefined terms stand out strongly. This was a useful overview for me to understand why the law exists: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.htm http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.h...
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Mentioned in the article: > The lawsuit hinges on a federal law called the the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. > A subsection of copyright law, the act grants visual artists the right to claim or disclaim a work and to protect their work from mutilation or distortion that would harm their honor or reputation. And if the art is of “recognized stature,” the act can be invoked to prevent their work from being destroyed.
fortythirteen 9y ago
I say this as an active collector of pop and street art. If you want to retain total ownership of your art then you should probably own the surface you create it on. No matter how much we may appreciate street art, in it's most common medium, it's technically vandalization. I think it's in poor taste for building owners to tear down walls and sell them to art dealers, but that's what happens when you paint all over someone else's property.
- hamitron 9y ago
  *vandalism
  - thephyber 9y ago
    > Vandalization is a synonym of vandalism. [1] https://wikidiff.com/vandalization/vandalism https://wikidiff.com/vandalization/vandalism
  - cantrip 9y ago
    Yeah honestly it's annoying enough already to pick out one specific word from a whole thoughtfully written comment and point out that it's incorrectly used, but you're not even right in that. Furthermore, you can't even be bothered to spend 5 seconds Googling your belief, rather you just blindly stick to your incorrect assumption and post a one word completely nonconstructive reply.
- nathancahill 9y ago
  Like the Banksy in Park City that's protected by a sheet of plexiglass?
cbr 9y ago
The quote "These individual artists may be compensated, but what is going to be the long-term effect [is] buildings don’t allow public art because they don’t want to face damages" looks right to me.
Shivetya 9y ago
Initially I was concerned that someone was copying and reselling the works of others. However once reading I have to side with the developers and/or owners of the property. Those being sued are simply being sued because they have the means to pay. It simply comes down to one fact. The art was all temporary with artist after artist replacing some of those before them. Their work is not being exploited by others for profit. Hence they are not owed anything, nothing was done under commission and it had been they would have been paid at the time. this is a money grab with a group attempting to play the victimization card. if those demolishing the buildings had no money there would never have been any issue raised nor if the buildings had been torn down for safety issues.
trothamel 9y ago
Random musing: By the logic of this case, would taking down confederate monuments be illegal?
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  If I park a car illegally and claim that it's performance art, can I sue the city when it gets towed away?
- GuB-42 9y ago
  I suppose most confederate monuments are not copyrighted, unless they have been created after Mickey Mouse.
  - albedoa 9y ago
    Not most, but it might be closer than you think: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_... [PDF] (Pages 12–13)
- hobbyjogger 9y ago
  Your comments seems a bit tongue in cheek, but the answer is probably not. This law doesn't protect works made for hire--and presumably the monuments would have been. It also only gives standing to sue to the author of a work, so the general public couldn't rely on it and if the author is dead the right to sue likely died with him/her. Finally, it doesn't prevent taking something down--only mutilation or destruction, etc. of an artist's work.
- syphilis2 9y ago
  "In a 2006 decision involving public sculptures that were removed from the park for which they were created, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that VARA does not protect location as a component of site-specific work. VARA covered works can be moved as long as the move does not constitute 'destruction, distortion, or mutilation.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act
- 9y ago
TheAdamist 9y ago
Better have an artists contract with your house painter, otherwise if you decide to repaint with another firm you are destroying their Monochrome painting in the style of Klein and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting
- ggggtez 9y ago
  I know your comment was supposed to be sarcastic, but it has nothing to do with what is being discussed.
anonyx69 9y ago
For anyone that's interested in this, I'd like to recommend an awesome documentary called Vigilante Vigilante. It's about anti-graffiti vigilantes that take it a little too far.
- subzidion 9y ago
  Saving Banksy is another really good one, talks about some of the struggles in preserving street art.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
They should have had a contract They all spraypainted over other people's work that came before them The owner will let them come back and graffiti more with a contract detailing ownership The informal agreement is outmoded and should therefore default to the property owner, even in the world where it doesn't, the artists forfeited their right to say otherwise when they did the exact same actions to the prior artist's works on the wall

51 points by lnguyen 9y ago

Like most interesting stories, I find myself without a clear opinion as to which side is correct. It would be annoying to be a judge. Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith. I know the real question the judge must answer is whether or not a law was broken, but I assume since they're humans they often act from a sense of personal justice and then rationalize backwards to a sensible legal argument.

alistairSH 9y ago
Totally agree. It's an interesting case - I never would have expected to see laws interpreted to protect public art such as this. Why should any public artist have an expectation of their art being preserved? Just because a property owner grants permission, I would assume that property owner reserves the right to change their mind at any time, no? If it was a sculpture in the parking lot, would we feel the same way? Can the property owner demolish that without the 90 day heads-up? Can previous artists at that site turn around and sue the last wave of artists for doing the exact same thing?
- menacingly 9y ago
  It actually robs some of the ephemeral mystique of graffiti. It's really gutsy to put effort into art you know someone can destroy the next day. I consider it one of the unique constraints of the form. Of course, in this instance, there was an inviting space for it. As laws go, 90 days to come and preserve the art is pretty reasonable to the property owner, but I can also see that given the unique form, he assumed it could be destroyed.
  - alistairSH 9y ago
    Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Can the artist force the reconstruction of the wall? If so, that's completely bonkers. I'm with you... the ephemeral quality of graffiti is a defining attribute. Without that, it's not graffiti any more. Not sure that invalidates the legal argument - it could still be art. Thinking locally... there's a ton of redevelopment in my area (Reston, VA). If I were a NIMBY, could I doodle on a few walls, throw paper at the courthouse, and bring it all to a stop?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Well, you could make arrangements with the owner to cut the section of the wall. I think some Banksi works have already been sold like that.
    - ChoGGi 9y ago
      Yeah, how do you preserve art that's painted on a wall owned by another party? Assuming you want to keep art on both side of the wall: attach some sort of steel support to one side of the wall, then cut out the section with a concrete saw, I've seen blade diameters go up to four feet. You'd just need to have the blade on rails.
chimeracoder 9y ago
> Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith. The owner rented out the interior of the building to tenants as studio space and the exterior to 5Pointz as gallery space while claiming the building was empty and writing it off for tax purposes. He wanted to sell the land to a developer to demolish it and put up a high-rise. When there were murmurings that the building might get declared a protected landmark, thereby preventing him from demolishing it, he hired people overnight and in secret to whitewash the exterior and destroy the graffiti art. That way, there's be nothing left to protect. If that's not bad faith, I don't know what is.
- mc32 9y ago
  However, the artists would paint over previous works, so it's not like they were permanent installations, they lasted from days to on occasion a year. There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art. Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > However, the artists would paint over previous works, so it's not like they were permanent installations, they lasted from days to on occasion a year. That's not true. Some of the works were permanent installations, including tribute and memorial works from artists who have died. Only some spaces were designated for temporary installation. > There was impermanence about the art. So, i think it's mostly about not wanting to lose their "canvass" than to preserve the art. There's no need to put "canvas" in scare quotes. There's plenty of case law that helps define what an installation is, in the context of art. This isn't a novel concept. > Given that the canvass was a building owned by someone else, I don't see much of a case. The owner agreed to let them use the space (and even charged them for it, along with double-dipping into tax write-offs for the building). Legally, that gives them a pretty strong claim to the space.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
juicy-fruit 9y ago
Basquiat, who's paintings are some of the most valuable, started off as a graffiti artist. One of my favourite artists, Kaws, started off as a graffiti artist. In fact a lot of companies liked Kaws' vandalism of their ads. One of my fraternity brothers has an album full of pictures of all the places he travelled in the world and did some graffiti. It is so cool. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like graffiti, but I also think we should "enforce" the law so that not every part of the city gets plastered in graffiti. I think the appeal of seeing graffiti in grungy, underground places is a lot more authentic.

amelius 9y ago

Perhaps technology can help answer this. E.g. if a large number of facebook users "like" a photo of the artwork, then it can be considered art. If someone wants to know if something is art, they can take a picture, and submit it to facebook, and they can then photo-id it and determine its "art" status.

bfuller 9y ago
Seriously?
matt4077 9y ago
The question is almost never "is this art?" Because "art" isn't a two-valued logic, and the legal protection of art is similarly gradual. Proof by absurdity: Imagine a skyscraper that is, according to your own definition, definitely art, and specifically art that falls under the protection of free speech in the first amendment. Now try building that skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. You'll quickly find that even constitutionally protected rights can be abridged for reasons not protected by the constitution.
lr4444lr 9y ago
1000 years from now, do you want our distant descendants to judge our aesthetic merits by the Kardashians?
tehlike 9y ago
on fb, everybody likes everything.

enord 9y ago

Ah hah! Now _that's_ a conundrum... How can it be grafitti if it's not subversive? Grafitti as art would vanish in a puff of logic.

makapuf 9y ago
Well the same could be said of most forms of art which were often created as a reaction to established order only to become the new established order. See: rock, rap, jeans, snickers, German language opera, abstract modern art.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Snickers?
  - delinka 9y ago
    Perhaps “sneakers.”
    - makapuf 9y ago
      Lol right. Not a native speaker, sorry.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Snickers is the Reese's counterculture.
- enord 9y ago
  Indeed, but the art component (as in: relevance within the zeitgeist, social commentary, emotional message etc.) of these movements, while subversive, didn't hinge on the express illigality of the act itself. Grafitti is beautiful vandalism. Paradoxical, controversial, illigal yet defensible, vexing and captivating at the same time. Under the protection of the law, only half of these remain, leaving grafitti with the artistic content of the common tattoo. Illigal, controversial and vexing now replaced with vulgar, crass and stupefying. (not to put down tattoos as an artistic medium, i'm just saying nobody's impressed with your sick sleeve, George)

golemotron 9y ago

This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail. That's not at all how art works, and thankfully we have plenty of case law and common law tradition to the contrary.
- golemotron 9y ago
  What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and destroy an art form..
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and destroy an art form.. This apology is rather off-base. It's not like property owners generally permit artists to paint on their buildings in the first place. 5Pointz was a different case in that the landlord permitted the use of the building as a museum and charged for its use. It wasn't an illicit or secret subversion of the property; it was the agreed-upon, intended use for about two decades. There's lots and lots of case law for this. It's not new. It's not like ruling in favor of 5Pointz would create some new, anti-artist precedent. (Yes, that may be what the lawyers representing the landlord want you to think, but it's very demonstrably wrong.)
- raverbashing 9y ago

syphilis2 9y ago

I was wondering what federal law could support the artists here. Answer: "Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 A subsection of copyright law" It's pretty short and the undefined terms stand out strongly. This was a useful overview for me to understand why the law exists: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.htm http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.h...

theandrewbailey 9y ago
Mentioned in the article: > The lawsuit hinges on a federal law called the the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. > A subsection of copyright law, the act grants visual artists the right to claim or disclaim a work and to protect their work from mutilation or distortion that would harm their honor or reputation. And if the art is of “recognized stature,” the act can be invoked to prevent their work from being destroyed.

fortythirteen 9y ago

I say this as an active collector of pop and street art. If you want to retain total ownership of your art then you should probably own the surface you create it on. No matter how much we may appreciate street art, in it's most common medium, it's technically vandalization. I think it's in poor taste for building owners to tear down walls and sell them to art dealers, but that's what happens when you paint all over someone else's property.

hamitron 9y ago
*vandalism
- thephyber 9y ago
  > Vandalization is a synonym of vandalism. [1] https://wikidiff.com/vandalization/vandalism https://wikidiff.com/vandalization/vandalism
- cantrip 9y ago
  Yeah honestly it's annoying enough already to pick out one specific word from a whole thoughtfully written comment and point out that it's incorrectly used, but you're not even right in that. Furthermore, you can't even be bothered to spend 5 seconds Googling your belief, rather you just blindly stick to your incorrect assumption and post a one word completely nonconstructive reply.
nathancahill 9y ago
Like the Banksy in Park City that's protected by a sheet of plexiglass?

cbr 9y ago

The quote "These individual artists may be compensated, but what is going to be the long-term effect [is] buildings don’t allow public art because they don’t want to face damages" looks right to me.

Shivetya 9y ago

Initially I was concerned that someone was copying and reselling the works of others. However once reading I have to side with the developers and/or owners of the property. Those being sued are simply being sued because they have the means to pay. It simply comes down to one fact. The art was all temporary with artist after artist replacing some of those before them. Their work is not being exploited by others for profit. Hence they are not owed anything, nothing was done under commission and it had been they would have been paid at the time. this is a money grab with a group attempting to play the victimization card. if those demolishing the buildings had no money there would never have been any issue raised nor if the buildings had been torn down for safety issues.

trothamel 9y ago

Random musing: By the logic of this case, would taking down confederate monuments be illegal?

pavel_lishin 9y ago
If I park a car illegally and claim that it's performance art, can I sue the city when it gets towed away?
GuB-42 9y ago
I suppose most confederate monuments are not copyrighted, unless they have been created after Mickey Mouse.
- albedoa 9y ago
  Not most, but it might be closer than you think: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_... [PDF] (Pages 12–13)
hobbyjogger 9y ago
Your comments seems a bit tongue in cheek, but the answer is probably not. This law doesn't protect works made for hire--and presumably the monuments would have been. It also only gives standing to sue to the author of a work, so the general public couldn't rely on it and if the author is dead the right to sue likely died with him/her. Finally, it doesn't prevent taking something down--only mutilation or destruction, etc. of an artist's work.
syphilis2 9y ago
"In a 2006 decision involving public sculptures that were removed from the park for which they were created, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that VARA does not protect location as a component of site-specific work. VARA covered works can be moved as long as the move does not constitute 'destruction, distortion, or mutilation.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Artists_Rights_Act
9y ago

TheAdamist 9y ago

Better have an artists contract with your house painter, otherwise if you decide to repaint with another firm you are destroying their Monochrome painting in the style of Klein and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting

ggggtez 9y ago
I know your comment was supposed to be sarcastic, but it has nothing to do with what is being discussed.

anonyx69 9y ago

For anyone that's interested in this, I'd like to recommend an awesome documentary called Vigilante Vigilante. It's about anti-graffiti vigilantes that take it a little too far.

subzidion 9y ago
Saving Banksy is another really good one, talks about some of the struggles in preserving street art.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

They should have had a contract They all spraypainted over other people's work that came before them The owner will let them come back and graffiti more with a contract detailing ownership The informal agreement is outmoded and should therefore default to the property owner, even in the world where it doesn't, the artists forfeited their right to say otherwise when they did the exact same actions to the prior artist's works on the wall