Honor and Destruction: The Conflicted Object in Moral Rights Law

In 1990, the Copyright Act was amended to name visual artists, alone among protected authors, possessors of moral rights, a set of non-economic intellectual property rights originating in nineteenth-century Europe. Although enhancing authors\u27 rights in a user-oriented system was a novel undertaking, it was rendered further anomalous by the statute\u27s designated class, given copyright\u27s longstanding alliance with text. And although moral rights epitomize the legacy of the Romantic author as a cultural trope embedded in the law, American culture offered little to support or explain the apparent privileging of visual artists over other authors. What, if not a legal or cultural disposition toward visual artists, precipitated the enactment of a moral rights statute like the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (\u27\u27VARA )? This Article demonstrates that the answer is less related to authorship concerns than would reasonably be surmised from a doctrine premised on the theory that a creative work embodies the author\u27s honor, personhood, and even soul

Artist's Statement: Upwelling: Underwater Garden

Artist's Statement for the cover art of IJPS volume 3, issue 1: Upwelling: Underwater Garden, 2014. Acrylic on canvas

The Everyday Fantastic

The Everyday Fantastic was a major solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2009. A book was published to coincide with the exhibition: The Everyday Fantastic, with 100 full-colour illustrations and an essay by David Rayson. The exhibition and publication showcased four years of exploratory drawings responding to suburban living: ‘Comfy settees and fringed lampshades; a trip to the local off-licence; bird-watching, of both the human and animal kind. This is the sort of quotidian stuff that makes up David Rayson's depiction of English suburbia, but all of it drawn in bright, heavy, felt-tip inks so that his scenes take on an intense, immediate, disorientating feel, like something from a dream or fever.’ —Gabriel Coxhead, Time Out, January 2009 Research drew from the graphic works of historical artists including Francisco de Goya, George Grosz, Otto Dix and works from the Prinzhorn collection, alongside contemporary artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Mike Diana. The exhibition, book and associated guest lectures celebrated the formal possibilities of storytelling, exploring explicit figuration, surrealistic visions and psychological abstractions. The domestic scale and use of modest materials such as ink-pens echoed the works’ overarching themes of the vernacular and the ‘homegrown’. Reviews: TimeOut, critic’s choice 29th January 2009, The Guardian, Pick of the Week 7th and 14th of February 2009, The Spectator, 31st January 2009, and The Week, 24th January 2009. Lectures: The Everyday Fantastic (Guest Lecture) Slade School of Art (2009), The Everyday Fantastic (Public Inaugural Professorial Lecture) The Royal College of Art (2009), Everyone is here to see the show, (Gallery Lecture) The Rochelle School, London (2009). Everyday Fantastic works in other exhibitions: Peeping Tom, curated by Keith Coventry; The Vegas Gallery, London 2010 and Kunsthal Ka De (Amersfoort), Amsterdam 2011. Nothing in the World but Youth, Turner Contemporary, Margate 2011 (Publication isbn: 978-0955236334