FAQS

Guest Work Agency is Australia’s first dedicated art law and advisory practice, working with artists, collectors, galleries, arts organisations, art fairs and art tech start-ups. Although we are based in Melbourne, the firm works with clients around Australia and internationally.

As well as providing innovative legal solutions, Guest Work Agency is a curatorial practice, initiating its own exhibitions, talks and texts at the intersection of art, tech and law.

In 2019 Guest Work Agency founded an offshoot business, the Guest Club, a subscription-based art advisory service and membership network for art lovers and collectors.

Guest Work Agency is run by director and founder, Alana Kushnir. Alana is an art lawyer and curator with a strong interest in how the law and technology intersect with the creative industries, particularly art. She is a regular contributor and speaker in the art field in Australia and overseas.

Alana is also the Principal Investigator of the Serpentine Galleries’ R&D Platform Legal Lab, which explores how the law can better support collaborations across art, science and technology, and a sessional lecturer at The University of Melbourne, teaching subjects on curating, contemporary art and art law.

Alana is supported by a multi-disciplinary team with backgrounds in law and art in Australia and abroad. Team members include Paralegal Associate Mia Shaumann, London based Curatorial Associate, Anaïs Lellouche, and Marketing Consultant Aleks Czerwinski. To find out more about the team’s experience, visit our Guest Workers page.

Guest Work Agency’s legal services include helping clients protect their creative output, diversify their income streams, negotiate multi-party public commission projects, and launch art tech platforms and marketplaces.

Our specific areas of legal expertise include:

• Negotiating and drafting of contracts for private and public art commissions, artwork sales and licensing, gallery representation, artist publications, exhibitions and photography of artworks.

• Drafting of website terms and conditions, privacy policies and regulation-required statements.

• Providing legal advice on art and creative projects, particularly those with an advanced technology focus (AI, VR, XR, Blockchain & NFTs) in areas including intellectual property, privacy and consumer law.

• Drafting wills for artists and providing estate planning advice.

• Drafting letters of demand and providing dispute resolution advice, particularly in the areas of breach of contract, copyright, misleading and deceptive conduct and defamation.

• Setting up non-profit organisations, registering for charitable and Deductible Gift Recipient status.

• Advising on art crime and artwork restitution.

We embrace the role of the non-traditional advisor - part studio manager, estate planner, sport-style agent, producer, dealer and relationship facilitator.

Our specific areas of management consulting expertise for the art industry include:

• Identifying and negotiating commercial opportunities for artists, such as brand collaborations and major artwork commissions

• Project management of public artworks

• Artwork inventory management

• Artwork certification and blockchain registration advice

• Estate planning for artworks and digital assets

You can find a selection of our past and ongoing projects on our Projects page.

We are proud to work with a diverse group of artists at all stages of their career across a broad range of mediums, from painting and sculpture, to photography and video, to digital art and NFTs.

Although we are based in Australia, we work with artists both nationally and worldwide. Visit our Clients page for more information on the artists we work with.

Where possible, we prefer to offer a fixed fee for our services. Alternatively, if we can’t establish the length of time providing our services will take, we offer our services at hourly rates. We offer a 10% discount for artists.

We accept payment in fiat and cryptocurrency.

At Guest Work Agency we develop, manage and implement art and exhibition projects for artists, galleries, art tech start-ups and brands. We use our wealth of industry knowledge to provide tailored solutions for the art industry.

Our specific areas of project management include:

• curating exhibitions;

• curating public programs;

• managing public art projects; and

• managing art publications.

A curatorial practice encompasses exhibition-making, public programming, commissioning social or public projects, as well as working with artists and practitioners from other disciplines.

For Guest Work Agency, our curatorial practice is our creative outlet. It is how we push the boundaries of the disciplines we work across – art, law and technology.

As part of our curatorial practice, we initiate and collaborate on projects, exhibitions and writing at the intersection of art, technology and the law.

For example, our Director and Founder Alana Kushnir is the Principal Investigator of the Serpentine Legal Lab. A part of the Serpentine’s Arts Technologies department and R&D platform, the Legal Lab explores how the law can better support collaborations across art, science and technology. Since its beginnings in 2019, the Legal Lab has been investigating legal issues and prototyping accessible legal solutions for the art field. You can read more about the Legal Lab here and about other curatorial projects of Guest Work Agency here.

In 2019, Guest Work Agency launched the Guest Club to support the next generation of art lovers and collectors in Australia.

We offer art experiences, travel tours and masterclasses for our community. You can read more about our upcoming events here.

In the past Guest Club operated using a membership model. In 2023, Guest Club is changing. Each experience will be separately ticketed to provide you with more flexibility to attend the events that interest you.

To keep up to date with updates from the Guest Club, including upcoming events, you can subscribe to our quarterly newsletter, The Guest, here.

Art lawyers provide advice on a wide range of legal issues relating to the creation and commercialisation of art works and the art marketplace. These range from drafting and negotiating contracts, protecting and defending intellectual property and copyright through to dispute resolution advice.

Unlike some other types of lawyers, art lawyers are unique as their legal expertise covers a broad spectrum of different specialisations and they also require a solid understanding and interest in the art world and all of its intricacies.

We would always recommend being proactive in seeking legal advice. Whether you are an artist, gallery, art tech start up or museum, you should reach out to a lawyer when you are entering into a commercial agreement of any kind (such as the commission of a new artwork, the consignment of an artwork to a gallery or the setting up of an online platform for displaying and selling art). A specialist art lawyer can map the various relationships involved, and guide you on what contracts should be prepared to set out the terms of the arrangement (avoiding differing expectations and miscommunications down the track).

There is also a lot of confusion about who owns what creative content, and who has the right to use it. An art lawyer can help you understand the ins and outs of copyright law and advise you on how to protect your intellectual property.

An art lawyer also plays an important role in estate planning for artists. If you’re an artist, having your will drafted by an art lawyer who understands the importance of preserving your work and legacy is essential.

Read more in our blog When you should hire an art lawyer.

There are a number of different types of contracts which may be appropriate for you to have in place.

If you are considering signing with a gallery or just having one exhibition, it’s important that you set clear parameters around your relationship with the gallery. A Gallery Representation Agreement is a vital mechanism to establish your rights and obligations with a gallery and helps ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Are you thinking of consigning your artworks to a gallery? A Consignment Agreement is a contract between an artist and a gallery where the artist provides the gallery with artworks that the gallery can sell on the artist’s behalf. Traditionally, the gallery agrees to sell the artwork in exchange for receiving a commission on the sold price. Artists often make these agreements verbally so they don’t miss out on an opportunity to work with a gallery. We understand that the idea of having a Consignment Agreement can feel like overkill, however, like a Representation Agreement, a written Consignment Agreement can help you establish and rely on the payment structure, marketing and insurance obligations.

A Commission Agreement may also be useful to you. This contract sets out the terms for a commissioned artwork and often involves multiple parties such as fabricators, sound producers and photographers. For Commission Agreements, having a contract which clearly establishes the responsibilities of each party is vital.

What do you sell when you sell an artwork? Do you retain the copyright, can you reproduce the work? How and when will you get paid? An Artwork Sale Agreement governs the relationship between an artist and a purchaser. It helps answer these questions and clears up any uncertainties if the relationship deteriorates.

NFTs can give rise to fundamental legal questions around intellectual property ownership and rights such as “When you buy an artwork, what do you own? And what rights do you have in relation to that work?”

Other legal issues include having transparent terms of service in place for NFT marketplaces available to users before they sign up. These terms are important as they help users to understand the risks involved in interacting with a certain platform, as well as minting, buying and selling NFTs. Inconsistent terms of use may give rise to consumer law issues such as misleading and deceptive conduct.

Read more about legal issues and NFT in a Lawyers Weekly interview with Alana Kushnir: NFT market sees ‘innovative’ dealmaking, but also a ‘lack of standardisation and transparency’.

There are currently many different types of processes, or ‘AI techniques’ being used by artists in the production of artworks. Some artists are writing their own algorithms and creating custom-made data sets using original works in which they own the copyright. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some artists are using AI text to image generators such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.

In Australia, as is the case in all common law jurisdictions, one of the fundamental tenets of copyright law is the requirement of human authorship for a work to be protected by copyright. At this stage, it is unclear whether outputs from AI text to image generators are protected by copyright. It is also important to read the terms of service of AI text to image generator platforms before using them, as these terms stipulate what rights the platform and the user has to their outputs.

We recently wrote about How Artificial Intelligence is Challenging the Law’s Approach to Art for the Intellectual Property Law Bulletin here.

When it comes to public art, the traditional commissioning relationship between commissioner and artist rarely occurs today. Not only will the commissioner and artist be involved, but so too will other individuals and stakeholders who bring the artwork to life.

Parties to the contract could be the artist’s gallery, the architect of the site, the developer, the project manager, the artwork fabricator or the guarantor, for example. There may need to be more than one contract in place to address all of the parties involved.

Public art commission arrangements are also unique from a contractual perspective because they can encompass all (or some) of the varying life phases of an artwork.

You should consider not only who is involved, but what each party is responsible for and how a contract can be used to hold each party accountable for their obligations under the commissioning arrangement.

Read our blog about public art commission contracts for more information.

Copyright is a type of intellectual property (IP). IP is an umbrella term for rights which protect intangible expressions of the human mind. Other types of IP include patents, trade marks and designs.

In Australia, copyright is regulated by the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Copyright is automatically granted to authors of original literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works. Copyright provides creators with certain exclusive rights, such as the rights to reproduce and to communicate to the public by electronic means (such as uploading to a website), as well as to licence and assign (transfer) those rights.

In Australia, in order to make out claim of copyright infringement under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), you must first establish whether the work which is the subject of the alleged copying is protected by copyright. Secondly, you must establish whether the alleged infringer used a “substantial part” of your original work, which is a test of quality, not quantity. You must also be able to establish that the alleged infringer directly copied your original work and not merely that the works are stylistically similar.

Where the works are stylistically similar, but there is no direct copying involved, you may be able to make out a claim for misleading and deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law or the tort of passing off.

If you believe that someone is copying or ripping off your artwork, it is important to seek legal advice as early as possible, and before you choose to voice your concerns on social media.

Since copyright is personal property, it can be transferred to another person by assignment. An assignment enables the original copyright owner to transfer their ownership of copyright to another person. The assignment must be in writing and signed by the assignor in order to be recognised under Australian copyright law.

A copyright licence does not transfer copyright to another person. It gives a person permission to use someone’s copyright under certain conditions. The licence can either be made expressly – in writing or verbally – or it can be implied by conduct. For example, if you are a designer who's been engaged to design a logo for a client, then by nature of the service you are providing the client, it would generally be implied that the client has permission to use your copyright in the logo

Copyright assignments and licences can also be geographically limited. For example, a licence might be limited to use of the copyright within Australia. They can also be limited to certain specific copyrights; for example, they could be limited to the right to reproduce the copyright-protected subject matter, and they might also be limited so that the licensee cannot sublicense or transfer the licence to someone else.

The most sensible way to set up a copyright assignment or a licence is to speak to a legal professional so that the transfer or permission is legally binding, and the conditions can be tailored to your interests.

Guest Work Agency has developed automated Contract Builders with circumstances like these in mind. If you are collaborating with fabricators, assistants or others on your creative project and want to ensure that you own the copyright, you may be interested in purchasing our Copyright Assignment Deed here.

Copyright protects expressions of the mind, being the expression of ideas in a material form. This means that copyright does not protect ideas – and to that end, curatorial ideas – but rather, the way in which those curatorial ideas have been expressed in a material form, be it on paper, in a digital document, in a voice recording, and so on. For example, an exhibition concept might not itself attract copyright protection, unless it is expressed in a material format. Similarly, an essay theory or argument might not itself attract copyright protection, but the catalogue essay as expressed in material form could be considered a literary work and attract copyright protection on that basis.

There are other areas of law, outside of intellectual property (or ‘IP’ for short), that could help protect your curatorial ideas, such as the breach of confidence cause of action. Breach of confidence is not a part of intellectual property law, but a pseudo-cousin of sorts. In order to succeed in bringing a cause of action for breach of confidence, the information must have a quality of confidence and it must not already be public knowledge. The information needs to be given in circumstances which import the obligation of confidentiality, such as a confidential conversation. Unfortunately, pitching your exciting exhibition idea to your friends at a party, or even a lecture room, is unlikely to cut it. The best way you can impress the confidentiality of your curatorial project, is to have the person who you're pitching it to sign a Confidentiality Deed before you share anything with them.

Guest Work Agency has developed automated Contract Builders with circumstances like these in mind. If you are pitching a design, curatorial or advertising idea, you may be interested in purchasing our Confidentiality Deed here.

Guest Work Agency specialises in art law, and has extensive experience in creating estate plans for artists and art collectors.

We look after the legal, strategic and administrative aspects of preserving artists' and art collectors' legacies during their lifetime and following their death. This may involve preparing an estate plan, drafting a will, and appointing powers of attorney.

Guest Work Agency also drafts special legal instruments that can be particularly useful for art estate planning, called testamentary trusts. In addition, we create artwork inventories and catalogues and arrange for independent evaluations.

Our services also include assisting our clients in probate applications and overseeing the distribution of assets. We also prepare business strategies following an artist's death, like taking care of licensing arrangements.

For artists and art collectors, it’s essential that your plans for your estate account for the unique art aspects of your estate. If you’re a practicing artist, you leave behind quite a unique estate when you die. It may comprise of your existing stock, archive material, and copyrights, amongst other personal and real estate assets.

If you have digital assets, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency, this should also be considered in your planning.

Because of the unique nature of artist estates, the process of accounting for and distributing your assets can be complex. Dealing with this can place an unnecessary burden on your loved ones after your passing. You can ease this burden by putting in place an estate plan.

Under Australian copyright law (and the copyright laws of other jurisdictions like the UK), the copyright duration for artistic works, like painting and sculpture, generally lasts for 70 years after the author’s death. This means that after you die, the owner of your copyright would have the exclusive right to sell and licence your copyright during those 70 years. Have you considered who you want to own and administer your copyright after you die?

Where an artwork is resold on the secondary market after your death, you may also be entitled to statutory resale proceeds for the length of the copyright in the artwork. Have you considered who you want to receive those sale proceeds after you die?

These are important questions for all artists to consider as part of the estate planning process.

For artists and art collectors, the earlier you start considering the estate planning process, the better. After a complimentary initial consult with us, we will prepare your bespoke estate plan and include a list of steps for you to take in actioning your plan.

To start the estate planning process, contact Guest Work Agency by emailing info@guestworkagency.art for an initial consult.

Art archives document the activities and decisions of artists, collectors and organisations. They provide a way of collating and systematising original documents that can come in multiple formats, both physical and digital material.

An art archive makes accessing the source material of an artist or collection easy and straightforward given that all material is located in one place and is logically organised.

The purpose of an art archive is to ensure artistic legacy and to provide proof of provenance. Provenance is the record of ownership of an artwork that can help in art historical investigations, cataloguing and valuations.

Art archives also preserve the historical and cultural value of an artwork, the entire backstory behind the artwork, and the artist who created it.

Art archiving is an important exercise in physically maintaining your artworks and their related information. The role of an art archivist is to provide advice as to how to properly protect and preserve your collection for the longevity of your artwork as well to facilitate this process.

Guest Work Agency has first-hand experience in the management and organisation of art archives. We provide tailored advice for our clients both in their physical and digital archiving needs.

We advise as to the leading inventory management platforms and online digital authenticity record systems in order to define which solutions are the best fit for you and what will serve your needs moving forward.

Art archiving is also an important step in estate planning. To learn more about Guest Work Agency’s estate planning services, see our estate planning FAQs.

A chatbot is an automated software program. Our Contract Builders feature chatbots which ask you a series of specific questions and automatically populate documents drafted by us based on your responses to those questions.

Tailored specifically for the arts industry, our Contract Builders have been designed by us – specialist art lawyers who works with these kinds of documents all the time and know just how often they are not used – but should be used – in practice.

They are! Our Contract Builders are each designed to comply with Australian contract, consumer and intellectual property laws.

Not a tech whiz? Don’t worry, our Contract Builders are super simple and user friendly! All you need is internet connection and you’re good to go. We recommend using Google Chrome – don’t forget to wait a few seconds for the Contract Builder to load.

Each chatbot should take you approximately 10 minutes to complete. The automation process takes a matter of minutes and the populated document is then reviewed by us for our final tick of approval – and returned to you ready for signing - within 48 hours.

We know that it can be hard to decipher legal jargon, which is why we’ve programmed our Contract Builders to use simple, easy to understand language. We have even included additional hints in the chatbots to help explain some of the more technical questions. If you find yourself stuck on a question asked by the chatbot, or are in need of technical assistance, you can get in touch with one of our specialist art lawyers by contacting us at info@guestworkagency.art