Who is the Author of a Creative Work?

In contemporary art, creating is rarely a solitary act. A work may emerge through negotiation, collaboration, or delegation, passing through many hands before it is finished. But when a dispute arises, the law cannot deal in ambiguity. It must name a single figure: the author.

This event examines one of the thorniest questions at the intersection of art and law. At what point does carrying out an instruction become an act of creation? Can a technician, a performer, or a producer lay claim to a work they helped bring into being? And where, exactly, does the law separate the mind that conceives a work from the hands that make it?

To explore these tensions, the session turns to the rulings of Spanish courts that have had to draw that line in practice.  These decisions reveal as much about art as they do about law, testing concepts such as originality, creative contribution, control, and independence against the messy reality of how art is actually made.

Additional information

Limited places are available and will be assigned by registration only.

Blanca Cortés is a leading lawyer specializing in intellectual property and art law at ThinkSmartLaw. She is also a visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, ETSAM, ICADE, Carlos III University, Instituto de Empresa, University of Fine Arts and Madrid Design Festival, among others. She teaches on the relationship between intellectual property, architecture and photography. Blanca is co-founder of Camping, an initiative that opens the space of the NF gallery in Madrid to diverse cultural actors, so that they can freely develop and exhibit their projects using the exhibition space as a ground for their work and ALTTRA, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote globally renowned contemporary art in the Balearic Islands while placing art at the centre of the lives of  inhabitants and visitors.  For more information: https://thinksmartlaw.es/equipo/blanca-cortes/.