Anna Bartsch: 'Where is my Cut? Justifying Resale Rights'
In some markets, creators get a cut when their works get resold. One example is the art market. It strikes many people as unfair when artists whose works are generating large profits for galleries or art dealers do not benefit from the rise in value of their art. A policy called the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR), whereby the creator of an artwork receives a percentage of any subsequent resale transaction, is supposed to address this. I argue that this policy, as well-meaning as it may be, is hard to justify normatively. Property rights and personhood arguments are unlikely to succeed. While an argument from exploitation may be able to ground an ARR, it does so only when the artist is vulnerable and in cases where the resale is profitable. It is also dependent on a particular duty to help and relies on an internalist understanding of profit which is controversial. The wide-spread appeal of an ARR rests on the well-justified intuition that it is wrong to exploit someone’s vulnerabilities, and that many art transactions are characterised correctly as exploitative. But this intuition cannot yield a blanket ARR. My analysis could extend to other markets where resale cut policies exist, e.g. the market for football players, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and certain financial products.
