Release of the Serpentine Legal Lab Report 1

Users surveyed by the Serpentine Legal Lab, courtesy of Amurabi.

In this story, Guest Work Agency intern and Serpentine Legal Lab Research Associate, Jasper Salomonsz, shares his take on the Serpentine Research & Development (R&D) Platform’s recent release of Legal Lab Report 1: Art x Tech/Science Collaborations. Highlighting some of the key legal issues facing artists, technologists, arts institutions, tech companies and others when collaborating, this story offers a useful summary of the challenges faced by cutting edge creative practice.

As industries and institutions wrangle with global socio-economic, political and environmental uncertainty, traditional practices are increasingly switched out for dynamic experimentation and innovation. In this rapidly transforming landscape, even the regulation-averse art world can benefit from the antidote to the ambiguity that legal tools provide. At least, such is the thrust behind the Serpentine R&D Platform’s Legal Lab which last month launched its first report, Legal Lab Report 1: Art + Tech/Science Collaborations. The product of two years of research and analysis led by Guest Work Agency’s Director and Founder Alana Kushnir, the report represents the Lab’s maiden voyage into the largely uncharted waters of cross-disciplinary art, technology and science collaborations and their intersection with the law.

The Legal Lab

The Legal Lab is one of a number of labs that are part of the Serpentine’s Arts Technologies programme R&D Platform. As its modus operandi, the R&D Platform adopts the co-operative and experimental objectives of scientific R&D practices. The Legal Lab is supported by a diverse Advisory Panel of practitioners spanning the disciplines of art, design, technology and law. Following its launch in 2019, the Legal Lab has been mapping the legal landscape of the art field, investigating legal issues that arise in collaborations across disciplines and prototyping solutions.

As it advances the R&D Platform’s objective to bring the institution’s ‘back-end’ (operations, protocols, in-built values) and ‘front-end’ (what it produces) into “experimental realignment”, the Legal Lab signals a reframing of the legal department’s function within the broader cultural institution. Much like the R&D Platform’s other labs – such as the Creative AI Lab, Synthetic Ecologies Lab and Blockchain Lab – the Legal Lab’s output is considered as much a part of the institution’s cultural production as it is a part of the institution’s operational model.  

By fore-fronting the role of the law, the R&D Platform recognises the potential of legal infrastructure tailored to the art industry to support cutting-edge creative practice. This is a challenge to the commonly held art industry distaste for legal involvement. Somewhat provocatively, the Legal Lab replaces scepticism with confidence.

The Report

The 40-page Legal Lab Report 1: Art x Tech/Science Collaborations presents the findings of a survey and interview-based research endeavour. The first of its kind, the report runs a diagnostic over the increasingly prevalent collaborations between art, technology and science. Analysing data gleaned from over 250 responses from artists, curators, technologists, scientists, cultural institutions, galleries, funders, tech companies, legal academics and lawyers, the study adopts the foundations of ‘legal design’ thinking. Legal design is a methodological approach that applies human-centred design thinking to innovate legal solutions. It is a nascent movement being developed globally by leading practitioners such as Margaret Hagan at the Stanford Legal Design Lab. The Serpentine Legal Lab has adopted ‘legal design’ not only in its research methodology but also in the Report’s design. The Report has been created in collaboration with Amurabi, a Paris-based legal design firm whose goal is to improve the user experience of the law by developing user-friendly legal documents.

When ‘legal design’ is applied to legal issues in art and tech/science collaborations, the ‘users’ – represented by the respondents – expose their needs, expectations and the pain points along the ‘user journey’ of interdisciplinary collaboration. As the wants, needs and pain points are considered and restated as ‘action points’, the report marks an important transition from a purely research-oriented phase to a developmental phase of the Legal Lab. Ultimately, the Report aims to “catalyse the development of user-friendly contractual processes and legal education resources, as well as cross-disciplinary standards for best practice in collaboration”.  

The following is a summary of key issues presented by the Report.


A handshake should do…

The ‘anti-contract’ mindset is an age-old art world myth that legally enforceable contracts are redundant. As such, there is a tendency to “shy away from legally onerous forms of arrangement”. A lawyer interviewed characterised this as “an almost pathological aversion to written agreements”. As a symptom of this aversion, the report also identified the infrequent use of written contracts as another pain point. This emerged as a broad issue amongst many respondents, with only 44% using written contracts.

The power imbalance begins when the host institution/sponsor initiates the contract

As written contracts are usually initiated by the host institution or sponsor, the source of contracts – when used – can indicate an imbalance of power amongst collaborators. An artist group noted that “typically [contracts are] drafted by the largest partners, usually the corporates”. Sometimes an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) is drafted first, which can prove problematic when parties consider these legally binding. Finding a common language would resolve such issues, however, resource imbalances between contractual parties often hinder effective communication of parties’ ideas and intent.

Lawyer up, if you can…

The most perceptible form of resource imbalance is the lack of access to specialist legal advice. Legal representation of artists, particularly when drafting and negotiating collaboration contracts, remains niche. This is due to both affordability issues and the rarity of lawyers specialising in this area. Whilst artists and curators communicated a desire for legal advice, lawyers tend to only be engaged by more established artists. In contrast, technology sponsors and university partners will normally engage a lawyer, often in-house. This leads to a lack of opportunity to negotiate a contract before signing and the prioritising [of] different contract terms.

Who owns and holds the rights?

85% of respondents to a @serpentineuk Instagram poll did not know who owns intellectual property created in collaboration. Ownership of project intellectual property is generally misunderstood as falling to the artist. However, pursuant to copyright law, the person who puts the artwork into a material form may be regarded as the author and first owner of the copyright.

Who can use or “reuse” the rights?

Rights to use project IP also presents a cause for confusion. As collaborations in technology and science commonly engage new technologies, the question of IP rights and use protocols can be unclear. For example, in the case of Artificial Intelligence, one artist asked, “Who owns that? Is it the person who trained the neural network? The person who designed the code? The person who executes it?” Likewise, with almost all art + tech/science collaborations involving the use of prior intellectual property and source code but no standard protocols, retaining copyright in software code and re-using it in other projects by technologists can be contentious.  

A need to standardise crediting and remuneration practices

A need to innovate art + tech/science-specific business practices is communicated at several points throughout the report. From the budget and KPI-driven practices of tech companies to the divergent crediting etiquettes in science (where someone who might merely read over a paper will receive a mention) compared to art (where the impression of individual genius precludes such distributed crediting), industry practices are often at odds. The Report shows that art + tech/science collaborations have adopted traditional artist remuneration practices in the form of flat fees – or artist fees – rather than the more equitable royalty payment structures present in other industries. As such, artists expressed a desire to re-think business models for collaborative contexts, moving past traditional employment or sub-contractor relationships. This would “shift the balance of power in favour of the artist,” allow for diverse income and revenue streams and improve tax and liability conditions.

Action Points

The Report identifies both short-medium and long term action points. In the short-medium term, action points are oriented around developing legal and art field glossaries, how-to guides, specialist lawyer directories and example collaboration structures. In the long term, the Report considers knowledge dissemination methods, contract automation and a model code and membership body.

Final Thoughts

In keeping with the R&D Platform’s commitment to an open-source, knowledge-sharing practice, the Report is being widely disseminated and is publicly accessible via the Serpentine’s Legal Lab webpage. In many ways, the Report is the product of an emerging legal industry culture dedicated to the democratisation of legal resources and the improvement of legal services.

The Report, and the Lab’s intentions more broadly, attempt to overcome a serious legal access issue – particularly for artists and curators. It recognises that sustainable experimentation and risk-taking are enhanced when ethical and policy-based concerns are considered and the interests of stakeholders – creative and otherwise – are equally protected.

With the user at its core, the Report offers the fields of art, technology and science the potential to move past collaborations that are largely improvised, towards more streamlined, fair and productive endeavours.