Abstract
Resale right consists of a small percentage of the resale price that art market professionals pay to artists at each resale of their works with the involvement of an auction house, gallery, or dealer. Until the new millennium, the resale right was implemented in a small number of countries. In 2014, more than 70 countries have resale rights. The United States, which has been very reluctant toward the adoption of the resale rights, seems to have changed its mind very recently. The debate about the opportunity to implement a resale right is commonly structured around two main axes. The first discusses whether or not visual artists profit from the resale right. The second deals with distortions of trade and competition within different countries that this right could create. While numerous governmental reports and academic research studies concern these two axes, focusing on the effects and consequences of the implementation of a resale right, fewer works deal with its economic rationale.
An Economic Perspective for a Recurrent Issue: The Legitimacy of the Resale Right “I’ve been working my ass off for you to make all this profit. The least you could do is send every artist in this auction free taxis for a week.” -Robert Rauschenberg to Robert Schull
NB: Schull originally bought the artwork $900 in 1958 and resold it for $85,000 in 1973 (quoted by Wu 1999, p. 531)
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Moureau, N. (2019). Droit de Suite. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_7
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