Visual artists and creative labour: intellectual property rights as a basis for individual and collective interventions.

The practice of visual art is often regarded as an individual and autonomous form of labour. While the making of the art work might occur in isolation, its public exhibition will often bring artists together in negotiation with an art institution. This article analyses two such occasions: artists whose work is exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada, and those who were selected for inclusion in the 2014 Sydney Biennale. We argue that these case studies demonstrate the way in which visual artists, at a certain point in the value chain, acquire greater power to negotiate, frequently by invoking intellectual property and ancillary rights in their artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]