Displaying items by tag: lawuit

In November 2012, two members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York sued the institution for deceiving the public by making patrons think that the suggested admission fees are mandatory. The historically free institution suggests entry fees of $25 for adults and less for seniors and students.

Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson files the suit in state court in Manhattan and said that the museum’s fee policy lacks transparency. They also argued that the museum fails to note that the fee is suggested on several of its websites and that it’s only in fine and barely legible print on signs near cash registers. A statute was put in place in 1893 declaring that the Met must remain free in order to continue receiving government funding. Grunewald and Nicholson commissioned a survey of visitors to the museum and found that 85% of patrons believed they had to pay to gain entry.

According to court papers filed by Gerald Lee Jones, who worked at the Met as a floor manager from 2007 until 2011, cashiers were trained to deceive visitors and they were paid in part based on how much they collected from admission fees. The statement, which was filed in late June 2013, also suggested that cashiers were instructed to never volunteer that patrons may pay less than the “recommended” fee.

During the year ending in June 2012, the Met brought in $37.8 million in admissions, about 16% of the museum’s revenue.

When notable street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, passed a spiral notebook back and forth with his high school classmates, he surely didn’t anticipate the collaboration being at the center of a heated lawsuit. Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, Basquiat’s adolescent cohorts, are suing Yale University’s Beinecke Library to have their contributions to the “SAMO© high-school notebook” recognized.

 Diaz and Dawson claim that Yale has glossed over their roles in creating the notebook that is bursting with puns, notes, doodles, and scribblings, and are passing it off as a priceless piece of Basquiat’s oeuvre. The duo also claimed that the book was stolen from Dawson and somehow ended up in Yale’s library. The respected institution reportedly paid as much as $40,000 for the notebook.

The lawsuit raises a number of questions concerning artist ephemera, a notoriously difficult thing to trace. The fact that Diaz and Dawson had a falling out with Basquiat after the artist rose to fame also makes navigating the case difficult.