Decent short video about the process of moving a Sol Lewitt piece in a museum:
Some context from his wiki page:
According to the principle of his work, LeWitt’s wall drawings are usually executed by people other than the artist himself. Even after his death, people are still making these drawings. He would therefore eventually use teams of assistants to create such works. Writing about making wall drawings, LeWitt himself observed in 1971 that “each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently”. Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings. The wall drawings, executed on-site, generally exist for the duration of an exhibition; they are then destroyed, giving the work in its physical form an ephemeral quality. They can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. When transferred to another location, the number of walls can change only by ensuring that the proportions of the original diagram are retained.
There’s a famous quote that is attributed to Lewitt, and which appears to originate in this 1967 Artforum piece, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, which I’ll quote just a short version of here:
When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Presumably, that article is an extension of his original piece ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art,’ the text from which is visible here. I’m trying to figure out how Sol Lewitt’s artwork presages some of what we see in generative & algorithmic art today… Are Lewitt’s full-scale wall drawings that are executed by crews of artists & craftspeople considered copyrighted to him?
Like any good conceptual artist, I asked ChatGPT for its opinion, and it gave me this:
Sol LeWitt’s conceptual art practice directly parallels the AI copyright debate, particularly regarding authorship, execution, and human intervention. LeWitt created instruction-based artworks, where he provided precise, often algorithmic guidelines for others to execute his pieces—sometimes without his direct involvement. Despite this, LeWitt was still granted copyright over these works because the creative idea and system of execution were his intellectual property, even if the physical realization was carried out by others.
This raises key contradictions in AI-generated art:
• LeWitt’s logic applies to AI prompting: If a human provides structured prompts or generative rules, why is the resulting image considered AI-authored rather than human-authored?
• Does execution matter? If human assistants executing LeWitt’s instructions didn’t negate his copyright, why does AI “executing” a prompt remove authorship?
• Minimal human intervention: LeWitt’s wall drawings are often executed by fabricators with no creative input of their own—similar to an AI merely realizing pre-set human parameters.
If LeWitt’s purely conceptual authorship was enough for copyright, then AI-assisted art following structured human direction should logically qualify as well. The US Copyright Office’s position contradicts the art historical precedent set by LeWitt’s work.
Like many things ChatGPT, I’m not sure how accurate that all is in the specifics. It depends heavily on the assumption that Lewitt’s third-party produced drawings were/are copyrightable to/by/for him, something I have not yet been able to independently establish proof of.
I did find someone asking some related questions here on Reddit around Lewitt’s work and copyright. They point to the practice of Lewitt’s of issuing certificates of authenticity for a given work, a copy of one of which is presumably viewable here:

I haven’t dug too deep or verified much of this outside of the above fragments, as I’m during a speedrun through art history, but this is a good follow-on:
Free Sol LeWitt is a workshop producing copies of the work by Sol LeWitt, Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972. The workshop produces exact replicas of the artwork in metal and distributes them to the public, free of charge.
LeWitt famously wrote that “I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and not stolen.” Taking the artist’s word seriously, Free Sol LeWitt questions the restrictions of copyright, the relevance of originality, and the tendency to safeguard art in museums, distant from people’s daily lives. Through a lottery system, the works are “set free” from the museum or gallery setting, to take up residence in people’s homes.
Separately, this blog post seems to contradict ChatGPT’s ‘confidently wrong’ assertions above:
The international TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement—the treaty with the most nation signatories—puts the matter perhaps most succinctly: “Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such.” The expression is the formal thing—the words, the shapes, the sounds. This is the thing(to use the language of the U.S. Copyright Act) that is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” This, so far as the law is concerned, is the thing that is protected: those shapes and those colors in that arrangement. Insofar as Erased de Kooning Drawing is a work of conceptual art—and insofar as a work of conceptual art is not a final product but a process, a project, an idea—it isn’t protected by copyright. What is protected is what I like to call the authored work—the more impoverished thing with which copyright concerns itself: the merely formal thing—the visual composition, the arrangement of shapes and colors, the end result.
Copyright might also protect documentation of the work’s creation or instantiation, or the instructions for making that work. Where the construction of such a work is photographed or filmed, the photograph or film would be protected by copyright in the same way that, say, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination is protected: as the capturing of some moment in history, some fact from some perspective. The fact is not protected, only the document. The instructions for instantiating such a work, meanwhile—like Sol LeWitt’s wall-drawing instructions—would be protected in the same way that a recipe or the instructions for a game are protected, which is to say “thinly”. Those precise words in that precise order would be protected against illicit copying, but the method, system, or process they describe would not.
Anyway, a good enough place to end this ramble for tonight…
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