On the Preservation of Illegal Street Art

Protecting street art faces significant hurdles. To overcome them, Salib, P.N. (2015. The law of Banksy: Who owns street art? The University of Chicago Law Review, pp. 2293–2328) proposes to unbundle the various rights that art ownership usually implies. Specifically, he proposes to treat the finder of a street art piece as a minority shareholder in this piece, granting him some percentage of its value. We provide an economic analysis of this proposal by refining a simple discovery process model involving street art finders and the owners of the premises where street art is found. We consider both the optimal number of researchers and the share of the street art value that should accrue to a finder. We also pay attention to the co-determination of the numbers of seekers and street artists. We find that a change in the share of the value of discovered street art has an ambiguous effect on the numbers of seekers and street artists. Moreover, relying on this share alone cannot guarantee that the equilibrium values of the numbers of seekers and street artists are equal to their socially optimal values.