Brexit Was Meant to Rewrite UK Art Law. Ten Years On, It Mostly Hasn’t
A decade after the Brexit referendum, the UK’s art market is still living with a patchwork of EU-derived rules — some preserved, some trimmed, and some quietly discarded. The result is less a clean break than a legal compromise, with museums, auction houses, and dealers navigating a system that never fully settled into a post-Brexit shape.
Alexander Herman, director of the Institute of Art and Law, argues that the feared “regulation bonfire” never arrived in the art world. Instead, the UK retained some of the most burdensome EU measures, including anti-money laundering rules tied to the Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive. Those obligations brought a dense layer of compliance and guidance to the market, with the heaviest pressure often falling on smaller and more vulnerable businesses.
Data protection is another example. The UK kept GDPR-based rules after leaving the EU, and last year’s Data (Use and Access) Act adjusted some of those obligations for domestic use. For auction houses and museums, the acronym alone has become shorthand for a regulatory culture that remains firmly in place.
The UK also preserved the Artist Resale Right, which gives artists a share of secondary-market sales and includes a royalty cap. That system, once denounced by some market voices as a looming disaster, has proved more durable than critics predicted. Likewise, the Copyright Duration Directive remains reflected in UK law, extending protection to life of the artist plus 70 years. In practical terms, works by Picasso and Barbara Hepworth remain in copyright for another 20 years, where they would already be in the public domain under the older standard.
Other EU rules were repealed with little visible disruption. The Directive on the Return of Cultural Goods and the Directive on Orphan Works were both removed, as were the EU Regulations on the Export of Cultural Goods. Yet even here, the picture is not one of total rupture. The principles behind the return of cultural goods still echo in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and the UK, while the UK maintains its own orphan-works licensing system.
The sharpest contradiction lies in Northern Ireland. The EU Regulation on the Introduction and the Import of Cultural Goods continues to apply there under the Windsor Framework, even as it does not apply in the rest of the UK. That means Arts Council England is effectively applying EU import rules to the movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland — a reminder that Brexit’s legal afterlife is still being worked out in real time.
The broader picture is one of inconsistency rather than strategy. The UK has not mirrored later EU initiatives such as the Digital Single Market Directive or the EU AI Act of 2024, leaving the art sector with a regulatory landscape shaped by inheritance, exception, and partial alignment rather than a single coherent policy.
