Last week I focused mostly on the questions surrounding the pending legislation for the arts, particularly how it might affect public monuments.
Three other aspects of the issues the legislation is supposed to sanitise, according to the director general of the National Gallery of Art, concern auction houses, artists' rights, and artist-gallery relationships.
Without question, any legal structure that can be enshrined in the law of the land to protect artists' rights in Nigeria, is more than welcome, particularly because of the country's notoriously bad copyright environment.
Visual artists, like their counterparts in music, film, and literature, have their intellectual property rights brazenly savaged and gutted by collectors, film and video distributors and marketers, publishers, and street-side pirates, despite the establishment - more than a decade ago - of the Nigerian Copyrights Council, an organisation that has consistently failed to justify its relevance.
Might the pending legislation provide a new basis for prosecuting copyright cases? Is the absence of serious legal proceedings against the kind of egregious intellectual copyright infringements across the land due to lack of laws, or is it simply a reflection of the culture of impunity that pervades the body politic?
Despite my skepticism though, if the NGA has identified loopholes in the law that make intellectual copyright protection impossible in Nigeria, then it should by all means work towards the planned legislation.
In the meantime, artists and artist societies such as the Society of Nigerian Artists might want to look at other avenues for artists' rights protection, specifically the resources available through membership of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers .
Incidentally, among Nigerian organisations and societies, only the Music Copyright Society of Nigeria belongs to the international confederation, which is widely recognised as the umbrella body for protection of intellectual and creative property rights.
Thus, while the National Gallery of Art champions the inclusion of artists' rights clauses - including, according to the director general, resale rights - in the pending legislation, it should be obvious that artists must do some of the work themselves, and they could start by seeking membership with relevant international organisations, not least of which is Conseil International des Auteurs d'Arts Graphiques, Plastiques, et Photographiques, the visual arts branch of the international confederation for authors and composers.
While laws protecting artists' rights may seem straightforward, legislating the relationship between artists and art galleries is anything but. Among the issues identified as needing urgent action in the February 3 article in The Guardian is, "Work of an artist littering as many galleries as possible."
One cannot but be curious as to how an artist's work littering the floors of several galleries constitutes a problem, or how a piece of legislation could even be used to clean up the cluttered galleries.
The operation of most art galleries in Nigeria is, for want of a better term, quite primitive in the sense that there is yet to emerge a gallery that meets the standards of normative contemporary art galleries, such as one might find in cities with respectable contemporary art, except of course for the new Centre for Contemporary Art; established by the critic and curator Bisi Silva.
But this is not just about galleries. The business climate in Nigeria, regardless of what legislations are in the books, is often determined by a pervasive culture of informality operating in the shadow of the laws.
Moreover, the relationship between artists and galleries is not easily amenable to standardisation; rather it ought to be determined or guided by agreement or contract (written or verbal) drawn by both parties.
The development of good gallery practice - which really is the issue - will ultimately develop but not necessarily through a top-down federal legislation.
Until artists, galleries, and the rest of the society begin to place value on doing things properly, and on raising their practice to meet the same standards now taken for granted elsewhere, the business of transacting art will remain in its current sorry, inchoate state.
In a society where even people who should know, including those placed in positions of power, insist on making do with the least possible quality rather than on excellence; where people spend more time explaining why you must excuse the "Nigerian way" of doing the business of art, nothing, I suspect, will ever change regardless of how many legislations are passed.
That is why, ultimately, I think that Nigeria does not so much need more legislation on the visual as a change in the mindset of people who make, transact, manage, and administer art.
Not until there is a healthy level of transparency and rigour in official and non-official art business, nothing will change.
As the Centre for Contemporary Arts, and now the Arthouse Contemporary Limited, the auction house established in Lagos in 2007, has proven, positive change in the Nigerian art industry is possible after all, with or without another legislation on the arts.