Legal Studies 290V - Visual Arts, Expression, & Law

In this course, we?ll take a multifaceted approach to studying the interplay between the visual arts and law, with a general focus on US contemporary art and courts. In a practical sense, law regulates art-- as a commodity, as a product of labor, as a part of the market economy-- and in relation to legal concerns such as public order, obscenity, and copyright. Law also protects art and marks the limits of those protections through constitutional questions of freedom of expression. In so doing, the law often struggles with those elusive questions at the core of art: what is art, exactly? who has the power to define it? what is it for? who owns it? what does it owe its viewers? We?ll turn our attention to these complexities, as seemingly practical legal concerns give way to endlessly ruminative questions about the nature of art and law both. We?ll explore how contemporary artists routinely push back on the law as it seeks to establish definitions and boundaries around art. We?ll explore how conceptual, ephemeral, and site-specific art has come up against the limits of legality, and has recruited legal mechanisms and institutions into the art-making process, often with strange and subversive outcomes. We?ll also consider art crimes, including theft, forgery, and counterfeiting, as the intrusion of criminal actors provides yet another mode for mapping the dynamic relationship between art and law. Controversies that land art museums in court, including expropriation, restitution, and deaccessioning, will provide an additional plotpoint. Finally, we?ll look at art that has explicitly sought to change law and society. We?ll unpack how to know when protest materials become art, and when political art becomes protest. We?ll look at how artists have reflected back to us the problems of injustice as well as created a materially more just world. Please note that this is a highly participatory course with creative elements.

Open to Legal Studies majors only. Pre Req: LEGAL 250