Law Ethics And The Visual Arts

This book describes the collisions between the art world and the law, with a critical eye through a combination of primary source materials, excerpts from professional and art journals, and extensive textual notes. Topics analysed include + the fate of works of art in wartime, + the international trade in stolen and illegally exported cultural property, + artistic freedom, + censorship and state support for art and artists, + copyright, + droit moral and droit de suite, + the artist's professional life and death, + collectors in the art market, + income and estate taxation, + charitable donations and works of art, and + art museums and their collections. The authors are recognised experts in the field who have defined the canon in many aspects of art law.

"Introduces legal and ethical issues impacting artists, art collectors, dealers, and museums in today's international art markets. Highlights key international treaties and statutes, judicial decisions, and excerpts from scholarly and other publications to make legal and ethical issues in the world of the visual arts accessible and understandable"--

In engaging with the full range of 'the arts', contributors to this volume consider the relationship between law, justice, the ethical and the aesthetic. Art continually informs the ethics of a legal theory concerned to address how theoretical abstractions and concrete oppressions overlook singularity and spontaneity. Indeed, the exercise of the legal role and the scholarly understanding of legal texts were classically defined as ars iuris - an art of law - which drew on the panoply of humanist disciplines, from philology to fine art. That tradition has fallen by the wayside, particularly in the wake of modernism. But approaching art in that way risks distorting the very inexpressibility to which art is attentive and responsive, whilst remaining a custodian of its mystery. The novelty and ambition of this book, then, is to elicit, in very different ways, styles and orientations, the importance of the relationship between law and art. What can law and art bring to one another, and what can their relationship tell us about how truth relates to power? The insights presented in this collection disturb and supplement conventional accounts of justice; inaugurating new possibilities for addressing the origin of violence in our world.