Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts

Since its first edition in 1979, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts has established itself as the leading art law text among law professors, students, and practitioners. This new and newly illustrated, fifth edition, revised in collaboration with Stephen K. Urice, incorporates recent changes in treaty, statutory, and case law. It includes discussion of recent developments from the resurgence of iconoclasm to military conflicts’ depredations on cultural property. As in earlier editions, the authors present legal issues in their historical contexts.

The broad range of topics addressed in the fifth edition, makes the text especially adaptable for use in multiple classroom settings.

These topics include:

• • US museums’ return of works of art and antiquities to claimants such as Holocaust survivors and foreign nations
• • Artist’s rights such as copyright and moral rights
• • International movement of art and antiquities
• • Fakes and forgeries in the art market
• • The inner workings of art auctions
• • Plundering and destruction of works of art in times of war and military conflict
• • Censorship of “obscene” or politically challenging works of art
• • And many more

In this edition, documents previously presented in a separate documentary appendix have been integrated into the text to provide immediate access to important treaties and other materials.

Whether you need to understand something as provocative as who owns the past, or something as apparently straightforward as whether a museum can sell a work of art to raise funds for a new roof, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts provides the information you need. It combines unassailable scholarship with a deeply humanistic approach, recognizing that law and art each “impose a measure of order on the disorder of experience without stifling the underlying diversity, spontaneity, and disarray” (Paul Freund).