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The Legal Concept of Art by Paul Kearns. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1998, xv + 184 + (appendix + bibliography + index) 32 pp (hardback £30.00) ISBN 1 901362 50 7

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Abstract

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Type
Book Review
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1999

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References

1. All page numbers in the text refer to the book under review.

2. A few books of this nature in America have been published in the US, amongst others: J H Merryman and A E Elsen Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts: Cases and Materials (New York: Bender, 1979); J Gaines Contested Culture (Chapeel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) is a theoretically informed approach to the law-art relationship. Now see C Douzinas and L Nead (eds) Law and the Image: The Authoriry ofArt and the Aesthetics ofhw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

3. L Merrill A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington DC: Smithsonian Press, 1992). For a commentaq on the Whistler case, see C Douzinas ‘Law's Fear of the Image: Whistler v Ruskin’, (1996) 19 Art History 3, 353-369.

4. Re St Stephen Walbrook [ 19861 2 All ER 705 (London Consistory Court) and [ 19871 2 All ER 578 (Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved). For a commentary on this extraordinary case, see C Douzinas and R Wanington ‘The Aesthetics of Legal Judgment’ (1992) 9 Theory, Culture, Society 93-1 17.

5. Rogers v Koons 751 F Supp 474 SDNY (1990); 960 F 2d 301 (2nd Cir), 113 S Ct 365 (1992).

6. J Costonis Icons and Aliens: Law, Aesthetics and Environmental Change (Illinois:University of Illinois Press, 1989).

7. It is remarkable that a book on the relationship between law and art does not discuss the extensive bibliography on law and literature and devotes only one page to jurisprudence, which refers solely to the work of John Finnis.

8. See D Kennedy ‘The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries’; (1979) 28 Buffalo LR 205; R M Unger The Critical legal Studies Movement (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1983).

9. Bleistein v Donaldson 188 US 239 at 25 1 ( I 903).

10. City of Youngstown v Kuhn Blg Co 112 Ohio St 654,661-2,148 NE 842,844 (1925).

11. City of Passaic v Paterson Bill Posting, Advertising & Sign Painting Co 72 NLJ 267, 268 (1905).

12. Plato The Laws (London: Penguin, 1977) Bk 2,91.

13. Lessing Luocoon. An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry E A McCormick (tr) (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984 edn) p 13.

14. The claim that ‘God's approach to art is a central theme in neither Islamic or Christian tradition’ and that ‘it would be helpful … for peace among Her Majesty The Queen of England's subjects if God's wishes for Man's artistic creativity were more closely consigered by theologians’(p 28) is strange, to say the least. The most complete western theory of representation and the image is found in the eastern fathers of the church, Basil, Nicephorus, Theodore the Studite and their Reformation followers. If anything, Christianity is obsessed with imagery and art and the Byzantium with its ‘chain of icons’ was the first and most successful, until Hollywood, ‘empire of the senses’. See M Aston England's iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); P Goodrich Oedipus LRx (Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1966); C Douzinas ‘Prosopon and Antiprosopon. Prolegomena for a Legal Iconology’ in C Douzinas and L Nead, above n 1, ch 2.

15. C Bell Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931) p 72.

16. D Bell The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976) p 16.

17. H Foster ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’ in Douzinas and Nead, above n 2, ch 10.

18. Douzinas, C and Wanington, R Justice Miscarried (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) chs 1,4.Google Scholar

19. I Kant Critique of Judgement (J C Meredith, trans) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

20. Douzinas, C and Warrington, R Postrnodeni Jurisprudence (London: Routledge. 1993)Google Scholar chs 2,3 and 10; C Douzinas ‘The Aesthetics of the Common Law’ (1997) 17 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 3-29.

21. Douzinas and Warrington above n 20, ch 3.

22. Derrida, J The Truth in Pairiring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

23. Legendre, P Law and the Unconscious (edited and with an introduction by P Goodrich) (London: Macmillan, 1997).Google Scholar