Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts Book

No legal scholar has been as passionate and articulate about the visual arts as John Henry Merryman. This new book, the fourth edition of his classic Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts , revised in collaboration with Albert E. Elsen, incorporates razor-sharp insights into numerous developments that have occurred in recent years, from the widespread bomb damage of the nineties to such specialised agreements as the UNESCO Convention on Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. As readers have come to expect from earlier editions, historical underpinnings and patterns are clearly traced for every issue raised. These issues include:

• 'military necessity' as justification for destruction
• ugly, obscene, or offensive artworks as 'free speech' fakes and forgeries
• the inner workings of art auctions
• laws relating to art crimes: who do they protect? trade in antiquities .. and much else besides

A documentary appendix presents the texts of 23 relevant laws, conventions, treaties, declarations, resolutions, guidelines, codes of professional practice, and the terms and conditions of sale of major art auction houses.

Although the last decade has witnessed more than a few episodes of shocking cultural destruction, Merryman and Elsen note a great surge in worldwide consciousness of the unique, irreplaceable character of art, and a significant rollback of the cultural prejudices that have been ebbing away since the 1954 Hague Convention declared all art works, whatever their origin, to be 'the cultural heritage of mankind.'

Whether you need to understand something as provocative as who owns the past, or something as mundane as whether a museum can sell part of its collection in order to fix the roof, this book will set you on the right course. It combines unassailable scholarship with a deeply humanistic approach, recognising that law and art each (in the words of Paul Freund) 'impose a measure of order on the disorder of experience without stifling the underlying diversity, spontaneity, and disarray.'