Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law / Edition 2

by Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead

Overview

This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.

The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.

With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.

Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226569543
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
INTRODUCTION
Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead
PART I - VISION AND LAW
1. Must Justice Be Blind? The Challenge of Images to the Law
Martin Jay
2. Prosopon and Antiprosopon: Prolegomena for a Legal Iconology
Costas Douzinas
PART II - THE LAW OF IMAGES
3. The Molding Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance in Pliny's Natural History, Book 35, I-7
Georges Didi-Huberman
4. The Iconography of Nothing: Blank Spaces and the Representation of Law in Edward VI and the Pope
Peter Goodrich
PART III - THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF JUSTICE
5. The Function of the Ornament in Quintilian, Alberti, and Court Architecture
Piyel Haldar
6. The Festival of Justice: Paris, 1849
Katherine Fischer Taylor
7. Law and Justice in England and France: The View from Victorian London
Jonathan P. Ribner
PART IV - OBSCENITY AND ART
8. Bodies of Judgment: Art, Obscenity, and the Connoisseur
Lynda Nead
9. "Not in a Public Lavatory but on a Public Stage": The Prosecution of The Romans in Britain
Mandy Merck
10. Obscene, Abject, Traumatic
Hal Foster
Index

What People are Saying About This

Michael Camille

In this volume, Costas Douzinas and Linda Nead bring together some of the most significant minds in contemporary art history and theory. For those who think that art and law only interact over issues of copyright, here is a sophisticated and theoretically astute collection that focuses on the relationship between law and the production and reception of images.
— University of Chicago