It’s back, like a double-edged dagger — an éperon — Nietzsche style.  Back by popular demand, and now going on its third year, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts‘ legendary, ground-breaking, and no-holds-barred educational series for visual artists.

“Informative, thought-provoking, enlightening, sensical. These things should be taught in art school, but I’m glad I learned them here!” notes one artist. “Pure deliciousness. Challenging, spicy, enlightening,” notes another. Read (and see) what other past participants have said here.

Although fees are now attached, artists can register for individual classes or the entire series. Course starts March 20, 2012

Law School for Visual Artists

Topics that will be covered during the 5-week course:

Tuesday March 20, 2012
Introduction:
• Legal Hypothetical: Analyzing legal issues in your art projects

Tuesday March 27, 2012
• Basic business models (non-profit and for-profit corporations, LLC’s)
• Fiscal Sponsorships
• Employment issues
A. Studio and gallery assistants
B. Working as a preparator for art galleries

Tuesday April 3, 2012
• Free Speech
• Right of Privacy

Tuesday April 10, 2012
Contracts
• Consignment Agreements
• Licensing Agreements
• Commissioning Agreements

Tuesday April 17, 2012
• Intellectual Property (copyright and trademarks)

Click here to register for this course (or just one or two classes).

According to Animal, “[t]he art-world star curators were convicted for offending religion under Article 282 and fined, narrowly escaping being sentenced to time at a gulag-lite.”

Yuma, Arizona’s The Vertical Church is causing a bit of controversy. The Church has designated a free-standing wall along the north edge of the property as the Art Wall,specifically to promote “a form of ministry.” But not just anything can be posted or painted on the wall. A sign posted above the mural invites people to express themselves artistically, with the only requirement being that they not use profanity or gang images.

However, Yuma has an ordinance that expressly bans graffiti, arguing that even the sign posted above the wall also is a violation of city ordinances.

Feet First (Prima i piedi) (1990), Martin Kippenberger.

In today’s Art Newspaper, Sheikh Zayed, a professor from the University of Cambridge, writes about the contradictions and hypocrisy of liberals in their attempt to explain why blasphemies against Islam are a valid expression of artistic license.

The same religionists are laughing at liberal attempts to explain why blasphemies against Islam are a valid expression of artistic licence, while certain western legal and moral taboos may be acceptably internalised by curators and by legislation. Yet even in Sweden, just two years ago, the Linköping municipality banned posters for a rock festival that showed Satan excreting on a cross. And in Denmark, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had defended its right to publish cartoons of the Prophet, retreated from its stated intention to publish a cartoon that lampooned the Holocaust. Muslims are not slow to note these contradictions, and to observe with amusement the verbal acrobatics of western moralisers who seek to justify them. [italics added]

Zayed makes a good point. Why allow attacks on certain religious ideologies and beliefs, and yet simultaneously cry for punishment or the silencing of so-called hate speech, racist speech, sexist speech, or defamation? For Zayed, if you’re going to protect the aforementioned, then you’ll have to extend that same courtesy and protection to Islam.

Yet just as more secular vulnerabilities deserve protection, in the form of laws against libel, slander, racism, or Holocaust denial, so too do the no less tender sensibilities of religious believers. To assume that the infringement of secular honour is of moral and legal concern, while religionists must be fair game, is arbitrary and unjust.

What’s fascinating about this position is that it argues for the expansion and extension of law into that of artistic speech, effectively narrowing art’s historical function and reach. However, this may be a good thing. For it is only when a discourse or practice is more heavily regulated, legislated, and controlled that it finds the need to question those same regulations, control mechanisms, and laws. The question, of course, is whether there will be any attempt by artists and the “art world” to resist this “censorship,” or if they will simply react by posting their sentiments on facebook.

More via The Art Newspaper here.

Artinfo’s list of 10 least appropriate Easter artworks. Banksy, Serrano, Kippenberger: a bit predictable, but hey, so is art these days.

Check it here.

I was just reading Marie Darrieussecq‘s Dispatch (sorry, no link) in the recent Art Review Journal–concerning the “censorship” of Larry Clark’s recent exhibition in Paris–and it reminded me of the recent skirmishes in the U.S. with restrictions on the exhibition and experiencing of artworks. There is of course the recent National Portrait Gallery fiasco over their removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video; Jeffrey Deitch’s change of mind and paint-over at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA); and Ingrid Homberg’s violent ousting from the Gagosian Gallery, NY.

Darrieussecq asks: “Has the precautionary principle been taken too far?” Good question. But I like her ending thought better: “There’s a big difference between purposely choosing to visit an exhibition and being forced to see teenage bodies (particularly girls’) in advertising everywhere.”

The difference of course rests on agency: something we have pretty much forgotten about in both art and legislation. This is where law comes in. Not only should we ask why we depend so much on law, but better yet, why are artists so intent on speaking out against “censorship” in a random and arbitrary manner? Why not take another form of action against so-called “censorship”?

Why the over-blown hype concerning Wojnarowicz’s video but hardly a peep over Deitch’s destruction of Blu’s mural or the ousting of Homberg from a commercial Chelsea gallery? Perhaps it has to do with monetary and cultural capital. Who in Los Angeles would dare oppose Sir Deitch’s dictum? Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that it’s much easier to voice your opinion at a tired and true old enemy: conservatives and Republicans alike. Would it have made a difference if Deitch and Gagosian were die-hard Republican donors? I think so. If speech is speech, then it’s speech. And as far as I’m concerned the US Supreme Court has made it quite clear that protected speech–including art–deserves full First Amendment protection, regardless of the content and speaker. Of course, if what we’re arguing about are the few non-protected speech categories (obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, false advertisement, etc.), then I do believe that the battle terrain is quite clear. What is not evident–ironically–is the question of who’s going to fight the battle to liberate non-protected speech and garnish it with full First Amendment protection?

Furthermore, what has made art institutions so preoccupied with and fearful of dissent and inflammatory speech? Is it, as the Gagosian Gallery attendant proclaimed, about property and commerce: “This is private property…We’re here to sell art.” Certainly the National Portrait Gallery and Paris’ Musée d Art Moderne are not in the business of selling art. But they are in the business of securing the securing of public funds. At some point the public (ie- legislators) must act in its own best interest and not in that of a single individual or constituency. Hell, they are tax dollars after all.This brings to mind Justice Scalia’s scathing dictum from the NEA v. Finley case: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” In other words, there may be a fundamental constitutional right to speech, but not a fundamental constitutional right to fund speech.

Regarding the recent National Portrait Gallery fiasco over their removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video, the Warhol Foundation has taken an aggressive stance and threatened the Smithsonian with zero future funding if the NPG does not restore Wojnarowicz’s video.

The Warhol Foundation is proud to have been a lead supporter of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, but we strongly condemn the decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition. Such blatant censorship is unconscionable. It is inimical to everything the Smithsonian Institution should stand for, and everything the Andy Warhol Foundation does stand for.

After careful consideration, the Board voted unanimously to demand that you restore the censored work immediately, or the Warhol Foundation will cease funding future exhibitions at all Smithsonian institutions.

You can read the Warhol Foundation’s letter here. What do you  make of this move by the Warhol Foundation? Aggressive? Timely? And more importantly, will it set new funding standards?

According to the WSJ, that’s a big fat “yes.”

Deb Margolin recently wrote a play called “Imagining Madoff” that purported to offer audiences a fictional version of the relationship between Mr. Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, and Bernie Madoff, the arch-swindler who purloined vast amounts of money from Mr. Wiesel, his wife and the couple’s charitable foundation. … Then Ms. Margolin sent a copy of the script to Mr. Wiesel, who promptly replied that he found it “defamatory” and “obscene” and threatened to sue in order to prevent it from being performed at “any time in any venue.”

Artists and rights activists have appealed to the Kremlin to put a stop to the prosecution of two curators, Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev, but Russian prosecutors refuse to back down and have asked the presiding judge to hand down a three-year prison sentence on July 12. Why the hoopla? The curators previously included some art works in an exhibition which were thought to be inciting religious hatred. One painting depicted Jesus Christ as Mickey Mouse, another as Vladimir Lenin. The 2007 exhibit, Forbidden Art, at the Sakharov Museum, was part of an effort to fight censorship of the arts, but the Russian Orthodox Church was horrified. The curators and their lawyers believe they will be found guilty. More from the AP here.

UPDATE: July 12, 2010

Today, the two curators “were found guilty of inciting hatred by a Russian court on Monday, but the judge let them go free, after ordering them to pay fines.“