ART IN THE COURTROOM by Vilis R. Inde. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1998. 280 pp. Cloth $59.95. ISBN 0-275-95971-6.

Reviewed by Jennifer Way, School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas. E-mail: jway@unt.edu.

 
My colleagues in art history and cultural studies pay attention to place. They find that in the museum, gallery, studio, or classroom something happens. People with different agendas meet and interact through certain discourses, practices, and forms, thereby engendering the value and significance of art. In this new book lawyer Vilis Inde successfully represents how such activity occurs in another place – the courtroom.

Inde organizes his book into five chapters, each devoted to a well-known contemporary artist and lawsuit.

(1) A photographer sues artist Jeff Koons and Sonnabend gallery for copyright infringement. Koons purchased, in note card form, a photograph by Art Rogers. He gave it to fabricators in Italy to use as the basis for a sculpture, none of the credit for which went to Rogers.

(2) Sculptor Richard Serra sues the General Services Administration, an agency of the United States government, to overturn its decision to relocate the site-specific sculpture it had commissioned from him. Serra claims violations of oral and written promises, copyright law, the First and Fifth Amendments, and the Artist’s Authorship Rights Act.

(3) Artist David Wojnarowicz sues the American Family Association and its director for copyright infringement, defamation, and violation of the Artist’s Authorship Rights Act and the Lanham Act. The AFA represented Wojnarowicz’s works metonymically, thus "proving" that in their entirety they are pornographic and exhibitions of such works funded by the National Endowment for the Arts are immoral.

(4) A hearing involving Christie’s Appraisals, Inc, The Andy Warhol Foundation, and Edward Hayes, an attorney hired to help with the administration of Andy Warhol’s estate, is ordered to determine what percentage of Warhol’s estate is owed Hayes and, ultimately, what is the estate worth. At issue are Christie’s estimations of fair market value and blockage discounts.

(5) Performance artist Karen Finley and three peers sue the NEA and its chairperson for failing to uphold grant procedures, rejecting grant applications due to political reasons, and violating the First and Fifth Amendments. Additionally, they contest the "Decency Clause" appended to NEA guidelines. Together, the five lawsuits span from about the mid 1980s to the present.

As promised in the title of his book, Inde privileges activity related directly to and taking place in the courtroom. He uses the first few pages of each chapter to summarize how the activity originated, what was at stake, what happened. Then he returns to the origins and, roughly in the order in which they appear in the proceedings, he discusses each major participant. For the artist Inde cites biographical information, including notable exhibitions, as well as remarks from curators and critics attesting to his or her importance in the art world. Where appropriate he defines art styles and procedures. Inde reviews what led non-art world players to become involved in the case and what actions they pursued therein. He weaves this information into a narrative structured by the chronology of pretrial motions, the trial, rulings, and appeals. Inde closes each chapter by briefly speculating upon the lawsuit’s impact on the artist and/or rehearsing the status of similar litigation.

The strengths of ART IN THE COURTROOM measure from the minor to major. For instance, the book includes reproductions of some works in question. Also, a bold highlighted subheading introduces each component of the litigation process, thus helping readers keep track of events as they unfold. Inde carefully, clearly, explains the significance of these components to law in general and the lawsuit at hand. Consistently, he demonstrates the specificity and complexity of each suit. The latter is a major achievement given that in many art world publications, references to these lawsuits are very general or woefully brief, at best.

A related, valuable accomplishment is that Inde’s chronological account of each lawsuit approximates how, in the courtroom, procedures of law and their manifold components establish a narrative structure, even a medium, through which the value of art is constituted. Readers will witness how this value is contingent upon what has so far happened in the proceedings as well as where, therein, each participant is "located." Thus, readers will behold artists’ attempts at self-representation becoming charged with meaning not in relation to familiar art world or popular rhetoric but, rather, in connection to testimony from all the individuals who are interacting through forms of law at a particular moment in the courtroom.

Based on these strengths ART IN THE COURTROOM should appeal to members of art, legal, and many other communities. Yet, as I am, they may be puzzled about the book’s theme. In fact, at first I didn’t realize ART IN THE COURTROOM had a theme. Nowhere does the author directly address topic, thesis, or methodology. He leaves out an introduction and conclusion. Nevertheless, I detected a recurrent motif.

Without explanation Inde begins the book with a brief quote from president-elect Bill Clinton. Clinton proposes that Americans provide a place for everyone "’at the table’," and thus he invokes concepts of inclusiveness and tolerance. Gradually, I perceived that such concepts write a theme involving loss of freedom of expression and tolerance for art. By choice of and emphases in the lawsuits Inde suggests the motif. He accents debates about the value of art (community, moral, career, and economic) and its status as property, including who controls its use (fair use, appropriation). The theme materializes in comments. In the chapter on Finley, Inde cites art world concern for artistic freedom of expression (221). In general, Inde represents Wojnarowicz as an artist who is convinced that his government suppresses knowledge about a certain subject, AIDS. In another chapter, Inde juxtaposes President Reagan praising the General Service Administration’s Art-in-Architecture Program "’sustain[ing] potential risks in the selection of artists’" and the fact that, shortly thereafter, the GSA removed Serra’s "risky" sculpture (52). Elsewhere, Inde cites part of a ruling in Finley et al’s opposition to NEA practices: "’The decency clause seeks to suppress speech that is offensive to some in society’" (247). Inde implies that the art world’s power to establish the value of art abates in the courtroom. In the chapter on Warhol’s estate he declares, "The underlying question…is the court’s independent valuation despite [both side’s] use of experts [from the art.