"The ‘models of integrity’ in Kee's fascinating account are articulated in the intersection of individual codes of conduct, art world conventions, and the range of activities that are both facilitated and enjoined by legal protocols. Taking full advantage of her double background, as a practising lawyer who subsequently turned her attention to art history, Kee examines many telling points of comparison between the two fields while also drawing on a wealth of archival research."
"Adds a novel perspective on art law, highlighting how both law and art can serve as sources of creative thinking. Illustrations and scholarship form an integral part of the book, and constitute an unconventional and much needed artistic take on the law [putting] six post-sixties artworks in their legal, historical, political, and artistic contexts."
"Brushing with critical intersections of law and contemporary art, this book explores concepts of integrity as mediated and represented through artworks of the 1960s and onwards. Dancing fuidly between historical context, art theory, and legal theory, each piece of art is grounded in the legal developments of the time: questions of integrity for law and artists, the creation of artistic ownership rights, the constitutive power of property, and the emergence of art forms not yet recognised as art. Through art, Kee opens up vital spaces of legal discussion through depictions of (and participation in) authority, power, disobedience and other possibilities beyond compliance and consensus."
“The book speaks to a variety of audiences: those interested in post-1960s art of the United States; in the intersection of art and law; in the history of law and its intersections with art; in art triggering negative accountability and what is now referred to as moral outrage and call-out culture; and in art and its broader connections to social, political, and cultural moments in history. It also gestures toward a neglected field of art historical research that is ripe for development: an art history informed by legal analysis. . . . the strength of Models of Integrity is not just its integration of legal analysis into art history, it is also how the book lays the groundwork for (or one might say: operates as a model for) future scholarship examining the intersection of art and law.”
"A perceptive and sophisticated book that brings remarkable insight to the complex entanglements of law and art. It deftly and incisively explores the connections between art and law at a time in history during which there was “a crisis of citizenship." Rather than advocating a particular ideological agenda in response to this crisis, through her compelling interpretations of a series of case studies Kee illuminates how the relationships between the art and law invite critical engagement with “politics in need of accounting.”
"An exceptional and commanding work of scholarship. Despite the author’s qualification that the book might fall short of the visual analysis expected in an art history text, Kee’s book is vividly illustrative, and boldly leads the reader through the oft- fraught liminal space between art and law. The book’s achievements extend far beyond effectively bearing legal concepts on art or narrating the logistical relations between art and law. To be exact, its real feats lie in its rumination on not only the plasticity of the law, but also on art as an extralegal machination that structures our society. In this way, Kee’s work will serve as a model for future scholarship in this emerging interdisciplinary field."
"Joan Kee’s Models of Integrity is a fascinating book that makes a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary legal scholarship."
'Models of Integrity offers a provocative account of art that 'messes with' the law.''
“This strikingly original book analyzes interactions between contemporary art and American law in a rich and powerful way. One might think these cultural forms had nothing to say to each other, but Joan Kee sits the reader down in a new place of her own making. She shows that these forms and their relationship are very different from what one might have thought—they're fascinating, often in tension, sometimes listening to each other, at once enemies and friends. A real achievement!”—James Boyd White, L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Michigan
“This book is a very important piece of scholarship that ties together two very disparate fields: art history and legal analysis. Joan Kee, a top-flight lawyer and an art historian, makes a very powerful contribution to the existing field, which has been less covered with regard to post-sixties art. Not only does she do an excellent job of informing readers about existing law and how it governs contemporary art, but she also adds quite a bit of context and argument to current debates in a fresh and exciting manner.”—Sonia Katyal, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley
“Important, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, Models of Integrity is an illuminating analysis of the entanglements between U.S. law and contemporary art practices from the 1960s to the present. In a thorough and lucid voice, Joan Kee guides the reader—especially the reader reticent to engage with the question of the law—through the stories of key figures in contemporary art history in order to illustrate law and art’s mutual implication. This book brings the submerged connections between art and law to the surface, asking us in turn to reimagine our understanding of both.”—Joshua Chambers-Letson, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern University
“A tour de force of scholarship and interdisciplinarity, this book is fundamentally about power: who wields it, how it takes shape, and how it can be contested. Joan Kee shines a new light on the ways in which seminal artworks and artists in postwar America posed uniquely new models of justice, originality, authorship, property, identity, form, and experience. At a time when art itself was being radically redefined—as a statement, or contract, or act—this extraordinary study reframes the rise of performance, process, and conceptual art in terms of a contest between law and disorder, ethics and exegesis, control and freedom, authority and community, intention and force majeure. Kee’s groundbreaking work will change the way we think about culture and society; it will reshape our understanding of what art is—and what it can do.”—Michelle Kuo, Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art
"Rich, original, and provocative, Models of Integrity is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of art and law."—Amy Adler, Emily Kempin Professor of Law at New York University School of Law
