Available From UC Press

Models of Integrity examines the relationship between contemporary art and the law through the lens of integrity. In the 1960s, artists began to engage conspicuously with legal ideas, rituals, and documents. The law—a primary institution subject to intense moral and political scrutiny—was a widely recognized source of authority to audiences inside the art world and out. Artists frequently engaged with the law in ways that signaled a recuperation of the integrity that they believed had been compromised by the very institutions entrusted with establishing standards of just conduct. These artists sought to convey the social purpose of an artwork without overstating its political impact and without losing sight of how aesthetic decisions compel audiences to see their everyday world differently. Addressing the role that law plays in enabling artworks to function as social and political forces, this important book fills a gap in the field of law and the humanities, and will serve as a practical “how-to” for contemporary artists.

Joan Kee is Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Formerly a lawyer in Hong Kong and New York, she is the author of numerous articles on contemporary art and law as well as a widely reviewed book, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method.

“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