Joan Kee
JOAN KEE is an associate professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. A former attorney, she is writing a manuscript on the embeddedness of law in contemporary art. Another project explores how art historical methods can be brought to bear on how the law takes into account visual material. Recent and forthcoming publications in this area include articles for American Art, the Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, and Artistic Authorship and Legacy (Ridinghouse, 2016).
Guest Critic
Art Encounters Law
By Joan KeeFrom renting studio space in which to live and work to expectations concerning the sale and reproduction of artwork, making decisions with legal implications has been increasingly entrenched in being an artist.
The Law in Our Hands
By Joan KeeThey are images that, once seen, can never be unseen. Three large black-and-white photographs from 1995 show Ai Weiwei dropping a Han dynasty vase allegedly costing thousands of U.S. dollars. Known collectively as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, the photographs have been cited as evidence of a willful iconoclasm, despite their having been made under far more prosaic circumstances (according to one account, Ai was simply attempting to test the speed of his new camera.)
