Art And Law

9 Pages 2311 Words

icit objects. Though the king wanted to put the finds on display he feared that they might have a dangerous influence on those who saw them. The decision makers of the time thought that some viewers such as women, children and uneducated lower class people would not know how to view the pieces. The pieces were put in a separate room where they were guarded and only people with permission from the king could enter. The room became known as the “Cabinet of Obscene Objects” and in 1860 it was renamed the “Pornographic Collection”. When these artifacts were discovered the judging of obscenity was based on its ability and its result of arousing the individual viewer (Douzinas and Nead 203-205).
Unlike then, today it is not as easy to define obscenity or to determine when obscenity is present. There is a constant struggle between the courts and the artists, the lawmakers and the art makers. People are constantly being asked to put a more fine definition on the term obscene. The United States has enacted laws against obscenity, but just as art it is left up to the viewer’s interpretations, the laws are left up to the court’s interpretations.
In 1973 the question of obscenity was raised when Marvin Miller was arrested and charged with distributing illustrated books of a sexual nature. The case of Miller vs. California resulted in a three-prong test for determining whether or not a work of art is obscene. U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision and reaffirmed that obscenity in not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment (Lankford and Pankratz 4).


The three prong test set forth by the courts state that “a work must (a) appeal to prurient interest as judged by an average person applying contemporary community standards; (b) depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law: and (c) when taken as a whole lack serious literary, artistic, poli...