What possible affinities are there among the three seemingly disassociated terms museum culture, national identity, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)? Taken together, they compose a paradoxical combination because, as late as the 1970s, art objects were among the items explicitly excluded from debates about export controls by government action. Even when, during the Uruguay round of multilateral negotiations in the 1980s, debate on intellectual property was launched, the fine arts merited only the most tangential comments.

The incidents listed in this report document challenges to artistic expression across the during the calendar year 1994. The controversies involve virtually all forms of visual art (drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, and mixed-media) as well as such narrative forms as plays and performance art. Film and television works are included only when they were presented in a non-commercial format and/or were the recipient of federal arts funding.

This report provides a nationwide snapshot of challenges to artistic free expression in America during 1992 and 1993. Together, the incidents offer a unique picture of the many issues confronting both artists and the viewing public. These pages also provide analysis and insight into the complex political, social and cultural forces creating pressure in communities across the nation to mute artistic expression. The hundreds of incidents documented here send three important warning signals: controversies over art are proliferating at the local level; the attacks come from across the political

This article argues that a failure inherent in obscenity law itself explains why art is increasingly on trial. In recent years, we have witnessed a stunning assault on sexually explicit contemporary art in this country. Waged in Congressional funding debates, in political campaigns, and in the courts, this assault has raised a recurring question: What is obscenity and what is art? The question has sent artists, museums, galleries, judges and lawyers scrambling to decipher the constitutional law of obscenity, a hotly disputed and peculiarly anachronistic area of law. Over the past two years,

The artist, Richard Serra discusses the moral rights of artists and freedom of expression in the context of what happened to his own work of sculpture the Titled Arc and the controversy surrounding an exhibition, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

This article is a historical treatment of censorship focusing on the impact of Christianity on censorship and copyright regulation in English-speaking countries.

This publication has been researched and produced by a group of people in the arts who want to provide basic advise on how to begin planning for the care of your art. We hope this publication will be useful to any artist working in any medium, who will leave behind a body of artistic work - choreographic or musical scores, paintings, sculptures, photographs, manuscripts, plays, theatre designs, films, videos, etc. Much of the information provided, however will apply equally to an interpretive artist - an actor, dancer or musician. And, it also applies to artists who are ill from causes other

Today, across the cultural spectrum, artistic freedom is under assault. Free expression in popular music, photography, painting, cinema and other arts is threatened by pressure from lawmakers, prosecutors and self-appointed guardians of morality and taste. Succumbing to that pressure, more and more music stores, museums, schools, theatres, television stations, bookstores and video shops are restricting the display or availability of images and words deemed to be offensive to one group of citizens or another.

One of the most interesting policy issues to appear on the political landscape over the past several years is the debate over warning labels on records and tapes. The issue of warning labels is a fascinating study of First Amendment freedom that has focused public opinion around two very different and often conflicting policy options. The first option is what Ithiel de Sola Pool terms a policy of freedom, one that places the emphasis on the rights of the individual over the rights of the state. The second option is what could be termed a policy of justified control, one that emphasizes the

The author explores the First Amendment aspects of the content restrictions on the grant-making process and other constitutional issues raised by the NEA controversy.