Art Law Library Research topics, read summaries of defining cases in art law, and find full texts of the court opinions. The glossary defines some of the specialized terms used in the text.
Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy This non-binding document offers guidance to an institution concerned about or confronted with accusations of inappropriate, objectionable, or offensive content.
Art Selection Guidelines: Suggestions for State Arts Agencies, Museums, University Galleries and Performance Spaces In our experience of defending free expression against censorship, we have found that the task is made easier when there exists a clear process to be followed whenever somebody decides to challenge a work. Our findings have been confirmed by public policy research, which has found that art controversies erupt into public scandal much more frequently in cases where regular procedure is not followed.
Art and Culture Censorship Timeline 1989-
Exposing the Censor Within An installation and an online project abut self-censorship
Censorpedia: NCAC's Censorship Wiki An interactive information repository of information about censorship incidents. Censorpedia aids the fight for free expression by providing a repository of censorship incidents, information about what is vulnerable to censorship, and a guide to strategies and tactics that have defeated past attempts at censorship. It hosts articles documenting censorship outbreaks: the who, what, when, where and why.
Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (book) Censorship today is just as likely to be the result of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing free expression as powerful as any known in other centuries.
Handbook to Understanding, Preparing for and Responding to Challenges to Your Freedom of Artistic Expression. A handbook created in 1999 by the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression and based on their decade-long battleground experience in the Culture Wars: still very useful today.
Symbols Into Soldiers: Art, Censorship and Religion. Originally published on artsfreedom.org. Download a PDF.
The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance (DVD) A slide and voice-over presentation about censorship of visual art in the 20th and early 21st Centuries in the United States.
Partly Annotated Bibliography: Books and Articles on Censorship
See also: NCAC's Visual Art archive