Book Launch / “Permitting Art: Visual Arts and the First Amendment on the Streets of New York,” with Brian Soucek, Jonathan Gilmore, and Jennifer C. Lena

Date: Thursday, 7 November 2024, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

For information about the second launch event, which will see Soucek and company vending the book and related art on the streets of New York City on Saturday, 9 November, visit here.

On the occasion of the publication of our new book, legal scholar Brian Soucek’s Permitting Art: Visual Arts and the First Amendment on the Streets of New York, please join us for a discussion featuring philosopher Jonathan Gilmore, sociologist Jennifer Lena, and the author.

The first volume in Cabinet’s “Art before the Law” series, Permitting Art examines two federal cases, brought a decade apart, challenging vending laws that prevented artworks from being sold on the streets of New York City without a permit. Printed matter had always been exempted from this requirement because words are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and in 1995, a group of New York artists filed a federal suit against the city claiming that the visual arts are also a form of speech and should be similarly exempted. Their success led the city to allow sales of paintings, photography, sculpture, and prints on the street. But what qualifies as a painting? A second lawsuit, filed in 2004 by two graffiti artists who had been prevented from selling their painted T-shirts and hats on the street, forced the courts to address this question. Were these artists selling clothing that happened to have art on it, or paintings that happened to be on an unconventional material?

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A.

About the Participants
Jonathan Gilmore is a philosopher and art critic. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the chair of the philosophy program. He is also a coeditor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His most recent book, Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2020), was awarded the annual Outstanding Monograph Prize by the American Society of Aesthetics.

Jennifer C. Lena is associate professor of arts administration at Columbia University. Her books include Banding Together (Princeton University Press, 2012), Entitled (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Measuring Culture (Columbia University Press, 2020). She is currently working on two book projects: one on the American junk drawer, and another that extends her research with Brian Soucek on how tax law has shaped the arts. For more information, see jenniferclena.com.

Brian Soucek is professor of law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis. A lawyer and philosopher of art, Soucek’s interdisciplinary work spanning law and aesthetics was cited to the US Supreme Court in the 5Pointz aerosol art case and 303 Creative, the case that determined whether web designers have an expressive exemption from antidiscrimination laws. His articles include “Aesthetic Judgment in Law,” Alabama Law Review, 2017; “The Constitutional Irrelevance of Art,” North Carolina Law Review, 2021; “Censorship and Subsidy,” in A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (Wiley Blackwell, 2022); “Censorship and Selective Support for the Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art (Oxford University Press, 2023); and “Tax Law as Muse,” Cornell Law Review, 2025. His next book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025.