When Art Breaks the Law

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 09:57:04 +0000

This week Sarah breaks down why The Art Assignment sign-off cannot be "Please Don't Break the Law," and discusses artists Ai Weiwei and Pussy Riot who have broken the law for good reasons. What should our sign off be?

Please Break The Law: Reading List
(please suggest other readings in the comments)

Modernism
- Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863)
- Serge Guilbaut, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and David Solkin (eds), Modernism and Modernity (1983)
- Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (eds), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (1992)
- Meyer Shapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Century, Selected Papers, vol. 2 (1978)

The Avant-Garde
- Henri de Saint-Simon, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The artist, the scientist and the industrialist") (1825)
- Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939)
- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
- Peter Bürger's "Theory of the Avant-Garde" (1974)
- Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985)
- Hal Foster, "Who's Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?" in The Return of the Real (1996)
- Matthew Witkovsky, ed., Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life: Early Twentieth-Century European Modernism (2011)

Pussy Riot
- Masha Gessen's Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014)
- Pussy Riot's Pussy Riot!: A Punk Prayer For Freedom (2012)
- @Eng_Pussy_Riot

Ai Weiwei
- Ai Weiwei and Lee Ambrozy's Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (2011)
- Kerry Brougher, Mami Kataoka, and Charles Merewether's Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2012)
- Alison Klayman's film AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY (2012)
- @aiww | @aiww_en

Art + civil disobedience
- Hannah Arendt's "Civil Disobedience" (1970)
- Randy Martin's Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (1990)
- Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2004)
- Slavoj Zizek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)
- Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (2012)