Since we live in an age saturated with images, and images—whether we notice this or not—participate in producing our ideas of order and legitimacy, it makes sense that someone would want to study not only how law governs art, but how art governs law. Alison Young, Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has done just that for a number of years now. With interests ranging from the legitimacy of graffiti as an art form and how art gets regulated legally and socially to why some artworks provoke viewers to violence and how courts of law rule on politically charged artworks, Young has interrogated our responses to images with a rare combination of sensitivity and candor. Her basic assertion is that spectators are engaged in a process of judgment in relation to images—not only aesthetic judgment, but the type of judgment one finds in a courtroom. As such, spectators are involved in an ethics of witnessing, whether they like it or not.

In her recent book Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (Routledge, 2005), Young helps us think about and see law’s complex relation to images by means of a series of meditations on the relationship between judgment and aesthetics. Topics she considers include art about HIV, performance art that involves or invokes violence, and plans for rebuilding at Ground Zero after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Young earned an LL.B (that’s a bachelor of law degree in the U.K.) from Edinburgh University and a Masters and Ph.D. in Criminology from Cambridge University. She writes widely about criminology, sexual violence, law and aesthetics, and feminist theory. She is currently working on a study of cinematic and literary representations of crime, and an examination of graffiti writers’ narratives of cultural belonging. This interview took place initially in person, and later over email.

—Jill Stauffer

I. AESTHETIC VERTIGO

THE BELIEVER: Can an artwork move someone to violence? How or why?

ALISON YOUNG: Well, there are a lot of instances of spectators moved to violence by an artwork, if you define violence as throwing things at the artwork, or attempting to destroy it. I would certainly consider those reactions as violent ones. The exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in Melbourne in 1997 led to two young boys smuggling a sledgehammer into the National Gallery of Victoria and smashing the image. The Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 saw an elderly man smear white paint on Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary. When that exhibit was in London two years previously, a different artwork was attacked: Marcus Harvey’s Myra had eggs thrown at it by one man, and ink by another. And it’s not...