Funded PhD opportunities in Law and Popular Culture

The University of Westminster has just advertised some research studentships which might be of interest to some readers of this blog. Details about the application process appear via link above. There are a number of named possible topics but you are free in addition to construct your own proposal. Members of The Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture welcome proposals in relevant fields. The Centre currently has three students working on fields as diverse as: 

• Olympic Brandscapes: the production, control and impact of the space of London 2012 Olympics (Andrea Pavoni)
• Technology and Ideas: the challenge of ‘intangible property’ within Copyright Law (Danilo Mandic)
• Gambling and Governance: an analysis of common law approaches to the business of gaming, and their social and cultural impacts (Thea Oxbury)

In addition, in December 2009 the first of our PhD students, Oxana Chiscenco, successfully defended her thesis 'The Record Industry and Competition law in the Twenty First Century'. The areas that the Centre can supervise in are not confined to these above of course and anyone interested in applying should consider looking at the research interests and work of members of the Centre (currently Guy Osborn, Steve Greenfield, Ken Foster, Stephanie Roberts and Stuart Toddington); we are interested, amongst other things, in anything that examines the intersection between law and popular culture, and we construe popular culture very broadly. Any one interested should make contact  if they would like to discuss this further. The closing date is 19th February 2010.

Generation Terrorists

On Saturday 23rd January a Mass Photo Gathering took place in Trafalgar Square. The Gathering was a response to a number of high profile detentions under s44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. These have included a BBC photographer taking a photo of St Paul's Cathedral and a trainspotter being asked to delete images of a train carriage he took whilst on holiday in Wales. The Independent ran a front page focussing on what they saw as a misuse of police powers under the legislation, which allows police to 'stop and account' or 'stop and search' in certain authorized zones.  There are certain resonances here with previous attempts to use similar public order provisions to attempt to deal with football fans, see for example the work of Urban 75, and their now defunct offshoot, Football Fans against the Criminal Justice Act. In the 1990s this group campaigned against the regulation of football culture, see for example this article from the New Statesman at the time. These developments also have parallels with the case of Brian Haws, something memorably celebrated by Mark Wallinger in his installation State Britain 2007. We can in any event see this as a further example of law trying to regulate areas of popular culture, and as a further site for resistance.

Children, Art and Law

Laura Cumming's piece in yesterday's Observer adds an interesting extra level to the blog posted here in October on Brooke Shields. The detail above is taken from Bronzino's An Alegory with Venus and Cupid, a painting that has hung, apparently without problem, in the National Gallery for many years. Cumming explains some of the context and coverage of this image in her piece  When juxtaposed with work such as that of Tierney Gearon and others it provides a useful way of trying to undertand the context within which we see children within art, and how the way we view this can be constructed.

Justice, Media and Public conference: Changing Public Perceptions in the New Media Landscape

There is an excellent conference taking place next March that some of you may be interested in attending, or even contributing to. This is organised by Rob Mawby from Leicester, and Lieve Gies (Keele). Lieve is a renowned academic working in the area, her book Law and the Media (front cover image above) being a very important intervention for law and popular culture. The conference takes place on 25 and 26 March 2010 at Keele University with some great speakers alreday confirmed, but there is still time to submit an abstract if you are interested in attending this. More details of the conference are available via the conference website and it is also publicised via our Journal site, indeed the current issue of this is the special issue on Celebrity Big Brother, edited by Lieve herself.

Policing Art - Brooke Shields and the Metropolitan Police

The Tate Modern's new exhibition, Pop Life, looks to already have created a furore. I have not visited it myself yet, having preferred to take the short walk from work to the Royal Academy to see the superb Anish Kapoor exhibition, but will report back once I have done in the next few weeks.  On 1 October, the day the exhibition was due to open to the public, the Guardian reported  that the Tate had pulled one particular exhibit, Richard Prince's Spiritual America.  His piece contains an image of the 10 year old Brooke Shields, authorised by her mother and originally taken by the photographer Gary Gross in 1976 for the Playboy publication, Sugar and Spice. A cropped version of this image appears above. The photo was subsequently used by Richard Prince as the basis for his own piece. Initially, he put the photo in a gilt frame and displayed it, without any label, in a shopfront in a part of run down New York. Apparently there was very little complaint when it has been  shown previously, including recently in the US as part of a Richard Prince Retrospective at the Guggenheim. For the Tate installation of Spiritual America, the photo hung, in  its tacky frame, on its own inside what Adrian Searle called a 'dark red and womb like' room. However, the gallery was visited by the Metropolitan Police and the display has been, to use the words of the Tate, 'temporarily closed down' and the catalogue withdrawn from sale. I have blogged before about the regulation of art, and indeed discussed a visit to the exhibition Seduced last year with my LLM students. This case also appears to have echoes of previous problems galleries have had involving the use of images of children, involving Robert Mapplethorpe and Tierney Gearon amongst others. No doubt time well tell what will become of this particular exhibit, and a view of the comments via the Guardian website shows that the area is one that provokes strong emotions, but a moot point is whether we feel the police should be regulating art, and how the law operates in this area? This question is one that will run and run.

File sharing - the industry changes tack.

You may have seen this advert in the Guardian on 28th September. Its an interesting change of approach for the music industry who have previously tried using various tactics and techniques to deal with the issue of file sharing.  This has included threatening end users and internet providers, and bleating loudly to anyone who will listen. It is particularly interesting for readers of blogs, as the full page advert paid for by UK Music is actually a reproduction of a blog posting by the lead singer of the indie band Future of the Left earlier in the year. The advert has created a lot of discussion, not least on the excellent Guardian musicblog, and is a further reminder that the music industry is trying desperately to deal with the issues created by technology, and failing to properly embrace them.

Edwyn Collins and Teenage Fanclub

I have blogged about Edwyn before, but just been alerted by my good friend Richard to what looked like a fantastic night in Glasgow recently, with Edwyn playing with Teenage Fanclub, and some clips from the gig are available here. It looked like a top night out. Its great to see that Edwyn is going from strength to strength, his wife Grace also published a book recently Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins which is well worth a read.