Artistic merit
Artistic merit is the artistic quality or value of any given work of art, music, film, literature, sculpture or painting.
Obscenity and literary merit
The
U.S. mail, incurred a $100 fine, and were forced to cease publishing Ulysses in The Little Review. It was not until the 1933 case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses
that the novel could be published in the United States without fear of prosecution.
Another important obscenity trial occurred 1960 in Britain, when the full unexpurgated edition of
trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. Several academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Norman St John-Stevas and John Robinson, Anglican bishop of Woolwich, were called as witnesses for the defence, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty".[3]
This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit sexual material in the United Kingdom.
See also
- Aesthetics
- Art
- Kitsch
- Masterpiece
- Taste (sociology)
- Theory of art
References
- ^ de Grazia, Edward (1992). Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House. p. 10.
- ^ a b c Anderson, Margaret, C (1930). My Thirty Years' War: An Autobiography by Margaret Anderson. Covici, Fried. p. 220.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Feather, John. A History Of British Publishing. p. 205; Rolph, C. H, ed. (1990). The Trial of Lady Chatterley (2nd ed.)
