University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Volume 43 2010 Trespassory Art Randall Bezanson University of Iowa Andrew Finkelman United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr Part of the Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons Recommended Citation Randall Bezanson & Andrew Finkelman, Trespassory Art, 43 U. MICH. J. L. REFORM 245 (2010). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr/vol43/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. TRESPASSORY ART Randall Bezanson* Andrew Finkelman** The history of art is replete with examples of artists who have broken from existing conventions and genres, redefining the meaning of art and its function in society. Our interest is in emergingforms of art that trespass-occupy space, place, and time as part of their aesthetic identity. These new forms of art, which we call tres- passory art, are creatures of a movement that seeks to appropriate cultural norms and cultural signals, reinterpreting them to create new meaning. Marcel DuChamp produced such a result when, in the early twentieth century, he took a urinal, signed it, titled it Fountain, and called it art. Whether they employ twenty-first-century technologies, such as lasers, or painting, sculpture and mosaic, music, theatre, or merely the human body, these new artists share one thing in common.