According to the WSJ, that’s a big fat “yes.”

Deb Margolin recently wrote a play called “Imagining Madoff” that purported to offer audiences a fictional version of the relationship between Mr. Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, and Bernie Madoff, the arch-swindler who purloined vast amounts of money from Mr. Wiesel, his wife and the couple’s charitable foundation. … Then Ms. Margolin sent a copy of the script to Mr. Wiesel, who promptly replied that he found it “defamatory” and “obscene” and threatened to sue in order to prevent it from being performed at “any time in any venue.”

Artists and rights activists have appealed to the Kremlin to put a stop to the prosecution of two curators, Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev, but Russian prosecutors refuse to back down and have asked the presiding judge to hand down a three-year prison sentence on July 12. Why the hoopla? The curators previously included some art works in an exhibition which were thought to be inciting religious hatred. One painting depicted Jesus Christ as Mickey Mouse, another as Vladimir Lenin. The 2007 exhibit, Forbidden Art, at the Sakharov Museum, was part of an effort to fight censorship of the arts, but the Russian Orthodox Church was horrified. The curators and their lawyers believe they will be found guilty. More from the AP here.

UPDATE: July 12, 2010

Today, the two curators “were found guilty of inciting hatred by a Russian court on Monday, but the judge let them go free, after ordering them to pay fines.“

This past January 1st, Ireland’s parliament clarified an old antiblasphemy law, defining it as any statement “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion,” and added a fine of up to $34,000 for offenders.

Taking this new law as a point of departure, the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art curated a show, aptly titled, you guessed it, Blasphemous, which opened on Good Friday (April 2nd), and which aims a direct attack at this law.

However, visual artists need not fret, as the new law has an exception that should comfort artists like those featured in the blasphemy exhibition. The law provides for a defense in cases of materials “that a reasonable person would find of genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific or academic value.” This week’s Time Magazine has a bit more on scheduled protests as well as IMOCA’s upcoming summer show, These Artists Are Criminals. Check out some of the work here:

Erin Donnelly has just informed me that Art21 has just launched what appears to be a timely and exciting program dealing with ethics and law. The Flash Point program, The Ethics of Art, will explore the issue of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives.

Throughout this topic, we’ll feature artists who make this ethical debate a focus in their work, from artists who question the role of the institution, such as Hans Haacke or Marcel Broodthaers, to artists like Alfredo Jaar, who examines the disparity between an oil-rich government and a poverty-stricken populace in his work Muxima.

Ethical decisions also factor into the artistic process. Does a photographer who sells a portrait owe anything, financially or psychologically, to the work’s subject? What kind of ownership does an artist have over reproduced images of his or her work? We’ll also look at the discussions taking place around the use of animals in art[.] Ethical issues can even come into play after an artist’s death, especially in the handling the artist’s estate and the management of his or her legacy.

Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, play a role in institutional practice. With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, deaccessioning practices…do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today’s museum studies programs?

Here are some topics they’ll cover:

Another relevant subtopic would analyze the distinction between ethics and law, or the “should” and the “can,” and perhaps what the artist’s role is in defining and blurring these two discourses.

From today’s Dallas Morning News,

Eastfield College in Mesquite [Texas] may land in federal court for refusing to allow a student to make crucifixes in a ceramics class.  Liberty Legal Institute, representing the student, wrote to officials at Eastfield and the Dallas County Community College District, demanding that the college rescind a policy against the crafting of religious works in art classes.  The letter, sent Tuesday, warned of a federal lawsuit unless Eastfield promises in writing by Jan. 23 that students “will be allowed to freely express their faith.”

The community college district said Eastfield’s policy is intended to encourage original work by students – not to infringe on religious freedom. The district said its lawyers “will review the policy and make recommendations to amend the language which will make the policy more clear for faculty and students.”

It seems that in difficult financial times people not only protect their intellectual propety assets to their full extent, but also litigate to collect any monies lost due to illegal infringement.

57 years after being bought direct from the artist by Glasgow’s city fathers, [Dali's Christ of St John of the Cross] painting is at the centre of a legal investigation which may yet snare a death metal band from Alsace in France, ashtray manufacturers, and poster-makers in the US, Britain, Italy and Spain.

The [Glasgow City] council believes it has been losing tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid licensing fees and royalties a year from unauthorised copies of Christ of St John of the Cross, which was bought for £8,200 and now valued at more than £60m.

Lawyers acting for Glasgow city council have drawn up a hit-list of 50 companies, manufacturers and artists selling hand-painted copies, who are suspected of illegally copying it. Warnings have been issued to 25 firms and individuals across the world – some wrongly claiming to have the council’s permission to reuse the image – to “cease and desist” or face legal action.

Apparently, Dali’s sale of the painting included copyright ownership to the image. More from The Guardian here.

An Oklahoma City council has — once again — authorized the use of public money for the fabrication and installation of a religious statute. The statute, Come Unto Me (not “come on to me”), by artist Rosalind Cook, depicts a “larger than life [Jesus] Christ figure,” which can be supplemented by, get this, “children of varied nationalities that can be purchased to group with the sculpture.” From Townhall.com:

A conservative Oklahoma City suburb with a history of trying to incorporate religious art into public spaces has approved city funds to help pay for a statue of Jesus Christ to be placed downtown for Christmas, likely leading to another court fight.

“This is the third major unconstitutional effort they’ve engaged in recent years,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It’s a little surprising, because normally people pause to take a breath before they violate the Constitution again.”

June Cartwright, the chair of the commission and who supported funding the latest statue, said the sculpture was viewed simply as a piece of art and not a religious endorsement. “It is a piece of artwork,” Cartwright said. “It doesn’t state that it is specifically Jesus. It is whatever you perceive it to be.”

“You cannot promote what is obviously a very specific religious image using tax dollars,” Lynn said. “The city lawyers should have stopped this. This isn’t even close to the line. This is way over it.”

With Jeff Koons’ Château de Versailles show set to open tomorrow, the French are complaining that the Koons paraphernalia will “cheapen” Versailles: a Disneyification of it if you will. There are also allegation that the exhibition poses a conflict of interest:

Rightwingers wrote to the culture minister, protesting that the “sacred” site of Versailles would be cheapened. Then the French media questioned whether the exhibition at a palace that symbolises the French revolution would benefit a billionaire French collector.

François Pinault, whose business empire includes Gucci and the Christie’s auction house, is one of the most influential private collectors in the modern art world. Alongside several other private collectors, he is a key patron of the Koons exhibition, lending six of the 17 works on show, including the giant outdoor flower sculpture Split Rocker.

Le Monde warned of a “possible conflict of interest”, saying that Koons’s first French exhibition would see the value of the works soar, benefiting their private owners. It pointed out that the chairman of the Château de Versailles, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, used to run Pinault’s private art foundation in Venice.

According to The Guardian, “yesterday, the leftwing paper Libération dismissed the conservative protesters as marginal ‘Catholic monarchists’.”

More on this from The Guardian.

Seems like the religious right is on the prowl again: first going after frogs and now, after a sexually aroused messiah (no, not Obama).

Lawyers for Emily Mapfuwa, a Christian who was offended by a Terence Koh sculpture of Christ with an erection, initiated a private prosecution against the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art for “outraging public decency and causing harassment, alarm and distress to the public.” Ms. Mapfuwa argues the Baltic would not have dared depict the prophet Muhammad in such a way.

After complaining to the Northumbria police and geting nowhere, Mapfuwa approached the “Christian Legal Centre – an organisation that aims to ‘promote and protect the biblical freedoms of Christian believers in the United Kingdom’ – agreed to pay her legal costs. The CLC also funded the case brought by Stephen Green against the BBC over Jerry Springer – The Opera. A CLC spokesman said Mapfuwa believed in freedom of expression, but ‘this statue served no other purpose than to offend Christians and to denigrate Christ’.

More from The Guardian here.

If it isn’t Mauricio Cattelan’s Ninth Hour sculpture of Pope John Paul II crippled by a boulder, it’s a crucified frog.

Pope Benedict XVI has condemned a sculpture of a crucified frog on display at a museum in Bolzano, Italy, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. …The work, by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997, depicts a frog nailed to a cross with a mug of beer in one hand and an egg in the other.

It’s not known if the beer is German or Budweiser, or if the egg is organic. From the NY Times.