What is sculpture?

Art Monthly 34, p45

October 2011, no. 350

Henry Lydiat

" Guidelines as to the legal meaning of 'sculpture' were handed down by the High Court Judge in the first trial, which were endorsed by the Court of Appeal, and were therefore subjected to argument and judicial review by the UK Supreme Court. They were approved and are summarised as follows:

- 'sculpture' can be things going beyond what one would normally expect to be art in the sense of the sort of things that one would expect to find in art galleries.

- no judgement is to be made on artistic merit

- not every three-dimensional representation of a concept can be regarded as sculpture

- the essence of a sculpture is that it should have, as part of its purpose, a visual appeal in the sense that it might be enjoyed for that purpose alone, whether or not it might have another purpose as well; the purpose of the creator, who may fail, but that does not matter (no judgements are to be made about artistic merit) because it is the underlying purpose that is important

- for example, a pile of bricks, temporarily on display at Tate Modern for two weeks, is plainly capable of being a sculpture; the identical pile of bricks dumped at the end of a driveway for two weeks of preparatory to a building project is equally plainly not; one asks why there is that difference, and the answer lies in having regard to its intention - one is created by the hand of an artist, for artistic purposes, and the other is created by a builder, for building purposes. "

From the Tate Archives...http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm