Censorship in Polish Art After 1989 · Art, Law, Politics

Censorship in Polish Art After 1989 is a pioneering work on censorship in Polish art after the fall of the USSR available in English for the first time with a skilled translation by Lukasz Mojsak. Polish Art Historian Jakub Dabrowski, with contributions from Anna Demenko, offers the first comprehensive study to analyze the problems of restricting the freedom of artistic expression in the Third Polish Republic. Censorship in Polish Art After 1989 includes two complementary approaches - legal and historical (including political and social aspects of the phenomenon). The first section of Dabrowski’s thought provoking book contains an analysis of the issues of freedom of artistic expression in the Polish legal system, against the background of international context. This unprecedented approach allows a new look at the issues being addressed and helps to develop insightful conclusions. This section includes reflections on the meaning of art in the context of general principles of criminal responsibility and a detailed analysis of selected criminal law regulations, which most often become the cause of conflicts between artistic expression and the law. Section Two is an attempt to narrate the history of censorship in Polish art after 1989. Based on the collected factographic material, Dabrowski captures the characteristic qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the phenomenon studied in time. He enters his considerations in a wider social, political, artistic and media context, at the same time pointing to symbolic breakthroughs, precedents, sequences or correlations of events. The book closes with a detailed study of censorship cases.