Sonia Katyal, professor of Law at Fordham University Law School, was awarded a grant by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for her upcoming book, Anti-Branding, which deals with the legal issues involved with artists’ responses to advertising.
Katyal is the first law professor to receive a grant through The Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a three-year program created to support independent, progressive arts publications and individual arts writers.
In her book, Katyal argues that, in contemporary society, the production of popular culture rests on the pervasive presence of corporate sponsorship in many aspects of public and private life. Less familiar, yet more important, are the ways in which the American legal system has allowed advertising to become a large part of everyday language. Anti-Branding investigates how artists transform and “successfully subvert” the power of advertising and how the law has both enabled and silenced their work.
The book will be published in 2009.
“I am honored to receive this grant from a foundation that does such important work for the visual arts,” Katyal said. “The intersection of artistic expression and the law is a fascinating area and one whose complexities and importance I teach to my law students.”
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in 1987. In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, its mission is the advancement of the visual arts. The Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is designed to reward writing about art that is both intellectually rigorous and creatively generative and to support critical writing that engages the visual arts.
