Abstract
This article argues that the focus of many criminologists and art crime scholars is too often rather narrow, and promotes a more expansive notion of “art crime” —one that centers not on crime, but on the relationship between art and crime. More specifically, this article argues for an approach to “art crime” that contemplates “socially injurious acts” or omissions involving art that are not defined as “crime” or proscribed by civil or criminal statutes. Employing this “harm-based” approach, this article examines the responses to Damian Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a piece consisting of a 14-ft tiger shark (caught by a fisherman commissioned to do so) immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine of glass and steel—to demonstrate how art criticism can be employed as a tool for dissent, especially in cases involving art that causes ecological or environmental harms.
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