Artistic Freedom in Fear City: Abeyance and the Legal Ecology of Collapse

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between law and cultural production through the concept of legal abeyance: a condition in which legal rules persist formally but recede in practice. Focusing on New York City’s fiscal crisis of the late 1970s, it argues that the emergence of the No Wave art scene was enabled not despite legal breakdown, but through it. As property, licensing, and nuisance laws went largely unenforced, artists occupied and repurposed urban space, generating new forms of cultural expression. Comparative examples from graffiti, Detroit techno, and post-wall Berlin suggest that such conditions recur across contexts. The article situates abeyance as a fourth mode of law’s relationship to art, alongside protection, restriction, and subsidy.