How do you make art for lawyers?

April 4, 2018 5:31 AM

Animator Rory WT was commissioned to make art for lawyers in London. But what's it all about? What kind of stuff do they like? This is his story.
posted by nerdfish (4 comments total)

Interesting! You really can tell a lot about a lawyer by what they put on the walls in their office. Especially when it's different than what their firm is displaying in the hallways, etc. When you walk into someone's office and see clipper ships, hunting scenes and the scales of justice you know you're in for some high-handed 'such aforesaid' assholery.

Mine features Micheal Heizer's Geometric Extraction series and Honore Daumier's drawings of French lawyers.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:46 AM on April 4, 2018

To be fair, sometimes you are just stuck with a pile of tombstones you can't get rid of.

Besides those, I have a print of The Ambassadors and a Funko Pop of Mycroft Holmes. What does that say about me?
posted by praemunire at 7:51 AM on April 4, 2018

That was a lot more interesting (and less snarky) than I imagined t would be. It ended up being a really fascinating insight into what being an Artist in Residence is like outside of the more typical arts, education, and academic contexts. Going into a workplace to make art for people who are not necessarily the usual audience for contemporary art is a very different beast to spending a year in a purpose-built facility with a collection of like-minded people (aka temperamental weirdos).

There's an interesting (maybe inadvertently) comment made by one of the interviewees in response to Rory WT's worry that maybe he'll waste the arts residency by not making art - she says "you've encouraged people to engage in it, so you animate and you create something". There's a really nice double meaning of 'animate' in there, as in the craft of the animator and as in giving life or movement to something.
posted by prismatic7 at 9:10 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Charles Bragg did a number of sculpture and etchings on lawyers and the law. Examples can be had at reasonable prices.
posted by BWA at 8:50 AM on April 5, 2018