Artistic merit

Artistic merit is the perceived artistic quality or value of any given work of art, music, film, literature, sculpture or painting. Artistic merit is the perceived artistic quality or value of any given work of art, music, film, literature, sculpture or painting. At the trial of James Joyce's novel Ulysses in 1921, though not required to do so by law, Quinn the lawyer for the defence decided to produce three literary experts to attest to the literary merits of Ulysses, as well as The Little Review’s broader reputation. The first expert witness was Philip Moeller, of the Theatre Guild, who interpreted Ulysses using the Freudian method of unveiling the subconscious mind, which prompted one of the judges to ask him to 'speak in a language that the court could understand'. The next witness was Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial, another literary magazine of the time, who 'was forced to admit that if he had had the desire to publish Ulysses he would have consulted a lawyer first—and not published it'. The final witness was English novelist, lecturer, and critic John Cowper Powys, who declared that Ulysses was a 'beautiful piece of work in no way capable of corrupting the minds of young girls'. In another important obscenity trial in 1960 Britain, when the full unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was published by Penguin Books. The trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. Several academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was 'not guilty'. This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit sexual material in the United Kingdom.