Justice & Law Quote by Jock Sturges

The line lands like a legal threat disguised as an artist statement, and that’s the point. Sturges isn’t arguing about aesthetics; he’s pre-loading the courtroom with cultural capital. By invoking “the directors of every museum,” he’s treating legitimacy as something conferred by institutions, not settled by public comfort. It’s a power move: if you want to criminalize me, you’ll have to indict the gatekeepers who’ve already vouched for me.

The subtext is defensive and strategically elitist. Sturges’ work, especially his photographs of nude adolescents, has long sat in the blast radius of obscenity debates and moral panics. He knows the fight won’t be decided by nuanced discussions of form and intention. It will be decided by who gets to define “art” versus “pornography,” and in American culture that boundary often gets policed through law. So he reaches for the one authority that tends to hold up under cross-examination: museums, curators, the canon.

There’s also an admission embedded in the bravado: legitimacy is fragile. If it were self-evident, he wouldn’t need an army of experts. The conditional “If it gets” suggests he expects scrutiny, maybe even welcomes it as a stage where pedigree can be weaponized.

It works because it exposes the uncomfortable machinery of art-world validation. Sturges isn’t just defending images; he’s defending the right of an institutionally sanctioned gaze to remain protected, even when the subject matter makes the public flinch.