Not according to United States District Court Judge Miriam Cedarbaum. The injunction was intended to protect artists who've been arrested and had their original fine art confiscated or destroyed by the police while displaying it on New York City streets. The City sells the confiscated art at a monthly police department auction.
Any unsold art is destroyed.
The ruling finds the City's vending license scheme constitutional as applied to artists, despite the City admitting in hearings and in it's legal brief that it has no licenses for artists who want to display or sell their art. Traditionally, the works of fine artists are thought to contain implicit political and social meaning, and to be a medium for communicating the artists' ideas, beliefs and opinions. Though the judge never viewed any of the plaintiffs' paintings, prints, sculptures or photographs, the 17 page ruling repeatedly mentions a lack of political content in the works in order to explain why the art is not protected expression. The ruling also denied that the City violated artists' Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law, despite the vending ordinance exempting an unlimited number of vendors of written or printed matter from needing a license. Based on this new ruling, sidewalk vendors of art books, used magazines, comic books and baseball cards are expressing a First Amendment right, while artists selling non-political paintings created to express their own ideas, are not.