Search results for ""author art, culture"

This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. Through detailed commentary and focused case studies of influential texts and events -- from Invisible Man to West Side Story, from Disneyland to the Seattle World's Fair, from Rear Window to The Americans -- the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture. The two core aims of this volume are to chart the changing complexion of American culture in the years following World War II and to provide readers with a critical investigation of 'the 1950s'. The book provides an intellectual context for approaching 1950s American culture and considers the historical impact of the decade on recent social and cultural developments. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Chronology of 1950s American Culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * over twenty illustrations

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History and Culture in Italy is a scholarly, introductory survey of the history and culture of Italy, focusing on art and architecture, literature and philosophy, politics and historical events, and observations of daily life in modern Italy. The book is based on lectures and tours given over the course of four years to American students in Italy. It is written as a narrative, which readers have found makes it enjoyable to read. Chapters are identified according to subject. The book emphasizes the importance of the history and culture of Italy to modern life and identity in Western culture.

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By focusing on the story of Hector, James M. Redfield presents an imaginative perspective not only on the Iliad but also on the whole of Homeric culture. In an expansive discussion informed by a reinterpretation of Aristotle's Poetics and a reflection on the human meaning of narrative art, the analysis of Hector leads to an inquiry into the fundamental features of Homeric culture and of culture generally in its relation to nature. Through Hector, as the "true tragic hero of the poem," the events and themes of the Iliad are understood and the function of tragedy within culture is examined. Redfield's work represents a significant application of anthropological perspectives to Homeric poetry. Originally published in 1975 (University of Chicago Press), this revised edition includes a new preface and concluding chapter by the author.

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Practices of Looking, Third Edition, bridges visual, communication, media, and cultural studies to investigate how images and the activity of looking carry meaning within and between different arenas in everyday life. The third edition has been updated to represent the contemporary visual cultural landscape and includes topics like the increasingly rapid global circulation of media, the rise of design and DIY cultures, digital media art and activism, and challenges to photojournalism and news media. Challenging yet accessible, Practices of Looking, Third Edition, is ideal for courses across a range of disciplines.

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno wrote about the 'culture industry'. For Adorno, culture too along with the products of factory labour was increasingly becoming a commodity. Now, in what they call the 'global culture industry', Scott Lash and Celia Lury argue that Adorno's worst nightmares have come true. Their new book tells the compelling story of how material objects such as watches and sportswear have become powerful cultural symbols, and how the production of symbols, in the form of globally recognized brands, has now become a central goal of capitalism. Global Culture Industry provides an empirically and theoretically rich examination of the ways in which these objects - from Nike shoes to Toy Story, from global football to conceptual art - metamorphose and move across national borders. This book is set to become a dialectic of enlightenment for the age of globalization. It will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences.

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Scholars from the humanities and social sciences analyze representations of Latinidad in a diversity of genres Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. While the presence of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture in the United States buttresses the much-heralded Latin Explosion, the images themselves are often contradictory. In Latino/a Popular Culture, Habell-Pallán and Romero have brought together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to analyze representations of Latinidad in a diversity of genres—media, culture, music, film, theatre, art, and sports—that are emerging across the nation in relation to Chicanas, Chicanos, mestizos, Puerto Ricans, Caribbeans, Central Americans and South Americans, and Latinos in Canada. Contributors include Adrian Burgos, Jr., Luz Calvo, Arlene Dávila, Melissa A. Fitch, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Tanya Katerí Hernández, Josh Kun, Frances Negron-Muntaner, William A. Nericcio, Raquel Z. Rivera, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Gregory Rodriguez, Mary Romero, Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, Christopher A. Shinn, Deborah R. Vargas, and Juan Velasco. Cover artwork "Layering the Decades" by Diane Gamboa, 2002, mixed media on paper, 11 X 8.5". Copyright 2001, Diane Gamboa. Printed with permission.

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Jewish art and visual culture—art made by Jews about Jews—in modern diasporic settings is the subject of Looking Jewish. Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions. She begins with a painting by Ken Aptekar entitled Albert: Used to Be Abraham, a double portrait of a man, which serves to illustrate Zemel's conception of the doubleness of Jewish diasporic art. She considers two interwar photographers, Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic; images by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz; the pre- and postwar photographs of Roman Vishniac; the figure of the Jewish mother in postwar popular culture (Molly Goldberg); and works by R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment.

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War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship.While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.

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When Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the crowd rioted in response to the harsh dissonance and jarring rhythms of its score. This was noise, not music. In Sublime Noise, Josh Epstein examines the significance of noise in modernist music and literature. How - and why - did composers and writers incorporate the noises of modern industry, warfare, and big-city life into their work? Epstein argues that, as the creative class engaged with the racket of cityscapes and new media, they reconsidered not just the aesthetic of music but also its cultural effects. Noise, after all, is more than a sonic category: it is a cultural value judgment - a way of abating and categorizing the sounds of a social space or of new music. Pulled into dialogue with modern music's innovative rhythms, noise signaled the breakdown of art's autonomy from social life-even the "old favorites" of Beethoven and Wagner took on new cultural meanings when circulated in noisy modern contexts. The use of noise also opened up the closed space of art to the pressures of publicity and technological mediation. Building both on literary cultural studies and work in the "new musicology," Sublime Noise examines the rich material relationship that exists between music and literature. Through close readings of modernist authors, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound, and composers, including George Antheil, William Walton, Erik Satie, and Benjamin Britten, Epstein offers a radically contemporary account of musical-literary interactions that goes well beyond pure formalism. This book will be of interest to scholars of Anglophone literary modernism and to musicologists interested in how music was given new literary and cultural meaning during that complex interdisciplinary period.

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We frequently engage with that which we consciously perceive not to be real, yet fantasy, despite its pervasive presence and strong role in everyday life through its connection to identities, communities, desires, and meanings, has yet to be properly defined and researched. This book examines fantasy from a performance theory perspective. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature, it presents ethnographic and art-based research on live action role-playing games to explore fantasy as a bodily and negotiated phenomenon that involves various kinds of engagement with one’s surroundings. Overall, this book is a study of various forms and roles that fantasy can take on as part of contemporary Western culture. The study suggests that fantasy emerges as a different type of interpretation of normalised performance and reality, and can thus provide individuals with the tools to wield agency in everyday life. The book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, literature and performance studies.

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In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine - never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centres of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture - such as the mysterious 'Stendhal's syndrome', which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalised due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.

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This book covers various forms of the production of girmitiya culture and literature. One of the main objectives is to conceptualize the idea of girmitya, girmitology, and girmitiya literature, culture, history, and identity in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. This book aims to document the history, experiences, culture, assimilation, and identity of girmitiya community. It also critically analyses the articulation, projection, and production of their experiences of migration and being immigrant, their narratives, tradition, culture, religion, and memory. It also explores how this labour community formulated into a diaspora community and reconnected/created the home (land) and continues to do so in the wake of globalization and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This book is an attempt to bring the intriguing neglected diverse historical heritage of colonial labour migration and their narratives into the mainstream scholarly debates and discussions in the humanities and the social sciences through the trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives. This book assesses the routes of migration of old diaspora, and it explains the nuances of cultural change among the generations. Although, they have migrated centuries back, absorbed and assimilated, and got citizenships of respective countries of destinations but still their longing for roots, culture, identities, “home”, and the constant struggle is to retain connections with their homeland depicted in their cultural practices, arts, music, songs, folklore and literary manifestations.

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Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. Unlike standard accounts that focus on Surrealism in the U.S. during the 1940s as a point of departure for the ascendance of the New York School, this study contends that Surrealism has been integral to the development of American visual culture over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of Surrealism in both the museum and the marketplace, Sandra Zalman tackles Surrealism’s multi-faceted circulation as both elite and popular. Zalman shows how the American encounter with Surrealism was shaped by Alfred Barr, William Rubin and Rosalind Krauss as these influential curators mobilized Surrealism to compose, to concretize, or to unseat narratives of modern art in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s - alongside Surrealism’s intersection with advertising, Magic Realism, Pop, and the rise of contemporary photography. As a popular avant-garde, Surrealism openly resisted art historical classification, forcing the supposedly distinct spheres of modernism and mass culture into conversation and challenging theories of modern art in which it did not fit, in large part because of its continued relevance to contemporary American culture.

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This epic calls to mind the famous works of ancient poets such as Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. These long, narrative poems, defined by valiant characters and heroic deeds, celebrate events of great importance in ancient times. In this thought-provoking study, Christopher N. Phillips shows in often surprising ways how this exalted classical form proved as vital to American culture as it did to the great societies of the ancient world. Through close readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Sigourney, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, as well as the transcendentalists, Phillips traces the rich history of epic in American literature and art from early colonial times to the late nineteenth century. Phillips shows that far from fading in the modern age, the epic form was continuously remade to frame a core element of American cultural expression. He finds the motive behind this sustained popularity in the historical interrelationship among the malleability of the epic form, the idea of a national culture, and the prestige of authorship - a powerful dynamic that extended well beyond the boundaries of literature. By locating the epic at the center of American literature and culture, Phillips' imaginative study yields a number of important finds: the early national period was a time of radical experimentation with poetic form; the epic form was crucial to the development of constitutional law and the professionalization of visual arts; engagement with the epic synthesized a wide array of literary and artistic forms in efforts to launch the United States into the arena of world literature; and a number of writers shaped their careers around revising the epic form for their own purposes. Rigorous archival research, careful readings, and long chronologies of genre define this magisterial work, making it an invaluable resource for scholars of American studies, American poetry, and literary history.

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We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With "The Moment of Complexity", Mark C. Taylor offers a map for the unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy of our time through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in natural, social and cultural processes. To appreciate the significance of emerging network culture, he claims, it is necessary not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion and education. "The Moment of Complexity" is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the 21st century.

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This book provides a fresh account of the major cultural and intellectual trends of the United State in the 1910s, a decade characterised by war, the flowering of modernism, the birth of Hollywood, and Progressive interpretations of culture and society. Chapters on fiction and poetry, art and photography, film and vaudeville, and music, theatre, and dance explore these developments, linking detailed commentary with focused case studies of influential texts and events. These range from Tarzan of the Apes to The Birth of a Nation, from the radical modernism of Gertrude Stein and the Provincetown Players to the earliest jazz recordings. A final chapter explores the huge impact of the First World War on cultural understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and propaganda. Key Features *three case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists *Detailed chronology of 1910s American Culture *Bibliographies for each chapter *Fifteen black and white illustrations

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Exploring various forms of contemporary mass art and culture, from rock-'n'-roll music to "slasher" films, from women's romances to "retro" fashion style, these innovative and politically engaged essays reflect the paradox inherent in taking a critical approach to mass culture. They draw on a variety of theories, including feminist theory, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, linguistic theory, and psychonalysis, to reveal the very complicated workings of popular texts, to make explicit the text's ideological effects on consumers, and to challenge the outmoded (and, as two contributors argue, misogynist) dichotomy between high art and mass culture. It offers a provactive array of essays explaining important facets of contemporary culture.

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Bordering all but two of South America’s other nations and by far Latin America’s largest country, Brazil differs linguistically, historically, and culturally from Spanish America. Its indigenous peoples share the country with descendants of Portuguese conquerors and the Africans they imported to work as slaves, along with more recent immigrants from southern Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Capturing the scope of this country’s rich diversity and distinction as no other book has done—with more than a hundred entries from a wealth of perspectives—The Brazil Reader offers a fascinating guide to Brazilian life, culture, and history. Complementing traditional views with fresh ones, The Brazil Reader’s historical selections range from early colonization to the present day, with sections on imperial and republican Brazil, the days of slavery, the Vargas years, and the more recent return to democracy. They include letters, photographs, interviews, legal documents, visual art, music, poetry, fiction, reminiscences, and scholarly analyses. They also include observations by ordinary residents, both urban and rural, as well as foreign visitors and experts on Brazil. Probing beneath the surface of Brazilian reality—past and present—The Reader looks at social behavior, women’s lives, architecture, literature, sexuality, popular culture, and strategies for coping with the travails of life in a country where the affluent live in walled compounds to separate themselves from the millions of Brazilians hard-pressed to find food and shelter. Contributing to a full geographic account—from the Amazon to the Northeast and the Central-South—of this country’s singular multiplicity, many pieces have been written expressly for this volume or were translated for it, having never previously been published in English. This second book in The Latin America Readers series will interest students, specialists, travelers for both business and leisure, and those desiring an in-depth introduction to Brazilian life and culture.

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The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's most important writings on art, literature and aesthetics. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary, art and cultural criticism in the late twentieth century: aesthetic value and judgement, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation and consumption. He examines the individuals in institutions involved in making products: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries and academies. He analyses the structure of the cultural field itself, as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays gathered together in this volume examine a variety of substantive topics, including Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Production will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art and cultural studies.

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A paradox of surface and depth pervades the field of aesthetics. How can art's surface meanings and qualities be properly appreciated without understanding the cultural context that shapes their creation and perception? But exploring such underlying cultural conditions challenges the perception of thosequalities and meanings of aesthetic surface that constitute the captivating power of art. If aesthetics deals with both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one philosophical vision?In his new book, Richard Shusterman explores the dialectics of surface and depth by examining key issues in the philosophy of art and culture—from the logic of interpretation and evaluation to the roots of taste and convention, from the meanings of aesthetic purity and immediacy to the role of nature, theory, and history in our experience and understanding of art. In treating these topics, Shusterman combines the methods of analytic philosophy, critical theory, and poststructualism to arrive at new positions, displaying the philosophical versatility, originality of vision, and graceful, accessible writing that have become his trademark. Surface and Depth is crowned by a new definition of art as dramatization.

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Fermented foods may have an ancient history but they are experiencing something of a renaissance right now. Kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, yoghurts, pickles, kimchi - they are surging in popularity because of their health benefits as well as because they are fun projects for cooks who want to make things from scratch or preserve the bounty. Most commercially produced fermented foods in supermarkets have been pasteurised, killing off healthy bacteria in the process. But it's easy to incorporate some homemade fermented foods in your lifestyle, if you know how.

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Meteorites are among the rarest objects on Earth, yet they have left a pervasive mark on our planet and civilization. Arriving amidst thunderous blasts and flame-streaked skies, meteorites were once thought to be messengers from the gods, embodiments of the divine. Prized for their outlandish qualities, meteorites are a collectible, a commodity, objects of art and artists' desires and a literary muse. 'Meteorite hunting' is an adventurous, lucrative profession for some, and an addictive hobby for thousands of others. Meteorite: Nature and Culture is a unique, richly illustrated cultural history of these ancient and mysterious phenomena. Taking in a wide range of sources Maria Golia pays homage to the scientists, scholars and aficionados who have scoured the skies and combed the Earth's most unforgiving reaches for meteorites, contributing to a body of work that situates our planet and ourselves within the vastness of the Universe.Appealing to collectors and hobbyists alike, as well as any lovers of nature, marvel and paradox, this book offers an accessible overview of what science has learned from meteorites, beginning with the scientific community's reluctant embrace of their interplanetary origins, and explores their power to reawaken that precious, yet near-forgotten human trait - the capacity for awe.

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The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 celebrated Omaha’s key economic role as a center of industry west of the Mississippi River and its arrival as a progressive metropolis after the Panic of 1893. The exposition also promoted the rise of the United States as an imperial power, at the time on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and the nation’s place in bringing “civilization” to Indigenous populations both overseas and at the conclusion of the recent Plains Indian Wars. The Omaha World’s Fair, however, is one of the least studied American expositions. Wendy Jean Katz brings together leading scholars to better understand the event’s place in the larger history of both Victorian-era America and the American West. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume cover an array of topics, from competing commercial visions of the cities of the Great West; to the role of women in the promotion of City Beautiful ideals of public art and urban planning; and the constructions of Indigenous and national identities through exhibition, display, and popular culture. Leading scholars T. J. Boisseau, Bonnie M. Miller, Sarah J. Moore, Nancy Parezo, Akim Reinhardt, and Robert Rydell, among others, discuss this often-misunderstood world’s fair and its place in the Victorian-era ascension of the United States as a world power.

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A sweeping account of one of the cultural centers of Latin America, "Specular City" tells the history of Buenos Aires during the interregnum after Juan Peron's fall from power and before his restoration. During those two decades, the city experienced a rapid metamorphosis at the behest of its middle class citizens, who were eager to cast off the working-class imprint left by the Peronists. Laura Podalsky discusses the ways in which the proliferation of skyscrapers, the emergence of car culture, and the diffusion of an emerging revolution in the arts helped transform Buenos Aires, and, in so doing, redefine Argentine collective history.More than a cultural and material history of this city, this book also presents Buenos Aires as a crucible for urban life. Examining its structures through films, literatures, new magazines, advertising and architecture, "Specular City" reveals the prominent place of Buenos Aires in the massive changes that Latin America underwent for a new, modern definition of itself. Laura Podalsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State University.

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Celebrate the richness of modern queer culture and its vast history with this fascinating introduction to all the essential elements that helped sculpt the LGBTQ+ community up to the present day, including:- the amazing stories of queer pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson, celebrities, game-changers and unsung heroes alike- the essential LGBTQ+ timeline of queer world history- the biggest queer culture festivals and events in the world- classic works of queer art, literature, music, TV and filmThis cheerful collection shines a light on the rich variety of elements that form The Queeriodic Table.

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This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism, knowledge, and art. For the early moderns, touch was the earliest and most fundamental sense. Frequently aligned with bodily pleasure and sensuality, it was suspect; at the same time, it was associated with the authoritative disciplines of science and medicine, and even with religious knowledge and artistic creativity. The unifying impulse of Sensible Flesh is both analytic and recuperative. It attempts to chart the important history of the sense of touch at a pivotal juncture and to understand how tactility has organized knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The contributors examine in theoretically sophisticated ways both the history of the hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it. The essays consider such topics as New World contact, the eroticism of Renaissance architecture, the Enclosure Acts in England, plague, the clitoris and anatomical authority, Pygmalion, and the language of tactility in early modern theater. In exploring the often repudiated or forgotten sense of touch, the essays insistently reveal both the world of sensation that subtends early modern culture and the corporeal foundations of language and subjectivity.

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Whilst assisted reproduction techniques (ART) have become increasingly successful and largely standardized, there is still only a partial understanding of what constitutes a 'true' embryo environment. Replicating the varying physiological conditions of the in-vivo environment that the embryo travels through in the in-vitro culture is still a major challenge in ART. This practical volume details how to organize and operate an IVF laboratory in order to mimic these conditions for successful embryo culture. Environments and equipment that are essential for running safe and efficient facilities such as maintaining good air quality and hygiene protocols, and utilizing an effective layout are covered in detail. Other chapters discuss the different consumables needed, optimal handling techniques and parameter monitoring systems, as well as recent advances in the area including artificial intelligence and automation. This is an indispensable guide to understanding the background science of culturing embryos, crucial to successful outcomes in ART.

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For over a millennium, Durham has occupied a central place in English religious history, with its Norman rebuilding (1093–1133) marking it as an internationally significant masterpiece in the history of architecture. Its setting, perched on a peninsula formed by a bend in the River Wear, adds to the visual drama of the building. This monumental volume offers a comprehensive account, with contributions by a team of 30 experts, on the founding, development, building, and decoration of this magnificent and important edifice. The accessible essays gathered here approach Durham Cathedral from a wide variety of fields and vantage points, including liturgy, music, stained-glass decoration, and book collecting. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes both archival and new photography, and reproductions of representations in all media of the cathedral throughout history. Taken together, this landmark publication is a celebration of Durham Cathedral’s enormous historical, spiritual, cultural, and architectural significance.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Illustrating the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the changes it has generated in the economy, society and culture, this expansive book continues the debate concerning the digital revolution and the rise of the algorithmic society.Examining technological, economic and social transformations, and the role played by culture in terms of risks and new opportunities, Luciana Lazzeretti expertly reviews the issues surrounding the economics of innovation and the interaction with culture, creativity and local development to establish a future agenda for research. Commencing with a historical overview, Lazzeretti discusses how culture and creativity allow us to face the challenges of the new digital revolution and provides insightful antidotes to the risks generated by the rise and evolution of an algorithmic society. The key elements of the art of imagination and human intelligence are examined together with their mutual interactions and relationship with AI as they continue to remain intertwined.With a contemporary approach, this invaluable book will be an excellent resource for researchers and scholars interested in cultural economy and digitalization of cultural heritage. It will also be of interest to professionals who want to develop competencies relating to new technologies and the role of cultural organizations in the digital revolution.

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Organizational culture and climate continues to engage academic interest and debate. Culture has increasingly been linked to a diverse range of individuals and organizational behaviours. However, despite the international interest and importance of the concept, the dominant literature in this field has tended to reflect an Anglo-US model and perspective. There are no significant texts which have attempted to combine and integrate the more traditional with the more emergent perspective. This book will be the first volume to offer authoritative, critical and comprehensive discussion and information on the topic. It will review the current state of the art in terms of the theoretical and methodological issues and problems and it will consider future research directions.

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It is not uncommon for white suburban youths to perform rap music, for New York fashion designers to ransack the world's closets for inspiration, or for Euro-American authors to adopt the voice of a geisha or shaman. But who really owns these art forms? Is it the community in which they were originally generated, or the culture that has absorbed them?While claims of authenticity or quality may prompt some consumers to seek cultural products at their source, the communities of origin are generally unable to exclude copyists through legal action. Like other works of unincorporated group authorship, cultural products lack protection under our system of intellectual property law. But is this legal vacuum an injustice, the lifeblood of American culture, a historical oversight, a result of administrative incapacity, or all of the above?Who Owns Culture? offers the first comprehensive analysis of cultural authorship and appropriation within American law. From indigenous art to Linux, Susan Scafidi takes the reader on a tour of the no-man's-land between law and culture, pausing to ask: What prompts us to offer legal protection to works of literature, but not folklore? What does it mean for a creation to belong to a community, especially a diffuse or fractured one? And is our national culture the product of Yankee ingenuity or cultural kleptomania?Providing new insights to communal authorship, cultural appropriation, intellectual property law, and the formation of American culture, this innovative and accessible guide greatly enriches future legal understanding of cultural production.

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In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.

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With "The Invention of Art", Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention - that the lines drawn between art and craft resulted from key social transformations in Europe during the long 18th century.

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The influence of food has grown rapidly as it has become more and more intertwined with popular culture in recent decades. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture offers an authoritative, comprehensive overview of and introduction to this growing field of research. Bringing together over 20 original essays from leading experts, including Amy Bentley, Deborah Lupton, Fabio Parasecoli, and Isabelle de Solier, its impressive breadth and depth serves to define the field of food and popular culture. Divided into four parts, the book covers: - Media and Communication; including film, television, print media, the Internet, and emerging media - Material Cultures of Eating; including eating across the lifespan, home cooking, food retail, restaurants, and street food - Aesthetics of Food; including urban landscapes, museums, visual and performance arts - Socio-Political Considerations; including popular discourses around food science, waste, nutrition, ethical eating, and food advocacy Each chapter outlines key theories and existing areas of research whilst providing historical context and considering possible future developments. The Editors' Introduction by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, ensures cohesion and accessibility throughout. A truly interdisciplinary, ground-breaking resource, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the study of food and popular culture. It will be an essential reference work for students, researchers and scholars in food studies, film and media studies, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.

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Imagine mathematics, imagine with the help of mathematics, imagine new worlds, new geometries, new forms. Imagine building mathematical models that make it possible to manage our world better, imagine combining music, art, poetry, literature, architecture and cinema with mathematics. Imagine the unpredictable and sometimes counterintuitive applications of mathematics in all areas of human endeavour. Imagination and mathematics, imagination and culture, culture and mathematics.This sixth volume in the series begins with a homage to the architect Zaha Hadid, who died on March 31st, 2016, a few weeks before the opening of a large exhibition of her works in Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, where all the Mathematics and Culture conferences have taken place in the last years. A large section of the book is dedicated to literature, narrative and mathematics including a contribution from Simon Singh. It discusses the role of media in mathematics, including museums of science, journals and movies. Mathematics and applications, including blood circulation and preventing crimes using earthquakes, is also addressed, while a section on mathematics and art examines the role of math in design. A large selection presents photos of mathematicians and mathematical objects by Vincent Moncorge. Discussing all topics in a way that is rigorous but captivating, detailed but full of evocations, it offers an all-embracing look at the world of mathematics and culture.

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Essays showing how the stuff of Norman Sicily, its mosaics, frescoes, art and architecture, was used to construct its history. Material culture played a crucial role in developing the cultural narrative of Norman Sicily. The essays in this book consider how images, designs, artifacts, structures and objects were used to help create the story of the medieval kingdom, and what they reveal about the complex political and social dynamics that underpinned the so-called "multicultural" state. Arguing that a visual language developed in medieval Sicily and southern Italy in this period, the contributions journey through both familiar and unexplored aspects of Siculo-Norman art, in particular those areas which have only been made possible with recent advances in technology and international academic collaboration. Topics addressed include manuscripts and mosaics, textile diplomacy, the drama of coins and trade, new readings of old buildings, and the insights of archaeological excavations into everyday life. All of the ideas presented in this volume converge on the central theme of how material culture helped to develop story and society in the medieval kingdom of Sicily.

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This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. In so doing, they challenge past scholarship, which has generally rejected descriptions of pre-1945 Japan as fascist. The contributors explain how a fascist ideology was diffused throughout Japanese culture via literature, popular culture, film, design, and everyday discourse. Alan Tansman’s introduction places the essays in historical context and situates them in relation to previous scholarly inquiries into the existence of fascism in Japan.Several contributors examine how fascism was understood in the 1930s by, for example, influential theorists, an antifascist literary group, and leading intellectuals responding to capitalist modernization. Others explore the idea that fascism’s solution to alienation and exploitation lay in efforts to beautify work, the workplace, and everyday life. Still others analyze the realization of and limits to fascist aesthetics in film, memorial design, architecture, animal imagery, a military museum, and a national exposition. Contributors also assess both manifestations of and resistance to fascist ideology in the work of renowned authors including the Nobel-prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Kawabata Yasunari and the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō. In the work of these final two, the tropes of sexual perversity and paranoia open a new perspective on fascist culture. This volume makes Japanese fascism available as a critical point of comparison for scholars of fascism worldwide. The concluding essay models such work by comparing Spanish and Japanese fascisms.Contributors. Noriko Aso, Michael Baskett, Kim Brandt, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin M. Doak, James Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Angus Lockyer, Jim Reichert, Jonathan Reynolds, Ellen Schattschneider, Aaron Skabelund, Akiko Takenaka, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, Keith Vincent, Alejandro Yarza

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A fascinating look at communication in the eighteenth century.This volume addresses questions of communication in several media, from the oral, printed, and visual to the physical. It encompasses essays featuring France, Germany, Early America, Scotland, and Britain more generally.The first section, "Manuscript Communications," opens with Dena Goodman's presidential address on the secret history of learned societies. It is followed by a panel on manuscript and print circulation introduced by Colin Ramsey, which includes essays by Ryan Whyte, Chiara Cillerai, and Jürgen Overhoff. This section concludes with an essay by Carla J. Mulford on Benjamin Franklin's electrification of London politics.The second section, "Arts and Manufactures," opens with David Shields's Clifford Lecture on the flavors of the eighteenth century. It contains essays by Hanna Roman on Buffon's language of heat and Jason Pearl on the perspective of aerostatic bodies and concludes with essays by Matthew Mauger and Michael C. Amrozowicz on the languages of physical disciplines and social organization.The final section, "Devotion and Other Passions," begins with essays on silence and spectacle as means of convening the passions, by Adam Schoene and Anne Vila respectively, and it concludes with a forum introduced by Laura M. Stevens on Enlightenment representations of devotion. This section includes presentations by Clare Haynes, Penny Pritchard, Jennifer L. Airey, Sabine Volk-Birke, Megan E. Gibson, Laura Davies, and Theresa Schoen and an afterword by Emma Salgard Cunha.

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In Pursuit of the Beautiful Soul by Justine Kolata offers a revolutionary solution to overcoming the soullessness of modern life. The book explores the untold relationship between the eighteenth-century philosophy of the Beautiful Soul and the salon culture in which it was enacted. This lost humanistic artform of self-cultivation inspires the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and truth in the act of creating a beautiful existence. Kolata weaves together the essential features of this practical philosophy with an historical exploration of the German-Jewish salonnières’ ground-breaking efforts to cultivate beautiful souls through the arts and conversation. She recounts vivid anecdotes from her own salons which revitalise this vibrant tradition. In Pursuit of the Beautiful Soul explores how this philosophy’s prescient insights into the human condition provide a framework for today’s disenchanted generations to restore the ideals intrinsic to individual happiness and social flourishing.

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The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility.John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.

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The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity. Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonized avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

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What is "cancel culture." A new phrase in popular circulation for less than two years, it has provoked passionate denunciations from observers concerned with civil liberties, especially rights of free speech and expression, and apologetic defenses from opponents who advocate equity and accountability in light of new mores. Still others deny that "cancel culture" exists at all, while many claim never to have heard of it. In Cancel Culture: Tales from the Front Lines, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy presents a series of case studies that reveal the new phenomenon known as "cancel culture" as experienced or claimed in media, academia, the arts, public space, and other areas of ideological controversy. More than a bald denunciation or frustrated description of an unfamiliar new concept, this groundbreaking approach seeks to understand "cancel culture" as a process – how it starts and stops, where it comes from and leads, and how and, indeed, whether it might one day end. This penetrating and highly original analysis sheds light on a society grappling feverishly with fundamental issues of freedom and liberty.

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This Is Not a Hoax shows how the work of some contemporary artists and writers intentionally disrupts the curatorial and authorial practices of the country's most respected cultural institutions: art galleries, museums, and book publishers. This first-ever study of contemporary Canadian hoaxes in visual art and literature asks why we trust authority in artistic works and how that trust is manifest.This book claims that hoaxes, far from being merely lies meant to deceive or wound, may exert a positive influence. Through their insistent disobedience, they assist viewers and readers in re-examining unquestioned institutional trust, habituated cultural hierarchies, and the deeply inscribed racism and sexism of Canada's settler-colonial history.Through its attentive look at hoaxical works by Canadian artists Iris Häussler, Brian Jungen, and Rebecca Belmore, photographer Jeff Wall, and writers and translators David Solway and Erin Mouré, this book celebrates the surprising ways hoaxes call attention to human capacities for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience in a cultural moment when radical empathy and imagination is critically needed.

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From prehistoric times to the present, the Ocean has been used as a highway for trade, a source of food and resources, and a space for recreation and military conquest, as well as an inspiration for religion, culture, and the arts. The Ocean Reader charts humans' relationship to the Ocean, which has often been seen as a changeless space without a history. It collects familiar, forgotten, and previously unpublished texts from all corners of the world. Spanning antiquity to the present, the volume's selections cover myriad topics including the slave trade, explorers from China and the Middle East, shipwrecks and castaways, Caribbean and Somali pirates, battles and U-boats, narratives of the Ocean's origins, and the devastating effects of climate change. Containing gems of maritime writing ranging from myth, memoir, poetry, and scientific research to journalism, song lyrics, and scholarly writing, The Ocean Reader is the essential guide for all those wanting to understand the complex and long history of the Ocean that covers over 70 percent of the planet.

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A journey through M+’s collection and Hong Kong’s cultural spaces, telling the story of the city’s past and present through its works of art and key landmarks. Key to the M+ collections are objects made in or associated with Hong Kong, from neon signs and advertising ephemera to architectural plans, photographs and artworks, all of which offer new perspectives on contemporary life in the city. Hong Kong Visual Culture: The M+ Guide takes the reader on a journey through the city’s modern and contemporary visual culture. The book is arranged into three main sections, with the first focusing on artworks and objects that reflect daily life in Hong Kong; the second documenting the urban environment; and the final section concentrating on artistic perspectives and approaches that demonstrate the city’s unique outlook. Also included is a fold-out map by artist Don Mak and a specially commissioned cover. From Cantopop and Zaha Hadid’s man-made polished granite mountain to masterpieces of vernacular culture by the calligraphic artist the ‘King of Kowloon’ and the photographs of Michael Wolf, this richly illustrated book celebrates Hong Kong’s significant contribution to global material culture.With 245 illustrations

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Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times. Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as "the end of sex," and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern.

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How West African gold and trade across the Sahara were central to the medieval worldThe Sahara Desert was a thriving crossroads of exchange for West Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in the medieval period. Fueling this exchange was West African gold, prized for its purity and used for minting currencies and adorning luxury objects such as jewelry, textiles, and religious objects. Caravans made the arduous journey by camel southward across the Sahara carrying goods for trade—glass vessels and beads, glazed ceramics, copper, books, and foodstuffs, including salt, which was obtained in the middle of the desert. Northward, the journey brought not only gold but also ivory, animal hides and leatherwork, spices, and captives from West Africa forced into slavery.Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time draws on the latest archaeological discoveries and art historical research to construct a compelling look at medieval trans-Saharan exchange and its legacy. Contributors from diverse disciplines present case studies that form a rich portrayal of a distant time. Topics include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa’s forest region. The volume also reflects on Morocco’s Gnawa material culture, associated with descendants of West African slaves, and movements of people across the Sahara today.Featuring a wealth of color images, this fascinating book demonstrates how the rootedness of place, culture, and tradition is closely tied to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. These “fragments in time” offer irrefutable evidence of the key role that Africa played in medieval history and promote a new understanding of the past and the present.Published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern UniversityExhibition ScheduleBlock Museum of Art, Northwestern UniversityJanuary 26–July 21, 2019Aga Khan Museum, TorontoSeptember 21, 2019–February 23, 2020Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DCApril 8–November 29, 2020

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