Search results for ""author art, culture"

How China's art students develop their aesthetic styles and enter the nation's creative economyThe last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.

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Drawing on a wealth of texts and thinkers, the book shows the distinctive nature of sonic cultures in modernity.

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This is the first genuine appraisal of Virilio's contribution to contemporary art, photography, film, television and more. Paul Virilio is one of the leading and most challenging critics of art and technology of the present period. Re-conceptualising the most enduring philosophical conventions on everything from technology and photography to literature, anthropology and cultural and media studies through his own original theories and arguments, Virilio's work has produced substantial debate, compelling readers to ask if his criticism is out of touch or out in front of traditional perspectives. This collection of 13 original writings, including a newly translated piece written by Virilio himself, is indispensable reading for all students and researchers into contemporary visual culture. Key features: a wide-ranging treatment of Virilio's key theoretical concepts and themes from across his work on visual culture so far; surveys Virilio's aesthetics and socio-cultural ideas and how they function within his highly politicised approach to visual culture; examines Virilio's thinking from his first works on war and cinema to his latest theoretical conjectures on art, perception and seeing; contributors include Caren Kaplan, University of California at Davis; Ian James, University of Cambridge; Benjamin H. Bratton, University of California, San Diego, and Tania Roy, National University of Singapore.

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Kitharoidia was arguably the most popular, most geographically widespread, and longest-running performance genre in antiquity. From the archaic period to the late Roman imperial era, citharodes enjoyed star status, playing their songs to vast crowds at festival competitions and concerts throughout the Mediterranean world. The Culture of Kitharoidia is the first study dedicated exclusively to the art, practice, and charismatic persona of the citharode. Traversing a wide range of discourse and imagery about kitharoidia—poetic and prose texts, iconography, inscriptions—the book offers a nuanced account of the aesthetic and sociocultural complexities of citharodic song and examines the iconic role of the songmakers in the popular imagination, from mythical citharodes such as Orpheus to the controversial innovator Timotheus, to that most notorious of musical dilettantes, Nero.

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Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalised artists, the 'dark matter' of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it. Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite. This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this 'dark matter' of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world.

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Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

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Discover the rarified Peranakan (native-born Chinese of Southeast Asia) aesthetics that are today highly sought-after for their beauty: distinctive furniture and ceramics, textiles and jewelry, and many other art objects. Peranakan Chinese Home displays these extraordinary objects, visible markers of a highly developed culture. The broad range of beautiful objects which the Peranakan Chinese created and enjoyed in their daily lives is astounding. Each chapter in The Peranakan Chinese Home focuses on a different area and presents objects used or found in those spaces. Each piece is described in the context of their utility as household objects, as part of periodic celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year and other holidays, or in important life passage rituals relating to ancestor worship, birth, marriage, mourning and burial. The meaning of the rich symbolic and ornamental motifs found on the objects is discussed in detail, and key differences are highlighted between Peranakan objects and similar ones found in China.A fascinating mix of Chinese, European and Southeast Asian influences, the distinctly Peranakan identity of a people and their culture is beautifully portrayed through objects and archival photographs in this lovely and exotic book.

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In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

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A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns. Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule.

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The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technology that makes these new engagements possible, asking questions like: How should we theorise the sensory experience of art and heritage? What does information technology mean for the authority and ownership of heritage?

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This pioneering book studies the rise, heyday and demise of regionalism from the Belle Époque until the Eve of the Second World War. By using a novel comparative perspective it gives a fresh view of the relationship between cultural regionalism, political regionalism and nationalism. Storm further illuminates how during the first decades of the twentieth century the culture of regionalism slowly lost the battle against its main rival: the avant-garde.Regional identities, like national identities, were created and sometimes even invented; and this was equally the case in France, Germany and Spain. Artists, architects and international exhibitions played a highly influential role in this process. They all appropriated, and in some cases perverted, the regionalist message showing that strong regional identities would ultimately reinforce national unity.This book offers new perspectives to specialists of regionalism and nationalism, but will also be of interest to students of the cultural history of France, Germany and Spain and to specialists from the fields of politics, ethnology, art history, cultural studies and architectural history.

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Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalised artists, the 'dark matter' of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it. Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite. This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this 'dark matter' of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world.

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The pioneering account of West Coast assemblage art, featuring Bruce Conner, Jess, Jay DeFeo, Robert Duncan, Cameron and a cast of postwar countercultural icons This reprint of the now classic and much sought-after 2005 volume celebrates the circle of the quintessential visual artist of the Beat era, Wallace Berman (1926–76), who remains one of the best-kept secrets of the postwar era. A crucial figure in California's underground culture, Berman was a catalyst who traversed many different worlds, transferring ideas and dreams from one circle to the next. His larger community is the subject of Semina Culture, which includes previously unseen works by 52 artists. Anchoring this publication is Semina, a loose-leaf art and poetry journal that Berman published in nine issues between 1955 and 1964. Although printed in extremely short runs and distributed to only a handful of friends and sympathizers, Semina is a brilliant and beautifully made compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time, and is today a very rare collector's item. Showcasing the individuals that defined a still-potent strand of postwar counterculture, Semina Culture outlines the energies and values of this fascinating circle. Also reproduced here are works by those who appear in Berman's own photographs, approximately 100 of which were recently developed from vintage negatives, and which are seen here for the first time. These artists, actors, poets, curators, musicians and filmmakers include Robert Alexander, John Altoon, Toni Basil, Wallace Berman, Ray Bremser, Bonnie Bremser, Charles Britten, Joan Brown, Cameron, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, Diane DiPrima, Kirby Doyle, Bobby Driscoll, Robert Duncan, Joe Dunn, Llyn Foulkes, Ralph Gibson, Allen Ginsberg, George Herms, Jack Hirschman, Walter Hopps, Dennis Hopper, Billy Jahrmarkt, Jess, Lawrence Jordan, Patricia Jordan, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, William Margolis, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Taylor Mead, Henry Miller, Stuart Perkoff, Jack Smith, Dean Stockwell, Ben Talbert, Russ Tamblyn, Aya (Tarlow), Alexander Trocchi, Edmund Teske, Zack Walsh, Lew Welch and John Wieners.

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Drawing on the work of specialists in art history, religion, science, sport and leisure, war, and heritage studies, this volume explores aspects of the construction of national identity in Ireland and elsewhere. The book thus transcends some of the limiting, specialism boundaries which bedevil academia and restrict a proper understanding of identity and culture, and their relations with particular places, wherever they may be. The resulting volume of stimulating essays demonstrates, among other things, that cultural history, to which this volume is a contribution, need not necessarily or exclusively be the preserve of 'cultural historians'. This collection is based on papers presented to the 26th biennial Irish Conference of Historians, held at the University of Ulster, May 2003.

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The symbolic meaning of plants, their relevance for religion and the metaphorical provocations in the order of knowledge, culture and political power underline the role of plants as something more than passive objects. Current theoretical and artistic discourses have been seeking access to the world independently of man by focusing on the nonhuman other. The contributors to this volume examine the historical, philosophical and scientific findings that generate this idea. In what way are such perspectives manifest in contemporary art? Do artists develop a particular approach that enables nonhuman life forms like plants, insects or animals to have an impact?

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This book provides an insightful overview of the major cultural forms of 1930s America: literature and drama, music and radio, film and photography, art and design, and a chapter on the role of the federal government in the development of the arts. The intellectual context of 1930s American culture is a strong feature, whilst case studies of influential texts and practitioners of the decade -- from War of the Worlds to The Grapes of Wrath and from Edward Hopper to the Rockefeller Centre -- help to explain the cultural impulses of radicalism, nationalism and escapism that characterize the United States in the 1930s. Key Features: * 3 case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists * Chronology of 1930s American Culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * 22 black and white illustrations

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When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges. In some ways, the digital age seems to have brought the goals of the Enlightenment to their fullest fruition, giving us boundless and instantaneous access to every kind of knowledge and art. But the internet and its platforms also frequently bring chaos, immersing us in a sphere of often unverified information whose scope is unimaginable. This book takes a tour through the current debates on digital culture, bringing together a wide array of perspectives from aesthetic theory, cultural studies, electronic media, and the arts.

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Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical. In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

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This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

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Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this new book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism—the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components—has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals. In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time—the brain—has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art. At the heart of the book is an elegant elucidation of the contribution of reductionism to the evolution of modern art and its role in a monumental shift in artistic perspective. Reductionism steered the transition from figurative art to the first explorations of abstract art reflected in the works of Turner, Monet, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian. Kandel explains how, in the postwar era, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin used a reductionist approach to arrive at their abstract expressionism and how Katz, Warhol, Close, and Sandback built upon the advances of the New York School to reimagine figurative and minimal art. Featuring captivating drawings of the brain alongside full-color reproductions of modern art masterpieces, this book draws out the common concerns of science and art and how they illuminate each other.

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Introduction.- Part I Theory-Building.- Chapter 1.Connections between critical peacebuilding perspectives and Southern and liberation theories.- Chapter 2. No peace until we decolonize and return to our roots: Culture and peacebuilding in Sub-Saharan Africa.- Chapter 3. The war against Tigray's women and girls: Resistance in the face of grave atrocities.-Part 2 culture, Power, and Resistance.- Chapter 4. A heritage of stars: The dangerous business of being a woman and what to do about it.- Chapter 5.Culture and resistance: Home, exile, belonging and the representation of women in the posters of the Medu Art Ensemble.- Chapter 6. Cultural versus personal agency: Willpower close to madnesscharting my own path toward my dreams.-Part 3 (RE-)Creating Cultures of Peace .-Chapter 7.Aki gakinoomaagewin [Teaching from the earth] as peace education.-Chapter 8.Reckoning with racism: Critical education and community museums.- Chapter 9.Reinterpretation of the world: Transformat

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Sicily’s central location and natural resources have meant that various peoples have sought to conquer, control and settle on the island throughout its 3000-year history. Its Italian identity, with which we are familiar today, emerges only comparatively recently. It was under the rule of the ancient Greeks and medieval Normans that Sicily really flourished – golden eras when it became a serious political player and one of the wealthiest and most culturally prosperous places in Europe. Through an engaging text, exploring themes such as art, architecture and culture, and a remarkable selection of objects, from monumental metopes and beautiful mosaics to reliquary pendants and chess pieces (many revealing a distinct Sicilian character and style), this book provides a visually stunning insight into the key periods of Sicily’s extraordinary past.

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A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

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Psychoanalysis is a valuable tool to add to the sciences and the arts: all contain unconscious hidden depths that can become insight and understanding and contribute to humanity as culture. Using the prism of art, music, and storytelling, Jonathan Sklar takes psychoanalytic thought to a wide audience to enable a greater understanding of humanity.

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This book looks beyond the common label of 'Ronald Reagan's America' to chart the complex intersection of cultures in the 1980s. In doing so it provides an insightful account of the major cultural forms of 1980s America -- literature and drama; film and television; music and performance; art and photography -- and influential texts and trends of the decade: from White Noise to Wall Street, from Silicon Valley to MTV, and from Madonna to Cindy Sherman. A focused chapter considers the changing dynamics of American culture in an increasingly globalised marketplace. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1980s American culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * Twelve black and white illustrations

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The term ‘culture industry’ has been a key reference point in the critical literature on culture and the media ever since the classic chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, yet until now there has been little attempt to update the analysis for the present day. In this innovative new book, Heinz Steinert applies the concept of culture industry to contemporary cultural forms and demonstrates its relevance for the twenty-first century. Unravelling Horkheimer and Adorno’s complex prose, Steinert sets out to explain precisely what is meant by the term ‘culture industry’. Writing in a clear and engaging style, he provides an accessible exposition of the key themes and concepts. This close textual analysis is combined with wide-ranging case studies showing how the concept of culture industry can be used to approach more recent cultural phenomena. Examining contemporary film, pop music and art, as well as dating agencies and the paparazzi, Steinert reveals the ways in which culture is commodified today. This is an original book that provides a fresh critical perspective on culture and the media. It will be essential reading for students of media and cultural studies, sociology and of the humanities in general.

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Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

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As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of the new institutions, new public behaviors, and new cultural forms that emerged from this artistic engagement with war, some continued, others were reinterpreted, and still others were destroyed during the revolutionary period. Imagining the Unimaginable deftly reveals the experiences of artists and developments in mass culture and in the press against the backdrop of the broader trends in Russian politics, economics, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the revolution. After 1914, avant-garde artists began to imagine many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, “The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe.”

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This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1940s American culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * 20 black and white illustrations

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This book charts the changing complexion of American culture in one of the most culturally vibrant of twentieth-century decades. It provides a vivid account of the major cultural forms of 1960s America - music and performance; film and television; fiction and poetry; art and photography - as well as influential texts, trends and figures of the decade: from Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag; from Muhammad Ali's anti-war protests to Tom Lehrer's stand-up comedy; from Bob Dylan to Rachel Carson; and from Pop Art to photojournalism. A chapter on new social movements demonstrates that a current of conservatism runs through even the most revolutionary movements of the 1960s and the book as a whole looks to the West and especially to the South in the making of the sixties as myth and as history. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1960s American culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * Over 30 black and white illustrations

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This book charts the changing complexion of American culture in one of the most culturally vibrant of twentieth-century decades. It provides a vivid account of the major cultural forms of 1960s America - music and performance; film and television; fiction and poetry; art and photography - as well as influential texts, trends and figures of the decade: from Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag; from Muhammad Ali's anti-war protests to Tom Lehrer's stand-up comedy; from Bob Dylan to Rachel Carson; and from Pop Art to photojournalism. A chapter on new social movements demonstrates that a current of conservatism runs through even the most revolutionary movements of the 1960s and the book as a whole looks to the West and especially to the South in the making of the sixties as myth and as history. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1960s American culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * Over 30 black and white illustrations

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Featuring striking full-colour images and new research, this publication from the Hong Kong Palace Museum celebrates some of the most important works of horse art from the Palace Museum and the Louvre Museum. Five essays and forty-five entries highlight objects dating from the Han (206 BCE-220 CE) to Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, and explore the horse in art in a way that is accessible to general readers, encouraging them to think through comparisons with objects from both institutions. Centred on the question of human connection to the horse across time in China and beyond, the catalogue entries are divided into sections that examine the horse in mythology and religion, military culture, and transnational traversals, providing a means for reflecting on fundamental issues of human creativity, ambition, and tradition. This is a beautifully designed and thought-provoking volume that will find a ready market among those with an interest in Chinese art and culture. Published to celebrate the opening of the new Hong Kong Palace Museum in July 2022, Grand Gallop accompanies a major exhibition of the same name that is expected to generate significant media attention.

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This book discusses the cultural intentions of the founders of the first thoroughly commercial republic, the United States. The typical book on 'the culture' takes the view that commercial republicanism is the enemy of culture; this book tells a much more complex story, and measures the benefits and deficits of commercial republicanism in a way that does not sleight the very substantial achievements of commercial republicanism. The book looks at several critics of the commercial republic, 'left' and 'right'. These writers include Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dewey, and Pound. The book concludes with chapters on two very different writers who take a comprehensive view of culture, nature, and the commercial republic: Allan Bloom and Jane Austen. Contents: Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction: The Statesmanlike Sources of American Culture; Victorians Contra Commerce; Natural Right and the American Intellectual; American Historicist-Poets: Holmes and Whitman; An American Fascist: Ezra Pound; The American Left and the Culture of Sophistry; An American Philosopher?; The Politics of Self-Knowledge: Mansfield Park and the Refounding of the English Aristocracy; Conclusion: The Arts of Satiation; Endnotes; Index; Biographical Note.

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From Henry Darger's elaborate paintings of young girls caught in a vicious war to the sacred art of the Reverend Howard Finster, the work of outsider artists has achieved unique status in the art world. Celebrated for their lack of traditional training and their position on the fringes of society, outsider artists nonetheless participate in a traditional network of value, status, and money. After spending years immersed in the world of self-taught artists, Gary Alan Fine presents Everyday Genius, one of the most insightful and comprehensive examinations of this network and how it confers artistic value.Fine considers the differences among folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, explaining the economics of this distinctive art market and exploring the dimensions of its artistic production and distribution. Interviewing dealers, collectors, curators, and critics and venturing into the backwoods and inner-city homes of numerous self-taught artists, Fine describes how authenticity is central to the system in which artists—often poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or mentally ill—are seen as having an unfettered form of expression highly valued in the art world. Respected dealers, he shows, have a hand in burnishing biographies of the artists, and both dealers and collectors trade in identities as much as objects.Revealing the inner workings of an elaborate and prestigious world in which money, personalities, and values affect one another, Fine speaks eloquently to both experts and general readers, and provides rare access to a world of creative invention-both by self-taught artists and by those who profit from their work. “Indispensable for an understanding of this world and its workings. . . . Fine’s book is not an attack on the Outsider Art phenomenon. But it is masterful in its anatomization of some of its contradictions, conflicts, pressures, and absurdities.”—Eric Gibson, Washington Times

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This pioneering work traces the history and evolution of the textiles of Myanmar (Burma) made and used by the Burman (Bama) ethnic majority. Written accessibly, it covers the importance of textiles in many contexts as well as changes and innovation brought about by trade and conflict with neighboring states, British colonization, postwar isolation, and recent “open-door” policies. In addition to visiting the major textile centers, Sylvia Fraser-Lu ventured into the more remote areas of the Burman heartland to garner information on lesser-known textiles and those made by minorities. Profusely illustrated with on-site and archival photographs of weavers and heirloom textiles, as well as with diagrams and sketches, this book will be an important reference for textile scholars and art historians and for those interested in Burman culture.

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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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The 1920s saw the United States rise to its current status as the leading world superpower, matched by an emerging cultural dominance that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. This book provides an stimulating account of the major cultural and intellectual trends of the decade that have been pivotal to its characterization as 'the jazz age'. Currell's book places common representations of the 'roaring twenties' and the 'lost generation' into context through chapters on literature, music and performance, film and radio, and visual art and design, alongside the unprecedented rise of leisure and consumption in the 1920s. Key Features *3 case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists *Chronology of 1920s American Culture *Bibliographies for each chapter *17 black and white illustrations

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This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture. Key Features: * Focused case studies featuring key texts, genres, writers, artists and cultural trends * Detailed chronology of 1940s American culture * Bibliographies for each chapter * 20 black and white illustrations

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'A beautifully reasoned argument, in the age of cuts, as to why the arts absolutely must be at the very heart of primary education' – Jon Snow Studying the arts, including visual arts, music, dance, drama and literature, has numerous benefits across the primary curriculum. A truly creative curriculum has the power to motivate and energise pupils; it develops creative and critical thinking, problem solving, language, and fine motor skills. But what is the best way to invest in and improve arts education across a school? Drawing on interviews with successful school leaders, case studies and her own extensive experience working in the education departments of the Courtauld Gallery, the National Gallery and Somerset House, Ghislaine Kenyon presents simple, inexpensive and practical ways to integrate the arts across the primary curriculum. The Arts in Primary Education shows how resources already present in schools, such as picture books or the outdoor environment, can be used to develop a creative culture. With a focus on long-term initiatives including partnerships with art institutions and the training and personal development of teachers, the book also presents clear and accessible explanations of the benefits of integrating the arts across a school. Backed by research and evidence and complete with images and descriptions of artworks, this guide is ideal for helping develop a whole-school arts curriculum to enrich learning and raise attainment in all subject areas.

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It is widely acknowledged that the unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of "the Other" in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and postcolonial studies, and shows up in the "antihumanism" associated with figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. One might trace its genealogy, as Freud did, to the Copernican, Darwinian, and psychoanalytic revolutions that displaced humanity from the center of the universe. Or as Karl Marx and others suggested, one might lose human identity in the face of economic, technological, political, and ideological forces and structures. With dazzling breadth, wit, and intelligence, Unhuman Culture ranges over literature, art, and theory, ancient to postmodern, to explore the ways in which contemporary culture defines humanity in terms of all that it is not. Daniel Cottom is equally at home reading medieval saints' lives and the fiction of Angela Carter, plumbing the implications of Napoleon's self-coronation and the attacks of 9/11, considering the paintings of Pieter Bruegel and the plastic-surgery-as-performance of the body artist Orlan. For Cottom, the unhuman does not necessarily signify the inhuman, in the sense of conspicuous or extraordinary cruelty. It embraces, too, the superhuman, the supernatural, the demonic, and the subhuman; the supposedly disjunctive animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the realms of artifice, technology, and fantasy. It plays a role in theoretical discussions of the sublime, personal memoirs of the Holocaust, aesthetic reflections on technology, economic discourses on globalization, and popular accounts of terrorism. Whereas it once may have seemed that the concept of culture always, by definition, pertained to humanity, it now may seem impossible to avoid the realization that we must look at things differently. It is not only art, in the narrow sense of the word, that we must recognize as unhuman. For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman culture.

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This book explores the history and continuing relevance of melancholia as an amorphous but richly suggestive theme in literature, music, and visual culture, as well as philosophy and the history of ideas. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514)—the first visual representation of artistic melancholy—this volume brings together contributions by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Topics include: Melencolia I and its reception; how melancholia inhabits landscapes, soundscapes, figures and objects; melancholia in medical and psychological contexts; how melancholia both enables and troubles artistic creation; and Sigmund Freud’s essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917).

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Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911-1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear’s career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th-century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of ‘vulgarity’. The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear’s geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries. Tracking Spear also illuminates the networks of friendship and power at the Royal College of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts and within the post-war peace movement. As the tutor of the generation of Kitchen Sink and of future Pop artists at the Royal College of Art, and with friendships with figures as diverse as Sir Alfred Munnings and Francis Bacon, Spear’s interest in non-elite culture and marginal groups is of particular interest. Spear’s biting satirical pictures took as their subject matter political figures as diverse as Khrushchev and Enoch Powell, the art of Henry Moore and Reg Butler and, more generally, the structures of leisure and pleasure in 20th-century Britain. Humankind: Ruskin Spear has an obvious interest for art historians, but it also functions as a social history that brings alive aspects of British popular culture from tabloid journalism to the social mores of the public house and the snooker hall as well as the unexpected functions of official and unofficial portraiture. Written with general reader in mind, it has a powerful narrative that presents a remarkable rumbustious character and a diverse series of art and non-art worlds.

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American Culture in the 1990s focuses on the dramatic cultural transformations of the last decade of the millennium. Lodged between the fall of Communism and the outbreak of the War on Terror, the 1990s was witness to America's expanding influence across the world but also a period of anxiety and social conflict. National traumas such as the Los Angeles riots, the Oklahoma City bombing and the impeachment of President Clinton lend an apocalyptic air to the decade, but the book looks beyond this to a wider context to identify new voices emerging in the nation. This is one of the first attempts to bring together developments taking place across a range of different fields: from Microsoft to the Internet, from blank fiction to gangsta rap, from abject art to new independent cinema, and from postfeminism to posthumanism. Students of American culture and general readers will find this a lively and illuminating introduction to a complex and immensely varied decade. Key Features *3 case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists *Chronology of 1990s American Culture *Bibliographies for each chapter *18 black and white illustrations

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Writing Material Culture History 2e examines the methodologies used in the historical study of material culture. Looking at archaeology, anthropology, art history and literary studies, the book provides students with a fundamental understanding of the relationship between artefacts and historical narratives. The book addresses the role of museums, the impact of the digital age and the representations of objects in public history, bringing together students and specialists from around the world. This new edition includes: A new substantive introduction from the editors, providing a useful roadmap for students and specialists. A more balanced and easy-to-use structure, including methodological chapters and ‘object in focus’ chapters consisting of case studies for classroom discussion. New chapters showing greater engagement with 20th-century material culture, non-European artefacts and the definitions and limits of material culture as a discipline. Offers global coverage and discussion of both the early modern and modern periods. Writing Material Culture History 2e is an essential tool for students seeking to understand the potential of objects to re-cast established historical narratives in new and exciting ways.

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