Search results for ""author art, culture"

"Exploring Art and Visual Culture: A Reader" brings together essential primary texts by artists, critics and art historians ranging from the medieval period right through to our own times. There is no other reader available that covers such an extensive period. Selected by leading academics in their field, and published in conjunction with the Open University, the reader will be an essential sourcebook for every student of art history as well as all those seeking a greater understanding of art and of the cultural and historical context in which it is made. "The Reader" is organised in three parts. The first section, Medieval to Renaissance, 1000 - 1600, includes extracts from the writings of the Venerable Bede, Vasari, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aristotle, Erwin Panofsky, Nikolaus Pevsner, Erasmus and Walter Pater, among others, and sections on sacred art, Gothic architecture, the art of the crusades and the Renaissance. The second part Patronage to the Public Sphere, 1600 - 1850 includes texts by W.J.T. Mitchell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Crowe, Richard Shiff and Caspar David Freidrich and examines the city and the country, the golden age of Dutch painting, London and Paris, landscape design, exploration, neoclassicism and the birth of Romanticism. The section on Exploring Art from Modernity to Globalisation, 1850 - 2010 includes writings by Marinetti, Gauguin, John Ruskin, William Morris, John Berger, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Miwon Kwon examining modernism, the rise of abstraction, conceptual art and globalisation.

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Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

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Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

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A fascinating panorama of the faces of Jesus today Jesus Now presents, for the first time, a showcase of the figure of Christ in contemporary art, graphic design, advertising, and pop culture. Featuring the work of more than 80 artists from around the world, including Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle, Kehinde Wiley, Pierre et Gilles, Nina Chanel, Mark Ryden, and Alex Grey, Jesus Now! shows how the Christ figure continues to inspire the artists of today. In trendy galleries, on the walls of major cities, as a superhero or manga character, in Hollywood blockbusters or in satirical TV cartoons, Jesus is not only a guide for believers but also has become, as this book reveals, an icon of modern pop culture. This art anthology also showcases how today's artists have developed new iconographies that break with the image of the White Messiah to favor depicting Jesus in a more historically accurate way or in ways more reflective of themselves: Black Jesus, Maori Jesus, Native American Jesus.

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This groundbreaking classic, now reissued, gives a brilliant perspective on the cultural turmoil of the radical sixties and its impact on today's world, as reflected in the art of the time. It describes the social, historical and philosophical context of modern art and culture from a Christian perspective, including much valuable material on Western European art from the Renaissance onward. A respected jazz critic as well as Professor of Art History at the Free University of Amsterdam, Rookmaaker moves freely between the worlds of high culture, popular art and music and Christian faith.

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The idea of a graduate art program likely conjures up images of young artists in lofty studios, learning advanced techniques and honing the physical practice of their creativity. In truth, however, today’s MFA culture is centered almost entirely around discussing art rather than actually making it. In Talking Art, ethnographer Gary Alan Fine gives us an eye-opening look at the culture and practices of the contemporary university-based master’s level art program. Central to this culture is the act of the critique, an often harrowing process—depicted here in dramatic and illuminating detail—where artists in training must defend their work before classmates and instructors. Through analysis of the practice of the critique and other aspects of the curriculum, Fine reveals how art schools have changed the very conception of the artist: no longer a misunderstood loner toiling away in a garret, now an artist is closer to being an articulate tour guide through the maze of contemporary art rhetoric. More importantly, he tells us, MFA programs have shifted the goal of creating art away from beauty and toward theory. Contemporary visual art, Fine argues, is no longer a calling or a passion—it’s a discipline, with an academic culture that requires its practitioners to be verbally skilled in the presentation of their intentions. Talking Art offers a remarkable and disconcerting view into the crucial role that universities play in creating that culture.

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A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world. The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

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We are currently riders of the information storm. AI fascinates us, images mesmerize us, data defines us, algorithms remember us, news bombards us, devices connect us, isolation saddens us. Deeply embedded in digital technology, we are the very first inhabitants of life in the quantum zone. The Quantum Revolution is about life today – its entanglements, creativity, politics, and artistic vision. Arthur Kroker and David Cook explore a new way of thinking drawn directly from the quantum imaginary itself. They explain the quantum revolution as everyday life, where technology moves fast, and where, under cover of the digital devices that connect us, the most sophisticated concepts of technology and science originating in mathematics, astrophysics, and biogenetics have swiftly flooded human consciousness, shaped social behavior, and crafted individual identity. The book discusses the concept of the quantum zone as a new way of understanding digital culture, and presents stories about art, technology, and society, as well as a series of reflections on art as a gateway to understanding the quantum imaginary. Richly illustrated with sixty images of critically engaged photos and artwork, The Quantum Revolution privileges a new way of understanding and seeing politics, society, and culture through the lens of the duality that is the essence of the quantum imaginary.

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The family model has been central to patterns of social organization and cultural articulation throughout Chinese history, influencing all facets of the content and style of Chinese art. With contributors drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, psychiatry, history, and literature, this volume explores the Chinese concept of family and its impact upon artistic production. In essays ranging from the depiction of children to adult portraiture, through literary constructions of gender and the psychodynamics of cinema, these authors consider the historical foundations of the family--both real and ideal--in ancient China, discuss the perpetuation of this model in later Chinese history and modern times, and analyze how family paradigms informed and intersected with art and literature.

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Part 1: Location and immersion.- Introduction.- Microcosm of history: Everywhere. Everything. Everyone.- Part 2: Place and presence.- Art in the age of virtual reproduction.- Digital cultural heritage preservation.- Part 3: Identity and interactivity.- Embodiment in avatars and technoculture.- From simulacra to reanimation: Resurrecting the (un)dead.- Conclusion.

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Monikermonicker / [ mon-i-ker ]a person''s name, especially a nickname or alias.In the street art world everyone is equal and they don''t wait for official approval. They are artists in every sense of the word, whether they are painting in their own backyard or a huge illegal mural on the street for all the world to see. Frankie SheaMoniker Art Fair has caused a stir internationally by providing an art fair environment for the sort of work normally overlooked by the traditional art world. Katie Antoniou, Run-RiotThis groundbreaking platform dismantles the elitist barriers prevalent in the art world, offering artists an unbiased space to showcase their creations.This book reflects on Moniker's impressive saga, from upstart art fair to critical support infrastructure for the urban art community. For that next generation of artistic outsiders, those who are pounding at the gates to be let in, Moniker

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Lying between deserts, mountain chains and seas, Iran developed a fascinating cultural landscape. 360 objects from the time of the first advanced civilisations during the 3rd millennium BC until the end of the Safavid Empire in the early 18th century illustrate the outstanding significance of Iran as the initiator and centre of intercultural exchange. Exquisite artworks from the Sarikhani Collection in London and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin invite visitors to embark on a journey in time through the cultural heritage of Iran. The highlights include the great pre-Islamic empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids, the establishment of a Persian-Islamic culture, the masterly artistic achievements of the 9th to the 13th centuries and the Golden Age of the Safavids. They are brought together as in a multifaceted kaleidoscope in the copious illustrations and provide insight into the art of the courts and the urban elites.

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On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics.Samantha Baskind explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, Baskind pursues key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising?Vibrantly illustrated and vividly told, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.

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SOUTH AFRICA is a remarkable land of extraordinary beauty, a rich and colourful tapestry of diverse cultures and endless vistas that simply beg to be explored. In this handy little guide, South Africa's Top Sites - Art and Culture, we reveal and explore the rich cultural diversity of the visual arts, film, theatre, literature, music and architecture; which are a window into the history, life and culture of the country. The richness of the creative arts and the astonishing creativity has triumphed in spite of the traumatic history consequently, South Africa's importance as a destination for cultural tourism is increasingly being recognized. Sites included:; Tziko Museums - Cape Town; District Six Museum; Evita Se Peron - Darling; Grahamstown the National Arts Festival and Literary Eastern Cape; The Owl House at Nieu Bethesda; Newtown, Sophiatown, Literary Johannesburg, National Gallery (Johannesburg); The Groot Marico - outside Rustenberg; Rock Art - Drakenberg, Kimberley, Cederberg, Estern Hihlands (Free-State), Blombos Cave (Western Cape); Ixopo - Cry of the Beloved Country; Jackson Hlongwane - Mpumalangha; Gamka's Kloof - Western Cape

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Islamic Art and Visual Culture is a collection of primary sources in translation accompanied by clear and concise introductory essays that provide unique insights into the aesthetic and cultural history of one of the world's major religions. Collects essential translations from sources as diverse as the Qur'an, court chronicles, technical treatises on calligraphy and painting, imperial memoirs, and foreign travel accounts Includes clear and concise introductory essays Situates each text and explains the circumstances in which it was written--the date, place, author, and political conditions Provides a vivid window into Islamic visual culture and society An indispensable tool for teachers and students of art and visual culture

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This book examines the social, political, and cultural factors that have and continue to influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Reaching beyond the disciplines of architecture and urban design, Occupation:Boundary distills the dual roles art and culture have played in relation to the urban waterfront, as mediums that have recorded and instigated change at the threshold between the city and the sea. At the moment in time that demands innovative approaches to the transformation of urban waterfronts, and strategies to foster resilient boundaries, architect Cathy Simon recounts her career building at and around the water’s edge and in service of the public realm. In so doing, the work of contemporary architects is presented, while the origins and principles of a guiding design philosophy are located in meditations on art and observations on coastal cities around the world. The port cities of New York and San Francisco emerge as case studies that structure the reflections and mediate a narrative that is at once a professional and personal memoir, richly illustrated with images and drawings. Comprising three parts, the first two corresponding parts of Occupation:Boundary draw connections between the past and present by tracing the rise and fall of urban, industrial ports and providing context—in the forms of textual and visual media—for their recent transformations. Such reinterpretations, achieved via design, often serve the public through environmentally conscious strategies realized through inventive approaches to cultural and recreational programs. The work of visual artists, both historical and contemporary, appears alongside architecture, poetry, and literary references that illustrate and draw connections between each of these sections. The third section features select architectural work by the author, framed by critic John King and the architect and urbanist Justine Shapiro-Kline. Introduced with a foreword by the prominent landscape architect Laurie Olin, Occupation:Boundary draws on artistic and cultural intuitions and the experience of an architect whose practice negotiates the boundary between urban contexts and the bodies of water that sustain them. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.

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This book explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political relevance of music in radio art from its beginnings to present day. Contributors include musicologists, literary studies, and cultural studies scholars and cover radio plays, radio shows, and other programs in North American, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and German radio.

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A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national brand—all nurtured and promoted the emergence of London as “a new capital of art.” Extensively illustrated and researched, this book offers an unprecedented, rich account of the social field that constituted the lively London scene of the 1960s. In clear, fluent prose, Tickner presents an innovative sequence of critical case studies, each of which explores a particular institution or event in the cultural life of London between 1962 and 1968. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of an exuberant decade in the history of British art.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world. Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise. Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

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The concept of "postmigration" has recently gained importance in the context of European societies' obsession with migration and integration along with emerging new forms of exclusion and nationalisms. This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of "postmigration" and how it can be applied to arts and culture. While the concept has mainly gained traction in the cultural scene in Berlin, Germany, the contributions expand the field of study by attending to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. By doing so, the contributions highlight this concept's potential and show how it can offer new perspectives on transformations caused by migration.

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Spanning the economics of the fine arts, performing arts, and public policy, this updated classic is the go-to resource for navigating today's creative industries. Building on real-world data, engaging case studies, and cutting-edge research, it prepares students for careers in the cultural, creative, and public sectors. By avoiding mathematical treatments and explaining theories with examples, this book develops theoretical concepts from scratch, making it accessible to readers with no background in economics. While most of the theory remains timeless, this new edition covers changes in the world's economic landscapes. Updates include new sections on gender representation, cultural districts and tourism, digital broadcasting and streaming, how technology impacts the arts, and arts management and strategy. The authors demonstrate data-driven decision-making using examples and cases from various databases. Students learn to assess academic results and apply the learned material using the discussion questions and problem sets.

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For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

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How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

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How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

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"Art, Culture and Media Under the Third Reich" explores the way in which Nazi Germany used art and media to portray their country as a champion of "Kultur" and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda as other studies do, this volume reveals how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups, sowing the psychological seeds for the Holocaust to come. Topics covered by the essays range from the design of the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds to Nazi experiments with radio. Contributors address nearly every facet of the art and mass media under the Third Reich - efforts to define degenerate music; the promotion of race hatred and warfare through film, architecture and public assemblies; visual iconography and style; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; portrayal and reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest and cult. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects should benefit from this book.

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Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a practicing painter and art critic, Schor’s writing has been widely read over the past fifteen years in Artforum, Art Journal, Heresies, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal she coedited. Collected here, these essays challenge established hierarchies of the art world of the 1980s and 1990s and document the intellectual and artistic development that have marked Schor’s own progress as a critic.Bridging the gap between art practice, artwork, and critical theory, Wet includes some of Schor’s most influential essays that have made a significant contribution to debates over essentialism. Articles range from discussions of contemporary women artists Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls, to "Figure/Ground," an examination of utopian modernism’s fear of the "goo" of painting and femininity. From the provocative "Representations of the Penis," which suggests novel readings of familiar images of masculinity and introduces new ones, to "Appropriated Sexuality," a trenchant analysis of David Salle’s depiction of women, Wet is a fascinating and informative collection.Complemented by over twenty illustrations, the essays in Wet reveal Schor’s remarkable ability to see and to make others see art in a radically new light.

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While therapists are increasingly working with multi-ethnic client groups, there is a paucity of material available for them to develop approaches, which meet diverse cultural and racial needs. Art Therapy, Race and Culture is a stimulating and inspiring collection which explores the often contentious themes of race, racism and culture in relation to the experience of art therapy, in a positive and constructive way. Contributors examine the impact of racial perceptions in their own experience, their clients' lives, and on the interaction of therapist and client. The potential of art therapy as a force of liberation, and art therapists as cultural activists, is explored. Cultural differences in meanings applied to 'colour' and to the nature of art are also discussed. Illustrated with line drawings and photographs, the book presents work, ideas and theories based on the practical experiences of therapists from many different backgrounds and their work with clients from equally diverse origins.

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This is the third of three text books, published in association with the Open University, which offer an innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists.

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More than any other decade, the Sixties captures our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King, Jr. declaring, "I Have A Dream," or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels while staring down the National Guard, the revolutionary Sixties resonate around the world: China's communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the brutality of the Vietnam War. In this highly original work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long Sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, Cai Guo-Qiang's reconstructions of an iconic Cultural Revolution-era sculpture, and the television series Mad Men, to name only a few. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties, who are driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history, whether dark or glowingly nostalgic, never perfectly replicates time passed. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us with a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

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In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, postmodernity, globalization, and decolonization are still relevant or useful. Including twenty essays and seventy-seven images, Antinomies of Art and Culture is a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment.In the volume’s introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that postmodernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their “contemporaneity,” a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri’s analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor’s argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss’s defense of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay’s characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume’s centerpiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.Contributors: Monica Amor, Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Geeta Kapur, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Zoe Leonard, Lev Manovich, James Meyer, Gao Minglu, Helen Molesworth, Antonio Negri, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Nikos Papastergiadis, Colin Richards, Suely Rolnik, Terry Smith, McKenzie Wark

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Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often as a participant-observer—the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition. Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne. With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

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This intellectual history chronicles the processes of compromise and negotiation between high and low art, federal and local interests, and the Progressive Era and New Deal. Victoria Grieve examines how intellectual trends in the early twentieth century combined with government forces and structures of the New Deal's Federal Art Project to redefine American taste in the visual arts. Representing more than a response to the emergency of the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project was rooted in Progressive Era cultural theories, the modernist search for a usable past, and developments in the commercial art world in the early decades of the twentieth century. In their desire to create an art for the "common man," FAP artists and administrators used the power of the federal government to disseminate a specific view of American culture, one that combined ideals of uplift with those of accessibility: a middlebrow visual culture. Grieve discusses efforts by thinkers and reformers such as John Dewey, John Cotton Dana, and Constance Rourke to democratize art amid a blossoming consumer culture around World War I. Against this backdrop of ideas about aesthetics and the purposes of art, Grieve explores how the FAP, more than merely employing artists during the Great Depression, used government resources to create a space for the "everyman" to make and appreciate art. Two programs in particular--the Index of American Design and the Community Art Center program--attempted to bring art to the masses. By the end of the 1930s, however, the nationalism and cultural egalitarianism of middlebrow visual art came under attack. But the FAP had laid the groundwork for a postwar resurgence of American art, and by the 1960s, the federal government would once again enter the cultural arena. By linking the FAP to its roots in earlier cultural movements, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture expands the historiography of the New Deal, illuminating the role of the visual arts in the 1930s. Focusing specifically on the fundamentally different and competing views of culture that informed the Federal Art Project, this study chronicles a controversial program that, to many, represented a unique opportunity to create a cultural democracy in America.

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How can we unmask the vested interests behind capital's 'cultural' urban agenda? Limits to Culture pits grass-roots cultural dissent against capital's continuing project of control via urban planning. In the 1980s, notions of the 'creative class' were expressed though a cultural turn in urban policy towards the 'creative city'. De-industrialisation created a shift away from how people understood and used urban space, and consequently, gentrification spread. With it came the elimination of diversity and urban dynamism - new art museums and cultural or heritage quarters lent a creative mask to urban redevelopment. This book examines this process from the 1960s to the present day, revealing how the notion of 'creativity' been neutered in order to quell dissent. In the 1960s, creativity was identified with revolt, yet from the 1980s onwards it was subsumed in consumerism, which continued in the 1990s through cool Britannia culture and its international reflections. Today, austerity and the scarcity of public money reveal how the illusory creative city has given way to reveal its hollow interior, through urban clearances and underdevelopment.

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This volume takes the reader on a tour of 160 homes in and around New York City, from affluent townhouses on Manhattan's Upper East Side and rowhouses in blue-collar Brooklyn to the middle- and upper-class suburbs of Long Island. The result text gives a portrait of the use of cultural artifacts - fine art, photographs, religious art, in private lives.

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The Islamic world finds itself increasingly at the epicenter of our escalating climate emergency, both as a locus of the petrochemical industry and as home to extraordinary landscapes in which the effects of environmental transformation are acutely felt. Yet, far from a solely twenty-first-century concern, engagement with changing, and often extreme, natural conditions has long characterized Islamic art and architecture in the central Islamic lands and beyond into the Muslim diaspora. This new book brings together a diverse group of scholars and critics whose contributions address this profound ecological awareness through the dual lenses of Islamic culture and climate change. Their case studies range from the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, the Indian Subcontinent, North Africa, and even outer space. Contributors examine the optimistic, sustainable, and innovative responses adopted by artists and builders in the face of often irreversible and escalating environmental destruction that necessitates such ingenuity. Breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries, this timely book brings together a diverse range of perspectives to bear on this increasingly urgent problem.

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In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

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The year 2014 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the beginning of the conflict that would become known as World War I. In addition to the devastating loss of human life, the Great War was also responsible for the destruction of historic buildings and monuments, the theft of precious artworks, and the burning of untold numbers of books. Ravaged uses this anniversary as a poignant gateway to a greater discussion of the effect of war on artistic heritage. Beginning with the Trojan War and weaving a compelling cross-cultural narrative that ends in the 21st-century Middle East, this affecting publication explores how cultural treasures often became silent victims of armed conflict. Illustrations highlight over two hundred artworks and relics, which are often featured alongside complementary written reflections from contemporary artists. This thoughtful book is a graceful homage to centuries of lost artistic treasures.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:M-Museum, Leuven (03/19/14–09/01/14)

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What is the cultural dimension of sustainability? This book offers a thought-provoking answer, with a theoretical synthesis on "cultures of sustainability". Describing how modernity degenerated into a culture of unsustainability, to which the arts are contributing, Sacha Kagan engages us in a fundamental rethinking of our ways of knowing and seeing the world. We must learn not to be afraid of complexity, and to re-awaken a sensibility to patterns that connect. With an overview of ecological art over the past 40 years, and a discussion of art and social change, the book assesses the potential role of art in a much needed transformation process.

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This is a discussion of the contribution and effects of East Asian art on American culture. Warren Cohen portrays the assembling of the great American collections of East Asian art and explains how this art became part of the cultural consciousness of the people of the USA, transforming their culture into something more complex than the Western civilization brought from Europe. Cohen tells of art collectors, dealers and historians, of museums and curators, of art and imperialism, art and politics, and art as an instrument of foreign policy. The book demonstrates how art collecting interacts with international politics and business. The recent decline in American economic power, the author argues, was first obvious in the art world when American collectors found themselves unable to compete with their Japanese and Hong Kong counterparts.

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Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.

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How can we unmask the vested interests behind capital's 'cultural' urban agenda? Limits to Culture pits grass-roots cultural dissent against capital's continuing project of control via urban planning. In the 1980s, notions of the 'creative class' were expressed though a cultural turn in urban policy towards the 'creative city'. De-industrialisation created a shift away from how people understood and used urban space, and consequently, gentrification spread. With it came the elimination of diversity and urban dynamism - new art museums and cultural or heritage quarters lent a creative mask to urban redevelopment. This book examines this process from the 1960s to the present day, revealing how the notion of 'creativity' been neutered in order to quell dissent. In the 1960s, creativity was identified with revolt, yet from the 1980s onwards it was subsumed in consumerism, which continued in the 1990s through cool Britannia culture and its international reflections. Today, austerity and the scarcity of public money reveal how the illusory creative city has given way to reveal its hollow interior, through urban clearances and underdevelopment.

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Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of Modern Art, A. Joan Saab discerns a broad-based democratic modernism inspired by and engaged with the social life of the period. In the summer of 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Arts Project under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The project's goal was, in the words of its director Holger Cahill, to "get people all over the United States interested in art as an everyday part of living and working." In addition to this endeavor, the project would also provide work for artists who, as a project press release stated, "had been hit just as hard by unemployment as any other producing worker." Meanwhile, as director of the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr was instituting his philosophy of "democracy in design" through a series of ambitious exhibits that focused on informed consumption in the marketplace. The idea of treating the artist as a "producing worker" and art as an "everyday part of living and working" was a novel one in 1935 and illustrated a broad shift in the social roles of both. Prior to the 1930s, art in America had resided principally in the domain of the cultural elite. The upheaval of the Depression era, however, challenged this authority. Throughout the decade, government officials, museum professionals, educators, and artists worked together to determine not only what role artists would play in society but also what forms democratic art would take and how widely it would be disseminated, thus fundamentally redefining the relationship between art and society. This egalitarian artistic movement of the 1930s stands as a significant moment in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship of art and public life that continues today.

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Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career—from the 1920s to the 1940s—in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.

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This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices; sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

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Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art, multimedia theatre, audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews, the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics. Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks, resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers, they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.

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