No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had alienat...
Los Maestros Fileteadores de Buenos Aires
by Esther Barugel and Nicolas Rubio
Art History As Social Praxis (Historical Materialism Book, #139)
by David Craven
Art History as Social Praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven brings together more than thirty essays that chart the development of Craven s voice as an unorthodox Marxist who applied historical materialism to the study of modern art. This book demonstrates the range and versatility of David Craven's praxis as a 'democratic socialist' art historian who assessed the essential role the visual arts play in imagining more just and equitable societies.
Landscapes
Curating at the Edge (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere)
by Kate Bonansinga
Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art” or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary a...
This volume presents different viewpoints on the periphery/center dichotomy with their connotations of east/west, north/south, local/international in terms of the operating system art. For a long time, the idea of center/periphery had validity in what was known as the north/south dialogue. Today however, with the important dynamics of new art centers in regions that used to be perceived as periphery from a European perspective, the issue is subject to debate. At the same time, relationships of c...
The subject of this artist’s book is the unconscious, to which art was opened up in early modernism particularly by Surrealism. The aesthetic object of this work is the bibliograph, a new textual form (explored in a series of several recent works) which presents variations in meaning of its dominant motif in referential images with an alphabetical structure. It’s visual network of textual patterns is informed by Sigmund Freud’s statement that, `the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to...
This comprehensive survey of the formation of French art criticism looks beyond the celebrated leading lights, such as Diderot and Stendhal, to examine the historical circumstances which made art criticism a flourishing journalistic venture. Between the mid-18th centuries and the 1820s, art critical writing became an established feature of the Parisian art world. Richard Wrigley considers the discourse of art criticism in the context of the dynamic political changes witnessed during this period....
Gustave Dore
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty", - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats in 1820. But what is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which aesthetics tries to answer. In our everyday life, we talk about the "aesthetics" of an artwork or a piece of design. But aesthetics goes beyond the simple experience of art. It is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our per...
Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view, and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell...
Beyond Imperial Aesthetics
There is evidence of a sea-change in Western consciousness, which implies a fundamental rejection of the Arts of Humanism: cut off from society, from nature and the sacred. John Lane both celebrates the power and challenges the defects of this five hundred year old tradition, questioning among other matters the institution of the self-directed professional artist. Challenging and illuminating, A Snakes Tail Full of Ants looks forward to a time when creative expression is not lofty, professionali...
Pablo Picasso, André Salmon and Young French Painting
by Jacqueline Gojard, Beth Gersh-Nesic, and Andre Salmon
Interactive Experience in the Digital Age (Springer Series on Cultural Computing)
The use of interactive technology in the arts has changed the audience from viewer to participant and in doing so is transforming the nature of experience. From visual and sound art to performance and gaming, the boundaries of what is possible for creation, curating, production and distribution are continually extending. As a consequence, we need to reconsider the way in which these practices are evaluated. Interactive Experience in the Digital Age explores diverse ways of creating and evaluatin...
In 1876, the museum's annual report observed that Glaswegians 'possess an Art Gallery, which, in several respects, is entitled to rank with famous galleries, and an institution which they may not only enjoy themselves, but point out with pride to strangers as one of the sights of the city'. Although this referred to the predecessor of the current art gallery and museum, this feeling of pride is as strong as ever, with Kelvingrove having been voted Glasgow's favourite building. Kelvingrove Art Ga...