This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book Music, Art, and Metaphysics, which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. Most of the essays are distinguished by a concern with metaphysical questions about artworks and their properties, but other essays address the problem of art's definition, the psychology of aesthetic response, and the logic of interpreting and evaluating works of art. The focus of about half of the essays is the art of music, the art of greatest interest to Levinson throughout his career. Many of the essays have been very influential, being among the most cited in contemporary aesthetics and having become essential references in debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

Building upon her previous work on everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito argues in this book that the aesthetic and ethical concerns are intimately connected in our everyday life. Specifically, she shows how aesthetic experience embodies a care relationship with the world and how the ethical relationship with others, whether humans, non-human creatures, environments, or artifacts, is guided by aesthetic sensibility and manifested through aesthetic means. Weaving together insights gained from philosophy, art, design, and medicine, as well as artistic and cultural practices of Japan, she illuminates the aesthetic dimensions of various forms of care in our management of everyday life. Emphasis is placed on the experience of interacting with others including objects, a departure from the prevailing mode of aesthetic inquiry that is oriented toward judgment-making from a spectator’s point of view. Saito shows that when everyday activities, ranging from having a conversation and performing a care act to engaging in self-care and mending an object, are ethically grounded and aesthetically informed and guided, our experiences lead to a good life.

If beauty is truth and aesthetic realization is the loftiest goal of human soul then tender shadows of poetry is the sweetest abode of yearning heart. This unique collection of poetry tried to touch every nooks and corners of human emotion. Joy, beauty, passion, fun, sorrow, love, loss, and childishness make this collection of poems an anthology of wide spectrum within a single tone. This book is a collection of sweet romantic love poems, intensely funny limericks, and song lyrics, adoration of beauty of nature, twisted satires and wonderfully crafted haikus. Unique rhyming style, soft free verses, vivid imagery entices the reader to the land of Muses.

The Enigma of Atlantida Andres Ruiz Tarazona English and Espanol With The Enigma of Atlantida, Spanish musicologist Andres Ruiz Tarazona, has written a book that envelops the reader in the captivating mystery of Atlantis. L'Atlantida , Jacint Verdaguer's poem, relates the mythological story of the submersion of Atlantis, which created the separation of Latin America from Spain by producing the Alantic Ocean. Subsequently, with the Spanish discovery of America, the two were again unified. Spanish composer Maneul De Falla was born in Cadiz in 1876. While living in Granada, he started work on a Cantata. Based on Verdaguer's text of the poem L'Atlantida, he set about creating a large scale orchestral piece, Atlantida. He considered it his most important work, continuing with it when he moved to Argentina. He had not finished the work when he died in 1946. Ernesto Halffter completed the orchestration after the composer's death.

The Birmingham Art Book is a tribute to a unique city whose visionary scientists and inventors made it famous as a manufacturing powerhouse. From heavy metal industry - here is where the first steam trains were built- to heavy metal music - Black Sabbath made their mark here, this is a place with a proud heritage. Its handsome university is the original of the 'Redbrick' universities, founded by a farsighted mayor in 1900 as a civic place of learning, open to all, now with many world famous alumni and staff, 10 of whom have won Nobel prizes. Local artists convey the architectural glory of Victoria Square and the city centre Museum and Art Gallery (which holds a sumptuous collection of Pre-Raphaelite art). In their drawings, they echo the modern vibrancy of buildings such as the iconic Selfridges department store and the REP theatre. Collages and sketches depict a city buzzing with vitality -from the world-renowned Hippodrome theatre, to the shopping centres and legendary nightlife that are national attractions. Quirky nooks like the Jewellery Quarter, the Electric Cinema or the tranquil Botanic gardens hidden so close to the centre are reflected in this lovely book. The green city with 8000 acres of public parks and many miles of canal paths dating from its heyday in the Industrial Revolution is lovingly drawn and painted by its artists. The Birmingham Art Book is where local artists shine a light on the grand and the humdrum with equal affection. Their love for the modern city is evident and their pride in its heritage comes to the fore in this lovely book.

The 2nd edition of The Care of Prints and Drawings provides practical, straightforward advice to those responsible for the preservation of works on paper, ranging from curators, facility managers, conservators, registrars, collection care specialists, private collectors, artists, or students of museum studies, visual arts, art history, or conservation. A greater emphasis is placed on preventive conservation, a trend among collecting institutions, which reflects the growing recognition that scarce resources are best expended on preventing deterioration, rather than on less effective measures of reversing it. Expanded and richly illustrated chapters include: *Supports for Prints and Drawings discusses the properties of parchment and paper and introduces the general preservation needs and conservation problems of all works on paper, regardless of their media. *Conservation Problems Related to the Paper Support of Prints and Drawings presents a guide to recognizing the symptoms and diagnosing the causes of damage specific to paper. *Conservation Problems Related to the Materials and Techniques of Prints describes the conservation problems that affect certain printmaking materials and arise from specific processes. *Conservation Problems Related to the Materials and Techniques of Drawings focuses on the various materials used to create marks on paper. *Item-Level Collection Protection: Envelopes, Sleeves, Folders, Enclosures, Mats, Boxes, Frames, and Furniture, discusses measures taken for prints and drawings so that they can better withstand the rigors of handling, examination, exhibition, travel, and adverse environmental conditions. *Preventive Conservation for Prints and Drawings describes how the integration of a comprehensive Collections Care Program into a Collections Management Policy can reduce the need for item-level conservation treatments. *Basic Paper Conservation Procedures provides instructions on how to stabilize damaged works. *How to Make Starch Paste and Methyl Cellulose Adhesive and Suppliers of Paper Conservation Materials and Equipment are appended as well as a Glossary.

Astra Magazine is a brand new international literary magazine, an emerging must-read for anyone interested in the best new literature from around the world. Astra Magazine connects readers and writers from around the world - New York to Mexico City, Lagos to Berlin, Copenhagen to Singapore and beyond. We want to bring about a new, borderless, and vital mode of reading. Astra is a magazine for our new moment, bringing us together while, the world over, we create new language for ourselves. Issue Number 2: Filth is dedicated to the dirty and the lowly, to the beautiful as well as the abject. Filth is a term that encompasses everything from actual trash to cultural garbage, the foetid, the foul and the pestilent and ranges into obscenity, smut and shame. This issue will explore the splendor in squalor and the pleasure in pain. Featuring thrilling and original new fiction, poetry, essays, art, and comics from writers and arists around the world.

A short but engaging exploration of our changing perception of creativity. Creativity was once seen as the mark of mad geniuses, troubled souls, and avant-garde eccentrics. Today, however, we expect to find the trait thriving in and around us. Why? In Creativity, Jan Lohmann Stephensen provides a historical and contemporary view of creativity and explains why it is not always the answer to every problem. From van Gogh to Springsteen, Lohmann Stephensen explores the creative process of artists in order to craft a new theory of creativity-marking it as a collective and dynamic process in flux, rather than a finished product with a set endpoint and sole creator. Finally, he warns, in the twenty-first century, the importance that employers place on creativity has warped the concept into a ubiquitous economic commodity. Reflections In Reflections, a series copublished with Denmark's Aarhus University Press, scholars deliver 60-page reflections on a key concept that encapsulates their years of study and research. These books present unique insights on a wide range of topics and concepts-everything from love, trust, and play to corruption, welfare, and sleep-that entertain and enlighten readers with exciting discoveries and new perspectives.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione's classic account of Renaissance court life, offers profound insight into the refined behavior which defined the era's ruling class. The courtly customs and manners of Italy to a great extent characterized the Renaissance, which elevated art and expression to new heights. Baldassare Castiglione published this book with the intention of chronicling the manners, customs and traditions which underpinned how courtiers, nobles, and their servants, behaved. Although ostensibly a book of etiquette and good conduct, Castiglione's treatise carries enormous historical value. He derived his observations directly from the many gatherings and receptions conducted by society's elite. Conversations with the officials, diplomats and nobility of the era further enhanced the accuracy of this book, imbuing it with an authenticity seldom seen elsewhere.

Continuities in artistic form from the fourteenth century in Italy to the present are examined, with emphasis on two overriding tendencies: (1) the formalization of visual representations and their interpretations, and (2) the association of that formality with extreme individualism in the Western world. Challenges to the tradition struck only at certain aspects of it (such as strict perspective and the hierarchy of subject matter) but did not undercut such fundamental characteristics as the nature of a given visual space or harmony derived from concentration of elements rather than, for example, cumulative distribution of elements, commonplace in Islamic and Early Christian art. Theories of art history and criticism have expressed the same inclination toward focusing on pictorial form and the contextual implications of it, not just because post-medieval art does so, but also because of the influence of Enlightenment philosophical thought. Kantian epistemology, too, reduces knowledge to form, a development that led theorists of Pure Visibility to establish an abstract formalism in opposition to the doctrines of content in the idealistic aesthetics that had survived from the pre-Christian Era. It is no accident that the development of this theory is coeval with the emergence of modernism, for both are expressive of the same individualistic concept of existence. Attempts to resist the conception of art as order on the grounds that such rationalism is inimical to free thought have ultimately revealed themselves to be alternative versions of what they resist; thus, deconstructionism, for example, is hardly more than an extreme formalization of conventional criticism.

Originally published in 1924, this early work on Pen Drawing is a highly illustrated and informative look at the subject with much of the information being useful and practical today. Chapters include; Style in Pen drawing, Materials, Technique, Value, Practical problems, Architectural drawings and Decorative drawings. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.