Philosophical Perspectives on Art presents a series of essays devoted to two of the most fundamental topics in the philosophy of art: the distinctive character of artworks and what is involved in understanding them as art. In Part I, Stephen Davies considers a wide range of questions about the nature and definition of art. Can art be defined, and if so, which definitions are the most plausible? Do we make and consume art because there are evolutionary advantages to doing so? Has art completed the mission that guided its earlier historical development, and if so, what is to become of it now? Should architecture be classified as an art form?
Part II turns to the interpretation and appreciation of art. What is the target and purpose of the critic's interpretation? Is interpretation primarily directed at uncovering artists' intended meanings? Can apparently contradictory interpretations of a given piece both be true? Are interpretative evaluations entailed by descriptions of a work's aesthetic and artistic characteristics? In addition to providing fresh answers to these and other central questions in aesthetics, Davies considers the nature and content of metaphor, and the relation between the expressive qualities of a work of art and the emotions of its creator.

This book examines how Massachusetts Normal Art School became the alma mater par excellence for generations of art educators, designers, and artists. The founding myth of American art education is the story of Walter Smith, the school's first principal. This historical case study argues that Smith's students formed the professional network to disperse art education across the United States, establishing college art departments and supervising school art for industrial cities. As administrative progressives they created institutions and set norms for the growing field of art education. Nineteenth-century artists argued that anyone could learn to draw; by the 1920s, every child was an artist whose creativity waited to be awakened. Arguments for systematic art instruction under careful direction gave way to charismatic artist-teachers who sought to release artistic spirits. The task for art education had been redefined in terms of living the good life within a consumer culture of work and leisure.

We live in a world of the image. In many ways, images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, whilst at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key ares for examining the issues of our age. This book explains issues and concepts such as psychoanalysis, cultural theory, psotmodernism, queer theory, gender studies and narrative theory. The major theorists are all covered as the authors look at the significance of the visual in the works of Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard and Guattari. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination and the frame, the book explains them within the context of these theoretical developments.

Rug Art-RESCUED FROM OBLIVION is a delightful tale of discovery, but a sad reflection on the lack of preservation of North America's most endangered art form that has literally and figuratively been "tramped on" for much too long. Abandoned for more than half a century in the basement of a damp and mould filled former New Glasgow, Nova Scotia rug pattern factory, a determined research team found amazing pen and ink rug art created by an artist who is said to have studied in the same New York art class with noted folk artist Norman Rockwell. Under a leaking sewage pipe in that same factory they unearthed amazing hand cut Mystery stencils that are now rewriting the arts heritage . Their discovery heralds the oldest known commercial designs recovered in Canada, and possibly in North America and a unique pattern printing system hitherto unknown. The searchers found, and rescued from imminent oblivion some 550 pieces of original pen and ink art created by the 1892 factory founder John Garrett and his son Frank. In acquiring remnants of the oldest known rug pattern factory in the world (1892) they also unearthed three unique hand-carved full size rug pattern blocks and a mass of records of early pattern designs from across North America. An intriguing bonus was the salvaging of some 300 hand cut stencils created by a talented unknown artist. Measuring only 3x5" in size-each contained two rug pattern designs. Designated the MYSTERY PATTERNS preliminary research indicates they are the oldest Canadian rug designs ever discovered and possibly the oldest in the world.

This book is a compilation of scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects pertaining to the cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. "Nordic Experiences" discusses music, art, literature, folkore, and the social fabric of past and present to offer the reader a many-faceted image of what the term Scandinavia stands for today.

There are now some 12-13 million people of Nordic descent living in the United States, and their culture has played a part in shaping the American experience. The cultural contacts and exchanges between the United States and the Nordic countries, thanks in large part to immigration, remains strong and varied, adding a significant dimension to the close ties that have existed for many years. This book is a celebration of Nordic culture and its harmonious and enduring relationship with the United States. As such, it will be of considerable interest to scholars and students alike of Scandinavian or European civilization.

The concept of the user is not a well-established sociological concept even though the

Taking the dichotomy of nonprofit "high culture" and for-profit "popular culture" into consideration, this volume assesses the relationship between social purpose in the arts and industrial organization. DiMaggio brings together some of the best works in several disciplines that focus on the significance of the nonprofit form for our cultural industries, the ways in which nonprofit arts organizations are financed, and the constraints that patterns of funding place on the missions that artists and trustees may wish to pursue. Showing how the production and distribution of art are organized in the United States, the book delineates the differing roles of nonprofit organizations, proprietary firms, and government agencies. In doing so, it brings to the surface some of the special tensions that beset arts management and policy, the way the arts are changing or are likely to change, and the policy alternatives "high culture" faces.

This text formally appraises the innovative ways new media artists engage urban ecology. Highlighting the role of artists as agents of technological change, the work reviews new modes of seeing, representing and connecting within the urban setting. The book describes how technology can be exploited in order to create artworks that transcend the technology's original purpose, thus expanding the language of environmental engagement whilst also demonstrating a clear understanding of the societal issues and values being addressed. Features: assesses how data from smart cities may be used to create artworks that can recast residents' understanding of urban space; examines transformations of urban space through the reimagining of urban information; discusses the engagement of urban residents with street art, including collaborative community art projects and public digital media installations; presents perspectives from a diverse range of practicing artists, architects, urban planners and critical theorists.

This book examines the ways in which artists and arts organizations today forge collaborative, socially engaged situations that involve non-professionals in the process of making art, often over a period of time, through creating opportunities to examine collective concerns and needs. Collaborative art praxis is gaining prominence in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region. This is a discursive method that is experimental, with results that often expand the notions of what art is -and how it can be produced. After an introduction to global approaches to such a practice, Ali examines the foundation of contemporary art in the MENASA that is linked to a longer history of colonialism. The book analyzes artist-led initiatives and community-based organizations through themes including relational aesthetics, war and violence, blight in marginalized places around the world, in addition to questions associated with art and its value in the fields of global contemporary art and society.

This book is an investigation of the cultural work involved in the social process of achieving and maintaining legitimacy as a not-for-profit arts or media organization in the twenty-first century. Within this work, Larsen advances an approach to studying organizational legitimacy, emanating from within cultural sociology. More specifically, he analyzes the legitimation work done in public service broadcasters in the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

This volume of the Golden Age of Illustration Series contains Hans Christian Andersen's 'Thumbelina', first published in May of 1835. This classic fairy tale has been continuously in print in different editions since its first publication, with many, many, different artists illustrating the story over the years. This edition features a beautiful collection of the best of that art, taken from the likes of Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson, Harry Clarke, Mabel Lucie Attwell, Milo Winter, among others. This series of books celebrates the Golden Age of Illustration. During this period, the popularity, abundance and - most importantly - the unprecedented upsurge in the quality of illustrated works marked an astounding change in the way that publishers, artists and the general public came to view this hitherto insufficiently esteemed art form. The Golden Age of Illustration Series, has sourced the rare original editions of these books and reproduced the beautiful art work in order to build a unique collection of illustrated fairy tales.

Gendering Modernism offers a critical reappraisal of the modernist movement, asking how gender norms of the time shaped the rebellion of the self-avowed modernists and examining the impact of radical gender reformers on modernism. Focusing primarily on the connections between North American and European modernists, Maria Bucur explains why it is imperative that we consider the gender angles of modernism as a way to understand the legacies of the movement. She provides an overview of the scholarship on modernism and an analysis of how definitions of modernism have evolved with that scholarship. Interweaving vivid case studies from before the Great War to the interwar period - looking at individual modernists from Ibsen to Picasso, Hannah Hoech to Josephine Baker - she covers various fields such as art, literature, theatre and film, whilst also demonstrating how modernism manifested itself in the major social-political and cultural shifts of the 20th century, including feminism, psychology, sexology, eugenics, nudism, anarchism, communism and fascism. This is a fresh and wide-ranging investigation of modernism which expands our definition of the movement, integrating gender analysis and thereby opening up new lines of enquiry. Written in a lively and accessible style, Gendering Modernism is a crucial intervention into the literature which should be read by all students and scholars of the modernist movement as well 20th-century history and gender studies more broadly.

Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book's metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature--from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book's complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations.

Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers' approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights' radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

Philip F. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature series at NYU Press.

Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, has won several awards, including the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Shaykh Zayed Book Award.

As technology becomes an important part of human-computer interaction, improving the various conceptual models and understanding of technological interfaces in design becomes essential. Enhancing Art, Culture, and Design With Technological Integration provides emerging research on the methods and techniques of technology to advance and improve design and art. While highlighting topics such as augmented reality, culture industry, and product development, this publication explores the applications of technology in online creation and learning. This book is an important resource for academics, graphic designers, computer engineers, practitioners, students, and researchers seeking current research on observations in technological advancement for culture and society.

A comprehensive resource for professional voice coaches, mapping out all important parts of the profession. This book has a broad market, not least as more and more university courses today focus on entrepreneurship and employability, increasing the number of students transitioning from study to professional practice. There is no other book that sets out the career and professional activity of a voice coach.

This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.

A history of the development of the art market spanning the 17th century to contemporary art today.In modern times the profession of the dealer had its start in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries and was essentially due to the revolution brought about by the invention of the printing press. Prints could be offered as readymade images to a widespread market. Durer said he made more money out of his prints, more easily than he did from his commissioned paintings. His mother was his dealer, offering them in the marketplace at Nuremberg.With the rise and expansion of mercantile capitalism the sale of readymade works, supplied by third parties, not directly commissioned from the artist himself nor directly specified by the ultimate client, became a more and more common form of trading in art. This was particularly the pattern in the Low Countries and it also helped to sustain the increasingly large community of foreign artists, Netherlandish and German, who made their way to Italy, where they had no immediate social connections and needed intermediaries in order to make a livelihood. These intermediaries undoubtedly encouraged artists to tackle subject matter they believed would sell.By the early 18th century the profession of art dealer was well-established, in opposition to the official academies. Watteau's painting L'Enseigne de Gersaint portrays an upmarket Parisian establishment of this type. It is perhaps no accident that it shows a portrait of the reigning French monarch, Louis XV, being unceremoniously packed away in a box. Emblems of power now counted for less that symbols of luxury. A large mirror propped up on the right suggests that little distinction needed to be made, in this context, between paintings and looking glasses. Both were furnishings, the essential trappings of a civilized life-style, and both served to display not only their possessors' taste, but also their wealth. The big mirror, in fact, may have been more valuable than any of the paintings crowding the walls.The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it saw a radical redistribution of art works. Naturally dealers played a large part in this - also in defining what was prestigious, therefore saleable, and what was not. In the Victorian period in London, as attention swung towards then contemporary creations, dealers such as the still surviving Fine Art Society (founded in 1877) played a major role in shaping taste. The history of this gallery in Bond Street and that of the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement are closely intertwined.In late 19th century, dealers such as Durand-Ruel (in this case through his support of the Impressionists) were increasingly important in changing the currents of taste. In Durand-Ruel's case, his influence became international. This went hand in hand with a different kind of international influence, exercised by the great British dealer Lord Duveen, In alliance with the art historian Bernard Berenson, Duveen devised a way of selling Old Master paintings, often of religious or esoteric mythological subjects, to a clientele who had little natural liking for that kind of subject-matter, by emphasizing the formal qualities of these works, rather than what they portrayed. This was a first step towards the acceptance of abstraction in art.As the Modern Movement progressed dealers such as Vollard and Paul Guilluame had a greater and greater say in defining what was important in contemporary art and what was not. This influence continued as the centre of avant-garde activity moved from Paris to New York. Galleries such as that of Pierre Matisse and Peggy Gugenheim's Art of This Century Gallery pioneered the way to the acceptance of new forms of artistic expression. Later, Leo Castelli, an immigrant from the cosmopolitan Italian city of Trieste, was instrumental in establishing the reputations of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Castelli's 1962 solo show for Lichtenstein was a major step in the worldwide success of Pop art.This pattern continues today, on an even more ambitious and global scale. Galleries such as Gagosian (with multiple international sites) and White Cube here in London play a major part in creating contemporary perceptions about what is and is not important in art.

The arts are situated at the centre of policies and programs seeking to make communities more creative, cohesive or productive. This book highlights the governmental, aesthetic and economic contexts which shape art in community, offering a constructive account of the ties between government, culture and the citizen.