Regardless of the subject matter, our studies are always searching for a sense of the universal in the specific. Drawing, etchings and paintings are a way of communicating ideas and emotions. The key word here is to communicate. Whether the audience sees the work as laborious or poetic depends on the creative genius of the artist. Some painters use the play of light passing through a landscape or washing over a figure to create an evocative moment that will be both timeless and transitory. The essential role of art remains what is has always been, a way of human expression. This is the role that our participants concentrate on as they discuss art as the expression of the spirit, a creative act through which the artist makes manifest what is within him. Spirit suggests the unity of feeling and thought. Avoiding broad generalities, our participants address specific areas in orchestration with music, architecture, literature and phenomenology. Profs. Souiller, Scholz, Etlin, Sweetser, Josephs show us at what point art is an intimate, profound expression and the magic of a civilization as a whole, springing from its evolving thoughts and embodying ideals, such as the Renaissance, the Baroque, Modernism and at what point it reflects the trans formation of a particular society and its mode of life."

For most of the last century the methodology of art history has followed a positivist approach, emphasizing form and style, fact and history as the means of studying works of art. By contrast the philosophical pursuit of truth, once central to the fine arts and humanities has largely been abandoned. In For The Love of Beauty, Arthur Pontynen offers a searching and ambitious critique of modern aesthetic practice that aims to restore the pursuit of the knowledge of reality--Being--to its rightful place.

Pontynen begins by addressing the question of why the pursuit of truth (be it called Dao, Dharma, God, Logos, Ideal, etc.) is no longer acceptable in academic circles even though it has been intrinsic to the purpose of art at most times and in most cultures. Lacking the pursuit of truth, of some degree of knowledge of what is true and good, the humanities necessarily lack intellectual and cultural grounding and purpose. Fields of study such as philosophy, music, art, and history are therefore trivialized and brutalized. Pontynen's focus on the study of the visual arts details the how the denial of purpose and quality in modernist and postmodernist aesthetics has denied art any possibility of transcending entertainment, therapy, or propaganda.

In place of the established narratives, Pontynen offers a counter-narrative based on a cross-cultural pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. He recognizes that substantively different cultural traditions exist and that the truth claims of each may be valid in whole or in part. He shows how the history of art parallels the intellectual history of Western culture and how these parallels affect both aesthetics and ethics. Pontynen engages with those elements of modernist and postmodernist thought that might be true. His purpose is not simply to deny their validity but to engage a viewpoint that does not privilege the notion of a purposeless cosmos. For the Love of Beauty will be of interest to art historians, students of aesthetics, ethics, and intellectual historians.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy,literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

This is the first book-length study of the genre of 'artist-opera', in which the work's central character is an artist who is uncomfortable with his place in the world. It investigates how three such operas (Pfitzner's Palestrina (1915), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1926) and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (1935)) contributed to the debate in early twentieth-century Germany about the place of art and the artist in modern society, and examines how far the artist-character may be taken as functioning as a persona for the real composer of the work. Because of their concern with the place of art within society, the works are also engaged with inherently political questions, and each opera is read in the light of the political context of its time: conservatism circa World War I, Americanism and democracy, and the rise of National Socialism.

The book is a selection of Malcolm Budd's papers on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art and the artistic expression of emotion. Other essays are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining certain well-known views, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the volume is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.

In this important new book the leading philosopher Jacques Ranciere continues his reflections on the representative power of works of art. How does art render events that have spanned an era? What roles does it assign to those who enacted them or those who were the victims of such events? Ranciere considers these questions in relation to the works of Claude Lanzmann, Goya, Manet, Kandinsky and Barnett Newman, among others, and demonstrates that these issues are not only confined to the spectator but have greater ramifications for the history of art itself.

For Ranciere, every image, in what it shows and what it hides, says something about what it is permissible to show and what must be hidden in any given place and time. Indeed the image, in its act of showing and hiding, can reopen debates that the official historical record had supposedly determined once and for all. He argues that representing the past can imprison history, but it can also liberate its true meaning.

Each of the contributors addresses the theoretical questions by pursuing a definite artistic problem, including a close look at the relation between the image and the object in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the sexual aesthetics of Caravaggio, the artistic pen of Barthes, and how Cronenberg's film Crash functions as a sinthome.

This major new volume brings together leading international scholars to debate the continuing importance and relevance of the concept of abjection for the interpretation of modern and contemporary culture. This genuinely interdisciplinary collection includes important new essays that draw on the work of Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and other key critical thinkers to provide innovative readings of works of art, film, theatre and literature. The clear and accessible essays in this volume extend the existing literature on abjection in exciting new ways to demonstrate the enduring richness of the concept. -- .

Colonized through Art explores how the federal government used art education for American Indian children as an instrument for the "colonization of consciousness," hoping to instill the values and ideals of Western society while simultaneously maintaining a political, social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and the world's fairs and local community exhibitions, Marinella Lentis examines how the U.S. government's solution to the "Indian problem" at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized education and assimilation. Educational theories at the time viewed art as the foundation of morality and as a way to promote virtues and personal improvement. These theories made art a natural tool for policy makers and educators to use in achieving their assimilationist goals of turning student "savages" into civilized men and women. Despite such educational regimes for students, however, Indigenous ideas about art often emerged "from below," particularly from well-known art teachers such as Arizona Swayney and Angel DeCora. Colonized through Art explores how American Indian schools taught children to abandon their cultural heritage and produce artificially "Native" crafts that were exhibited at local and international fairs. The purchase of these crafts by the general public turned students' work into commodities and schools into factories.

Race-ing Art History is the first comprehensive anthology to place issues of racial representation squarely on the canvas. Within these pages are representations of Nubians in ancient art, the great tradition of Westernmasters such as Manet and Picasso and contemporary work by lesser known artists of colour.
Assembled chronologically, these essays draw upon multiculturalism, postcolonialism and critical race theory to confront the longstanding tradition of art as a means of looking at 'the other'. The essays address important questions about racial visibility and racial be imposed upon ancient art, whether there is a link between pictorial realism and Orientalism, and how today's artists and critics can engage our visual culture's inherent racialized dimension.
Richly illustrated, this pioneering volume lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the complex and shifting category of race and its significance in our visual culture and everyday lives.

Related link: www.routledge-ny.com/pinderguide

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms. Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

This text re-appraises and expands the "Orientalism" debate by examining the ways in which the Asian "other" acts as a creative stimulus for the European artist, composer and playwright. In examining the work of Monet, Debussy and Brecht, the opening essays also explore a more subtle and complex circulation of ideas between the "Orient" and the West. It also investigates the scholar's own encounter with the exotic, in particular to what extent Western concepts and categories can be used in the analysis of Asian societies and cultures through the discussion of issues such as the Chinese perception of "space", Javanese notions of "landscape" and Japanese ideas of "tragedy". The concepts of "high art', "low art" and opera are considered in the context of Indonesia, the "book", "concert music" and subjectivity in Japan; and the implication of orality and literacy are examined in Malay society.

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yves-Alain Bois, and Theirry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollack, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species. In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that "make special," and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival. Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; "primitive" and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children's art. The final chapter, "From Tradition to Aestheticism," explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art. This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.

Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialisation, mass politics and consumerism. From Manet onwards, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And from modernism's retreat into abstraction to subsequent demands placed on audiences, from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going. In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and extends from a malign condition to be struggled against, to an experience to be embraced, or explored as a site of resistance.In this anthology, the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment is contextualized in a long view which encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the USA of silence, repetition or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance and film; Punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition from the end of the 1980s of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labour alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous.Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alys, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Bernadette Corporation, John Cage, Critical Art Ensemble, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Robert Morris, John Pilson, Sigmar Polke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Faith Wilding, Janet Zweig.Writers include Ina Blom, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jennifer Doyle, Alla Efimova, Jonathan Flatley, Julian Jason Haladyn, The Invisible Committee, Jonathan D. Katz, Chris Kraus, Tan Lin, Sven Lutticken, John Miller, Agne Narusyte, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne, Patrice Petro, Christine Ross, Moira Roth, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Zinovyev.

'Brad Evans in one of the brightest critical minds of his generation' - Henry A. Giroux Whether physical or metaphorical, institutional or interpersonal, violence is everywhere. A seemingly immutable fact of life, it is nonetheless rarely engaged with at the conceptual level. What does violence actually mean? And is it an inevitable part of the human condition? Conversations on Violence brings together many of the world's leading critical scholars, artists, writers and cultural producers to provide a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence. Through in-depth interviews with thirty figures including Marina Abramovic, Russell Brand and Simon Critchley, Brad Evans and Adrian Parr interrogate violence in all its manifestations, including its role in politics, art, gender discrimination and decolonisation. Provocative, eye-opening and bracingly original, Conversations on Violence sheds light on a defining political and ethical concern of our age.

With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.

Is the celebrated elegance of Cycladic marble figurines an effect their Early Bronze Age producers intended? Can one adequately appreciate an Assyrian regal statue described by a cuneiform inscription as beautiful? What to make of the apparent aesthetic richness of the traditional cultures of Melanesia, which, however, engage in virtually no recognizable aesthetic discourse? Questions such as these have been formulated and discussed by scholars of remote cultures against the backdrop of a general scepticism about the prospects of escaping the conditioning of one's own aesthetic culture and attuning to the norms of a remote one. This book makes a radical move: it treats the remote observers' lack of aesthetic insight not as a hindrance to aesthetic analysis, but as a condition requiring an aesthetic theory that would make room for an aesthetic analysis independent of the model of competent aesthetic judgement or appreciation. Objects of Authority represents a rare effort at bringing together methods and concepts that are often addressed by separate disciplines. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophical, art-historical, and anthropological theories of visual art and material culture.

Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon,encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology.Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery,trauma, affect and sensation,it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory. Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media:digital photography,painting,video,film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image. Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics,Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies,film and media studies,as well as trauma studies. It is a significant contribution across these dynamic fields of exploration for scholars who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work.

In Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education and Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art&Art Education, jan jagodzinski presents a series of essays covering a timespan of approximately ten years. These essays chart the theory and practice of art&art education as it relates to issues of postmodernity and poststructuralism concerning representation, identity politics, consumerism, postmodern architecture, ecology, phallocentrism of the artistic canon, pluriculturalism, media and technology, and AIDS.
As a former editor of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and a founding member for the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education, the author attempts to deconstruct the current art education paradigm, which is largely based on modernist tenets, and to reorient art education practice to social issues as developed in both media education and cultural studies. Part of the intent in these two volumes is to undertake a sustained critique of the 1982 Art in the Mainstream (A.I.M.) statement, which continues to be considered as the core value for art education. The distinct intention of this critique is to put forward a new value base for art&art education in these postmodern times.
Many of the essays raise the need to be attentive to sex/gender issues in art&art education and the need to read the artistic discourse "otherwise." There is a sustained critique of the art programs developed by the Getty Center for the Arts, whose arts curriculum presents the paradigm case of late modernist thinking. Some essays are written in a provocative form that tries to accommodate such content. This is particularly the case in Pun(k) Deconstruction, where architectural discourse is deconstructed, and which includes an "artistic performance" given by the author in 1987.
This singular set of volumes combines scholarship in the areas of gender studies, aesthetics, art history, art education, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in a unique blend of theory and practice for rethinking the field of art education.

Colour is a given of most people's everyday lives, but at the same time it lies at the limits of language and understanding. David Batchelor's previous book for Reaktion, Chromophobia, addressed the extremes of love and loathing that colour has provoked since antiquity. This book charts more ambiguous terrain. The Luminous and the Grey is a study of the places where colour comes into being and where it fades away, an inquiry into when colour begins and when it ends, both in the material world and in the imagination. Batchelor draws on a wide range of material, including neuroscience, philosophy, literature, film and the writings of artists; and makes use of his own experience as an artist who has worked with colour for more than twenty years. After considering the place of colour in some creation myths, in industrial chemistry, in recent thinking on optics and in the specific forms of luminosity that saturate the modern city, the book culminates in a meditation on the unique colour that is also a non-colour, a mood, a feeling, an existential condition and even an insult: grey.

Since its beginnings in the 1990s, artistic research has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance, or performance art. But from its beginnings--under labels like "art and science" or "scienceart" or "artscience" that mention both disciplines in one breath--it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term. Further, this manifesto defends the radical potential of artistic research against those who toy all too carefully with university formats, wishing to ally their work with scientific principles. Its aim is to emphasize the autonomy and particular intellectuality of artistic research, without seeking to justify its legitimacy or adopt alien standards.