This outstanding collection of hitherto unpublished work, written over the last fifteen years of the author's life, reveals the development and maturation of his ideas about sociology and art, and specifically about the relationship between them. Grafia sees in the artistic traditions of Western society the sociological sources of our sense of cultural form, as well as cultural and intellectual meaning. He discusses theories of art and theories of artists as they have changed over time, although the book is neither a history of art nor a criticism of specific artistic works. Rather, it is a defense of the sociology of art.

Grafia believes that the difficult and ambitious questions in the sociology of art are not merely questions of the proper role or status of the artist, or the recognition of art as an ornament, perhaps the supreme ornament, of our culture. He believes that what the sociologist must come to terms with is the view of art as the representation, indeed the revelation of what is most telling and pervasive in culture itself. This perspective assumes that the most serious claims made for art are in fact inseparable from the unique claims that are made about art. Art can make visible what is implicit in our lives. Art can put before us a statement of what we are but do not always recognize in oursleves. Art is the mask and mimicry through which society gestures to us its ultimate and most poignant meanings. Grafia contends that this vision of art derives from Hegelian aesthetics, and he believes that this grand view-whether one takes an idealist, a literary, or a Marxist-materialist position-also implies a dramatically changed conception of society itself.

The essays cover a variety of subjects, from Marx, museums, and modern literature, to Durkheim, Daniel Bell, and bullfighting-the last being the apotheosis of cultural expression rendered into artistic form. Throughout, Grafia considers questions of the social origins of our artistic and intellectual traditions, the influence of these traditions on our ways of thinking about society, and their pervasiveness as standards for social meaning.

"Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art "features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today.
Brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art
Topics addressed include the nature of beauty, aesthetic experience, artistic value, and the nature of our emotional responses to art.
Each question is treated by a pair of opposing essays written by eminent scholars, and especially commissioned for the volume.
Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion.
Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in aesthetics, while also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers

Originally published in 1958, this book by artist Joyce Cary examines 'the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it'. Cary speaks from practical experience when describing artistic inspiration and the ways in which varying arts present different forms of 'truth'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in art and the psychology of the artist.

The post-1989 period has seen artists in Central and Eastern Europe embrace socially engaged practices. Reclaiming public life from the ideologies of both communist regimes and neoliberalism, their projects have harnessed the politically subversive potential of social relations based on trust, reciprocity and solidarity. Drawing on archival material and exclusive interviews, in this book Izabel Galliera traces the development of socially engaged art from the early 1990s to the present in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. She demonstrates that, in the early 1990s, projects were primarily created for exhibitions organized and funded by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art. In the early 2000s, prior to Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania entering into the European Union, EU institutions likewise funded socially-conscious public art in the region. Today, socially engaged art is characterised by the proliferation of independent and often self-funded artists' initiatives in cities such as Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest. Focusing on the relationships between art, social capital and civil society, Galliera employs sociological and political theories to reveal that, while social capital is generally considered a mechanism of exclusion in the West, in post-socialist contexts it has been leveraged by artists and curators as a vital means of communication and action.

Anthropology and Art Practice takes an innovative look at new experimental work informed by the newly-reconfigured relationship between the arts and anthropology. This practice-based and visual work can be characterised as 'art-ethnography'. In engaging with the concerns of both fields, this cutting-edge study tackles current issues such as the role of the artist in collaborative work, and the political uses of documentary. The book focuses on key works from artists and anthropologists that engage with 'art-ethnography' and investigates the processes and strategies behind their creation and exhibition.The book highlights the work of a new generation of practitioners in this hybrid field, such as Anthony Luvera, Kathryn Ramey, Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Kate Hennessy and Jennifer Deger, who work in a diverse range of media - including film, photography, sound and performance. Anthropology and Art Practice suggests a series of radical challenges to assumptions made on both sides of the art/anthropology divide and is intended to inspire further dialogue and provide essential reading for a wide range of students and practitioners.

This timely collection examines the contemporary arts as political practice, offering critical insight into some of the more controversial talking points that have shaped Singapore's identity as a nation. Focusing on the role played by contemporary arts in shaping Singapore's political landscape as the country celebrated 50 years of independence in 2015, the authors consider how politics is often perceived as that which limits the flourishing of the arts. Contending that all art is political, and that all art form is a form of political practice, this collection examines ways in which the practice of art in Singapore redraws the boundaries that conventionally separate arts from politics. It critically examines the tenuous relationship between the arts and politics and offers a timely reevaluation of the relationship between the arts and politics. In doing so, it opens a dialogue between artistic practice and political practice that reinforces the mutuality of both, rather than their exclusivity, and redefines the concept of the political to demonstrate that political involvement is not a simple matter of partisan politics, but has an inherently aesthetic dimension, and aesthetics an inherently political one.

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color red throughout the ages The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in the Western world. For many cultures, red was not just one color of many but rather the only color worthy enough to be used for social purposes. In some languages, the word for red was the same as the word for color. The first color developed for painting and dying, red became associated in antiquity with war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period, red held both religious significance, as the color of the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell, and secular meaning, as a symbol of love, glory, and beauty. Yet during the Protestant Reformation, red began to decline in status. Viewed as indecent and immoral and linked to luxury and the excesses of the Catholic Church, red fell out of favor. After the French Revolution, red gained new respect as the color of progressive movements and radical left-wing politics. In this beautifully illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, the acclaimed author of Blue, Black, and Green, now masterfully navigates centuries of symbolism and complex meanings to present the fascinating and sometimes controversial history of the color red. Pastoureau illuminates red's evolution through a diverse selection of captivating images, including the cave paintings of Lascaux, the works of Renaissance masters, and the modern paintings and stained glass of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers.

In this new and accessible book, Italy's best known feminist philosopher examines the moral and political significance of vertical posture in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of inclination. Contesting the classical figure of homo erectus or "upright man," Adriana Cavarero proposes an altruistic, open model of the subject-one who is inclined toward others. Contrasting the masculine upright with the feminine inclined, she references philosophical texts (by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and others) as well as works of art (Barnett Newman, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Alexander Rodchenko) and literature (Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf).

This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration. Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Godel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoit Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing. Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.

This collection of essays from a range of philosophers and art practitioners offers tools through which we can action change across art and philosophy, across a range of media and across the theory/practice divide. Including insights from contemporary Middle Eastern art to Indigenous ritual art and from feminist and queer art to architectural algorithms, this collection will decolonise your thinking about art - bypassing the traditional Western-centred art history. The first section includes theoretical essays on the concept of multiplicities, on affect and politics as well as the thought of Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon - 2 key influences on Deleuze and Guattari. The second section includes applied essays on specific art practices including the plastic arts, theatre, architecture, music and folk performances.

Artworld Metaphysics turns a critical eye upon aspects of the artworld, and articulates some of the problems, principles, and norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory is treated as descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative: a theory that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe. Robert Kraut examines emotional expression, correct interpretation and objectivity in the context of artworld practice, the relevance of jazz to aesthetic theory, and the goals of ontology (artworld and otherwise). He also considers the relation between art and language, the confusions of postmodern relativism, and the relation between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory.

Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise , the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

This important addition to our understanding of art history's masterworks puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass to uncover their most small and subtle elements and all they reveal about a bygone time, place, and culture. Guiding our eye to the minutiae of subject and symbolism, authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen allow even the most familiar of pictures to come alive anew through their intricacies and intrigues. Is the bride pregnant? Why does the man wear a beret? How does the shadow of war hang over a scene of dancing? Along the way, we travel from Ancient Egypt through to modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the Roaring Twenties. We meet Greek heroes and poor German poets and roam from cathedrals to cabaret bars, from the Garden of Eden to a Garden Bench in rural France. As we pick apart each painting and then reassemble it like a giant jigsaw puzzle, these celebrated canvases captivate not only in their sheer wealth of details but also in the witness they bear to the fashions and trends, people and politics, loves and lifestyles of their time. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when outrage becomes a tired routine? In this original new book, Theo Reeves-Evison argues that transgressive art no longer succeeds on its own terms in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. This compels us to rethink the relationship between contemporary art and ethics, and focus our attention on the potential of artworks to propose new values rather than simply challenge pre-existing moral codes. Assembling a novel theoretical framework from the writings of Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and others, Ethics of Contemporary Art narrates a journey away from transgression towards a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that places questions of subjectivity centre stage. Along the way artworks by Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, Dora Garcia and others serve as springboards launching discussions of the varied pathways along which a renewed ethics of contemporary art might develop.

The measurement of the significance and 'impact' of research is absolutely paramount in today's academic world - as evidenced by the recent introductions of research assessment exercises in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand. Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research offers new and original ways of conceptualizing impact and innovation in creative arts research. This important book demonstrates how artistic research is capable of solving real-life problems and presenting transforming accounts of the world. What are the inventions and innovations of artistic research? What are the interdisciplinary applications of practice-led research methodologies and outcomes? In what ways can the methods and outcomes of artistic research benefit the broader community and creative and other industries? How can the impact of creative practice as research be demonstrated and more clearly articulated? By articulating the inventions, innovations, application and broader uptake of artistic research in and beyond the field of art, expert contributors advance the claim that artistic research constitutes a new paradigm or 'successor science' that impacts on interdisciplinary research and in diverse community and industry settings. In often surprising and unpredictable ways, the inventions and innovations of artistic researchers are being taken up beyond the creative arts in areas such as fire fighting, computer interfacing and design, public relations, medical science, caring for the aged, local history making, museology, biofeedback technologies and a range of therapeutic settings. This is a timely follow-up to Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry and will be indispensible to researchers, institutions and research assessment bodies.

Richard Wollheim's classic reflection on art considers central questions regarding expression, representation, style, the significance of the artist's intention and the essentially historical nature of art. Presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century, with a specially commissioned preface written by Richard Eldridge, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, Art and its Objects continues to be a perceptive and engaging introduction to the questions and philosophical issues raised by works of art and the part they play in our culture and society. Wollheim's insights into theories of art, criticism, perception and the nature of aesthetic value make this one of the most influential works on aesthetics of the twentieth century.

If today students of social theory read Jurgen Habermas, Michael Foucault and Anthony Giddens, then proper regard to the question of culture means that they should also read Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek. The second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory is fully revised and updated to provide students, teachers and researchers with a comprehensive, critical guide to the major traditions of thought in social and cultural theory, as well as tracing the complex intellectual connections between these distinct but related approaches to understanding society and culture. The Handbook, edited by acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott, develops a powerful argument for bringing together social and cultural theory more systematically than ever before. Key social and cultural theories, ranging from classical approaches to postmodern, psychoanalytic and post-feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are also new chapters on mobilities and migrations, as well as posthumanism. The Handbook, written in a clear and direct style will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Leopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in-and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay "The Herd of Independent Minds." An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken brings to life with vivid accounts from Rosenberg's life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. In the first part of the book Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why philosophers have concentrated on just this one mode of engagement. The answer he proposes is that almost all philosophers have accepted what the author calls the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that in the early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff argues that the grand narrative has to be rejected as not fitting the facts. Wolterstorff then offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to the alternative framework that he proposes are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. He goes on to use this framework to analyse in some detail five distinct social practices of art and the meaning that works have within those practices: the practice of memorial art, of art for veneration, of social protest art, of works songs, and of recent art-reflexive art.

'Insights from the zeitgeist are preserved with conviction and clarity, offering an inclusive way to access contemporary art in all its forms. If Talk Art is the fun podcast, then this book is the educational supplement to be prescribed alongside it.' - Aesthetica The authors of the Sunday Times bestseller Talk Art: Everything you wanted to know about contemporary art but were afraid to ask, have brought together 24 of the most profound, moving, funny and informative interviews from the wildly popular Talk Art podcast. These curated excerpts explore the inspirations, art experiences and favourite artists of a fascinating range of creative people from Grayson Perry to Elton John, from Tracey Emin to Paul Smith, and from Wolfgang Tillmans to Sonia Boyce, accompanied by images of the artworks that they have created or that have influenced them. The interviews featured include: - Jerry Saltz - Laurie Anderson - Stephen Fry - Elton John - Tracey Emin - Paul Smith - Sonia Boyce - Chila Burman - Rachel Whiteread - Wolfgang Tillmans - Pierce Brosnan - Grayson Perry

The building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, begun in 1857, is the most elaborately designed and decorated museum in Britain. This book is the first to consider the V&A as a work of art in itself, presenting drawings, watercolours and historic photographs relating to the Museum's 19th-century interiors. Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design. The V&A's first Director, Henry Cole, conceived the Museum's building as a showcase for leading Victorian artists to design and decorate. This book reveals for the first time the ways in which Cole's expressed policy to 'assemble a splendid collection of objects representing the application of Fine Arts to manufacture' was applied to the fabric of the building, as he engaged leading painters such as Frederic Leighton , G.F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as specialists in decoration such as Owen Jones and Morris and Company, to decorate and design for a building raised by engineers using innovatory materials and techniques.It represents a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of British 19th-century art, design, architecture and museums, and an essential backdrop to understanding the evolution of the Museum's early collections and identity.