If Greek tragedies are meant to be so tragic, why do they so often end so well? Here starts the story of a long and incredible misunderstanding. Out of the hundreds of tragedies that were performed, only 32 were preserved in full. Who chose them and why? Why are the lost ones never taken into account? This extremely unusual scholarly book tells us an Umberto Eco-like story about the lost tragedies. By arguing that they would have given a radically different picture, William Marx makes us think in completely new ways about one of the major achievements of Western culture. In this very readable, stimulating, lively, and even sometimes funny book, he explores parallels with Japanese theatre, resolves the enigma of catharsis, sheds a new light on psychoanalysis. In so doing, he tells also the story of the misreadings of our modernity, which disconnected art from the body, the place, and gods. Two centuries ago philosophers transformed Greek tragedies into an ideal archetype, now they want to read them as self-help handbooks, but all are equally wrong: Greek tragedy is definitely not what you think, and we may never understand it, but this makes it matter all the more to us.

The literature on the development of gifted child artists is sparse and very little is known of the developmental antecedents of giftedness in the visual arts. Although children's drawings have received a great deal of attention, the development of artistically gifted children has been a neglected topic due to the paucity of available data, which has led some investigators to argue that there are no child prodigies in this domain.
Researchers are faced with many unanswered questions regarding the course of artistic development including:
* Is it similar to that seen in ordinary children or does it follow a different developmental trajectory?
* What, if any, continuities can we discern over development, and how can we account for discontinuities?
* What motivates young children to pursue their art making, and what characterizes the gifted child who pursues an artistic career in adulthood?
* What are the socio-cultural conditions that foster artistic development, and how do we define artistic talent or giftedness?
Consisting of six case studies, the present collection is a first in that it traces the development of each artist from a very early age on through adulthood. The longitudinally based studies provide an insight into the evolution of a universal graphic language that is also highly subjective and reflects the individuality of the young artist. The material is unique in that the authors had access to comprehensive collections of gifted childrens' drawings, which enabled them to begin to fill the gap in understanding their development.
The development of artistically gifted children is examined from a variety of perspectives by authors who are artists, art educators and historians, and developmental and clinical psychologists. The children's collections studied afford detailed analyses of the drawings which shed light on the developmental origins and antecedents of giftedness in the visual arts. These studies elucidate the meaning of the early graphic forms, their evolution into a graphic language, and the child's early sense of aesthetics. In addition, they provide insight into continuities and discontinuities of style and subject matter, and the motivation to pursue art in childhood and adulthood. They also offer clues to the importance of socio-cultural factors that affect the choice of an artistic career. The diverse perspectives of the authors highlight the importance of theory for deepening the understanding of artistic development and its significance for human concerns.

For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished. How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Prodigies, revolutionaries, defiers of the patriarchy; drunks, rebels and impassioned immigrants; queer pioneers, paint-spattered punks and proto-feminists: there have always been artists in London. Some were celebrated in their lifetime, others were out-of-step with the spirit of their age: too radical, too subversive, too modest, too female, too foreign. Art London is more than a guidebook. It will accompany you on a journey through this great city, telling stories, uncovering histories, sharing insights into those who have made, collected and influenced art past and present. Moving neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Art London travels the streets with you, revealing art in museums, galleries and beyond, from palace to pub to studio. Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Mona Hatoum, John Akomfra, Rasheed Araeen, Sunil Gupta, Tracey Emin and Yinka Shonibare were among the artists who agreed to have their portraits taken for this book, while at work in their studios. Alex Schneiderman's exclusive photographs reveal the human element behind contemporary art, while pictures of streetside galleries place London's art scene within an ever-expanding cosmopolitan world. Fascinating, entertaining, full of anecdote and insights, Art London reflects the city itself: energetic, diverse, resilient, occasionally outrageous, and never short of fresh ideas. Also in the series: Vinyl London ISBN 9781788840156 Rock 'n' Roll London ISBN 9781788840163 London Peculiars ISBN 9781851499182

In this fascinating look at the creators of artistic fakes and copies, Sandor Radnoti explores the role of the faker in the art world, and tackles the question of whether fakes can be considered to be art in their own right. The Fake provides a thorough examination of the "parasites" of the art world, as Radnoti investigates the faker's motives and aesthetic sense, as well as the way in which the faker's own story acts as a critical appraisal of the center of the art world. If art is seen from both the center and the periphery of the art world, suggests the author, the viewer's questions about the art may be answered more accurately and appropriately. The Fake is essential reading for all philosophers interested in aesthetics.

The first English translation of one of the earliest and most brilliant art-historical surveys, from one of the greatest modern art historians Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the greatest modern art historians. The most important member of the so-called Vienna School, Riegl developed a highly refined technique of visual or formal analysis, as opposed to the iconological method championed by Erwin Panofsky with its emphasis on decoding motifs through recourse to texts. Riegl pioneered new understandings of the changing role of the viewer, the significance of non-high art objects such as ornament and textiles, and theories of art and art history, including his much-debated neologism Kunstwollen (the will of art). Finally, his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, which brings together many of the diverse threads of his thought, is available to an English-language audience in a superlative translation by Yale professor Jacqueline E. Jung. In one of the earliest and perhaps the most brilliant of all art historical "surveys," Riegl addresses the different visual arts within a sweeping conception of the history of culture. His account derives from Hegelian models but decisively opens onto alternative pathways that refuse attempts to reduce art merely to the artist's intentions or its social and historical functions.

By moving beyond traditional aesthetic categories (beauty, the sublime, the religious), Eco-Aesthetics takes an inter-disciplinary approach bridging the arts, humanities and social sciences and explores what aesthetics might mean in the 21st century. It is one in a series of new, radical aesthetics promoting debate, confronting convention and formulating alternative ways of thinking about art practice. There is no doubt that the social and environmental spheres are interconnected but can art and artists really make a difference to the global environmental crisis? Can art practice meaningfully contribute to the development of sustainable lifestyles? Malcolm Miles explores the strands of eco-art, eco-aesthetics and contemporary aesthetic theories, offering timely critiques of consumerism and globalisation and, ultimately, offers a possible formulation of an engaged eco-aesthetic for the early 21st century.

The post humanist movement which currently traverses various disciplines in the arts and humanities, as well as the role that the thought of Deleuze and Guattari has had in the course of this movement, has given rise to new practices in architecture and urban theory. This interdisciplinary volume brings together architects, urban designers and planners, and asks them to reflect and report on the (built) place and the city to come in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari.

Past philosophical ideas about arts influence contemporary artistic practices. We still use traditional Idealist concepts, such as the autonomy of art or the subjective expression of the artist. At the same time, today's art often attacks and abandons Idealist thinking. The author of this book analyses this relation between the Idealist conception of the arts including literature and present-day reality. The aim is to create a link between past and present artistic practices and theoretical, philosophical thinking. The author also questions the Idealist notions of history and the relation between the theoretical, the aesthetic and the practical, and seeks new ways to deal with the relation between the past and the present.

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renee Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display. -- .

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

This innovative book places culture, specifically in the form of the arts, back at the centre of debates in development studies by introducing new ways of conceptualizing art in relation to development. It shows that culture is not simply an explanation of last resort, but is itself a rich, multifaceted and contested concept and set of practices that needs to be expanded, appreciated and applied in fresh ways if it is to be both valued in itself and to be of use in practical development.

The book shows how the arts and development are related in very practical ways as means to achieve development goals through visual, dramatic, filmic and craft-inspired ways. It advocates not so much culture "and "development, but rather for the development "of" culture. Without a cultural content to economic and social transformation the problems found in much development up-rooting of cultures, loss of art forms, languages and modes of expression and performance may only accelerate. Paying attention to the development of the arts as the content of development helps to amend this culturally destructive process. Finally, the book argues for the value of the arts in attaining sustainable cultures, promoting poverty alleviation, encouraging self-empowerment, stimulating creativity and the social imagination, which in turn flow back into wider processes of social transformation.

This book recovers a holistic vision of development that links the more technical, and predominantly economic, aspects of development with humanistic and ecological goals. It is an inspiring read for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of development studies, cultural studies and sociology of development. "

How we perceive and respond to visual art has been a central concern of psychologists, philosophers and art historians. Today, where the visual image increasingly permeates our everyday life and consciousness, the question becomes ever more relevant. How do we, for instance, instinctively "know" what it is that a picture represents without having to be taught? How is it that we often want to talk about the pictures we look at? Such questions are currently asked by a wide range of disciplines, including: semiotics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, neuropsychology, and in general, contemporary critical analysis of the visual arts. In "A Transformational Theory of Aesthetics", Michael Stephan breaks new ground by linking the findings of these areas. Drawing on their common area of knowledge, he has developed a new theory of picture perception and aesthetic response, arguing that images can generate in us a complex pattern of mental changes, or transformations. This is because the left and right hemispheres of the brain do not always work in harmony, hence the wide ranging nature of aesthetic response to distinct art forms.

Situated at the interface of philosophy, aesthetics and art history, this collection brings together a series of creative responses to the recent speculative turn in Continental philosophy. It gives you both a genealogy of speculative art history and a provocatively experimental counter-discourse of new speculative art histories. The contributors include philosophers, art historians, architects and art practitioners who go beyond the mere complementarity of philosophy and art history. They are generous with the types of art they examine, including architecture, cinema, dance and new media, and the philosophical trajectories they engage with. Speculative Art Histories is published in association with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.

At a critical point in the development of photography, this book offers an engaging, detailed and far-reaching examination of the key issues that are defining contemporary photographic culture. Photography Reframed addresses the impact of radical technological, social and political change across a diverse set of photographic territories: the ontology of photography; the impact of mass photographic practice; the public display of intimate life; the current state of documentary, and the political possibilities of photographic culture. These lively, accessible essays by some of the best writers in photography together go deep into the most up-to-date frameworks for analysing and understanding photographic culture and shedding light on its histories. Photography Reframed is a vital road map for anyone interested in what photography has been, what it has become, and where it is going.

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.

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.

This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa's creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.

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.

A collection of observation and personal reminiscence on the precarious subject of death, written in language that is academic, poetic and sometimes, revealingly, both.

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.