Are the visual arts really so central in our time that, as Doug Adams once said, "people under 60, raised on television remember by what they see [F]ilm and television are really the language of today"? (TE 2013) This central view on the visual arts can be contrasted with an opposing view by Camille Paglia, who wrote that "the visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images." (TE 2013a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), the visual arts (in relation to techniques and spirits) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Needless to say, this questioning of the opposing views on the visual arts does not mean that the study of techniques and spirits is useless, or that those fields (related to the visual arts)like drawing, cosmetics, manicure, painting, landscape, calligraphy, photography, digital art, computer technology, advertisement, graphic design, filmmaking, fashion, sculpture, architecture, and so onare unimportant. (WK 2013) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of the visual arts in regard to the dialectic relationship between techniques and spiritswhile learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the ephemeral theory of the visual arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters. This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about the visual arts in relation to techniques and spirits from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate.

Are the visual arts really so central in our time that, as Doug Adams once said, "people under 60, raised on television remember by what they see. "[F]ilm and television are really the language of today"? (TE 2013) This central view on the visual arts can be contrasted with an opposing view by Camille Paglia, who wrote that "the visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images." (TE 2013a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), the visual arts (in relation to techniques and spirits) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Needless to say, this questioning of the opposing views on the visual arts does not mean that the study of techniques and spirits is useless, or that those fields (related to the visual arts) -- like drawing, cosmetics, manicure, painting, landscape, calligraphy, photography, digital art, computer technology, advertisement, graphic design, filmmaking, fashion, sculpture, architecture, and so on -- are unimportant. (WK 2013) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of the visual arts in regard to the dialectic relationship between techniques and spirits -- while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the ephemeral theory of the visual arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters. This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about the visual arts in relation to techniques and spirits from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate.

Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesthetics make powerful use of it. Journalists and legal professionals pore over open source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call "investigative aesthetics": mobilising sensibilities often associated with art, architecture and other such practices to find new ways of speaking truth to power. This book draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology, evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art, and examines radical practices such as those of Wikileaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. Investigative Aesthetics takes place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as it strives towards the construction of a new 'common sensing'. The book is an inspiring introduction to a new field that brings together investigation and aesthetics to change how we understand and confront power today. To Nour Abuzaid for your brilliance, perseverance, and unshaken belief in the liberation of Palestine.

The Artful Species explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. In Part One, Stephen Davies analyses the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, and evolution, and explores how they might be related. He considers a range of issues, including whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part Two examines the many aesthetic interests humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests, and the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists have traditionally focused on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but Davies presents a broader view which decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part Three asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental byproducts of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. Davies does not conclusively support any one of the many positions considered here, but argues that there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. Art serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, aesthetic responses and art behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.

There exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art & Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Lucky PDF. In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid 'artivism'? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alternative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion. As such, this book exposes the art world's financially incentivised infrastructures, but also examines how they might be reshaped from within. In an age of cuts to arts funding and forced self-promotion, this offers an important analysis of the pressing need for the artistic community to construct new ways to reinvent itself and incite fresh responses to its work.

The authors show how the idea of art has developed in the last 5,000 years and how we have reached the point we are at now. They provide a complete survey of all of the aesthetic, historical and practical questions that surround the idea of art.

Artists Rights Society (ARS) is an organisation that represents the intellectual property rights, including the copyrights, of more than 50,000 visual artists world-wide. It has an American repertory, which includes Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence, to name some of the prominent members. However, the overwhelming majority of ARS' members are lesser known artists who have nevertheless devoted their lives to this profession. This book provides an updated report examining the issues surrounding visual artists and resale royalties in the United States, and also is an adjunct to the Office's 1992 report, Droit de Suite: The Artist's Resale Royalty, and takes into account changes in law and practice over the past two decades. The book provides further detail on resale royalties, the Visual Arts and Galleries Association (VAGA), and the Equity for Visual Artists Act of 2011.

A provocative account of the philosophical problem of 'difference' in art history, Tintoretto's Difference offers a new reading of this pioneering 16th century painter, drawing upon the work of the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Bringing together philosophical, art historical, art theoretical and art historiographical analysis, it is the first book-length study in English of Tintoretto for nearly two decades and the first in-depth exploration of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for the understanding of early modern art and for the discipline of art history. With a focus on Deleuze's important concept of the diagram, Tintoretto's Difference positions the artist's work within a critical study of both art history's methods, concepts and modes of thought, and some of the fundamental dimensions of its scholarly practice: context, tradition, influence, and fact. Indicating potentials of the diagrammatic for art historical thinking across the registers of semiotics, aesthetics, and time, Tintoretto's Difference offers at once an innovative study of this seminal artist, an elaboration of Deleuze's philosophy of the diagram, and a new avenue for a philosophical art history.

When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, thousands of people flocked to see where it had once been on display. Many of them had never seen the painting in the first place. What could have drawn these crowds to an empty space? And can this tell us something about why we look at art, why artists create it, and why it has to be so expensive? Taking the intriguing story of the Mona Lisa's two year disappearance as his starting point, Darian Leader explores the psychology of looking at visual art. What do paintings hide from us? Why should some artists feel compelled to lead lives that are more colourful than their works? And why did the police bungle their long investigation into the theft of Leonardo's masterpiece? Combining anecdote, observation and analysis, with examples taken from classical and contemporary art, Leader discusses such seminal figures as Leonardo, Picasso and Duchamp, as well as Bacon, Lowry and the Young British Artists. This is a book about why we look at art and what, indeed, we might be hoping to find.

What is 'performance drawing'? When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not? Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since 1945. The term 'performance drawing' first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher's Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence. Featuring a wide range of international artists, this book presents pioneering practitioners, alongside current and emerging artists. The combination of experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning in the last few years. The Introduction contextualises the background and identifies contemporary approaches to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book, the authors combine individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.

In the Mind, But Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art considers how the Marxian concept of Real Abstraction--originally developed by Alfred Sohn Rethel, and recently updated by Alberto Toscano--might help to define the economic, social, political, and cultural complexities of our contemporary moment. In doing so, this volume brings together noted contemporary artists, literary critics, curators, historians, and social theorists who connect the concept of Real Abstraction with contemporary cultural production. Theoretical and artistic contributions from Benjamin Noys, Paul Chan, Joao Enxuto and Erica Love, Marina Vishmidt, Sven Lutticken, and many others help to map out the relationship between political economy and artistic production in the realm of contemporary, globalized cultural exchange. This anthology places economic and social analyses alongside creative projects and visual essays to consider the many angles of contemporary art, and how inquiry into the the production of abstraction through material and social processes can be used to better understand, and hopefully change, the conditions under which art is made, seen, and circulated today. Published in collaboration with [NAME] publications.

"Dread: The Dizziness of Freedom" reflects on possible re-articulations of the concept of dread in our times. Associated with the "dizziness of freedom" by Soren Kierkegaard, and with "the ecstasy of nihilism" by China Mieville, the experience of dread is a defining characteristic of the contemporary human condition, and--according to the contributors to this volume--an essential and potentially productive emotion. However dark and fatalistic its connotations, through its dialectical coupling of caution and transgression, of paralysis and overdrive, dread allows us to imagine the world differently. Through conversations with and essays by some of today's foremost cultural commentators, this book explores the creative agency of dread--an agency that is created by the very forces wishing to suppress or even destroy it--as well as its politics and related conceptions of fear and anxiety.

Although few philosophers agree about what it is for something to be art, most, if not all, agree on one thing: art must be in some sense intention dependent. Art and Art Attempts is about what follows from taking intention dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for something's being art. Christy Mag Uidhir argues that from the assumption that art must be the product of intentional action, along with basic action-theoretic account of attempts (goal-oriented intention-directed activity), follows a host of sweeping implications for philosophical enquiry into the nature of art and its principal relata such as authorship, art forms, and art ontology: e.g., * An informative distinction between art, non-art, and failed-art that any viable theory of art must capture. * A far more productive minimal framework for authorship not only capable of systematically addressing issues of collective authorship appropriation, etc. but also one according to which artists just are authors. * A coherent and structurally precise account of art forms based upon the relation between artists, artworks, and the sortal properties thereof. * A unified and far less metaphysically suspect ontology of art according to which if there are such things as artworks, then artworks must be concrete things. Ultimately, Mag Uidhir aims neither to propose nor to defend any particular, precise answer to the question "What is art?" Instead, he shows the ways in which taking intention-dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for being art can be profoundly revelatory, and perhaps even radically revisionary, as to the scope and limits of what any particular, precise answer to such a question could viably be.

Protecting, healing, or punishing-people of various eras and origins have attributed such powers to the sculptures that are being presented together here for the first time: be it the sculpture of the Mangaaka from what is today the Republic of Congo, the protective goddess Mahamayuri from China, or the Maria on the globe from Southern Germany. Forty-five objects created between the fourth and the nineteenth century from two museums in Berlin provide a vivid testimony to the ever-present need for protection and orientation when dealing with individual or social crises. They represent the existence of an invisible world of gods, spirits, or ancestors, and create a connection between this world and a "different reality." As a result of how they are presented in museums, their context of use is, however, often lost-a situation that is reflected on by the authors of this book.

In May 2008, five temporary art events by artists Alastair MacLennan, Maura Hazelden, Simon Whitehead, Anna Lucas and Yvonne Buchheim, took place in public spaces in Cardigan exploring themes of ritual, community and place. Holy Hiatus sought to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into different, often unexpected experiences of place through ritual. The temporary, mobile and in some cases, understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for audiences, leading witnesses to wonder what they had just seen and to what extent had they knowingly, or unknowingly, participated in it? The book also offers a contextual framework for the project within a field of cultural theory that ranges from contemporary art to anthropology, sociology and religious studies

In Victorian Britain, authors produced a luminous and influential body of writings about the visual arts. From John Ruskin's five-volume celebration of J. M.W. Turner to Walter Pater's essays on the Italian Renaissance, Victorian writers disseminated a new idea in the nineteenth century, that art spectatorship could provide one of the most intense and meaningful forms of human experience. In The Literate Eye, Rachel Teukolsky analyzes the vivid archive of Victorian art writing to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century authors in the rise of modernist aesthetics. Though traditional accounts locate a break between Victorian values and the experimental styles of the twentieth century, Teukolsky traces how certain art writers promoted a formalism that would come to dominate canons of twentieth-century art. Well-known texts by Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde appear alongside lesser-known texts drawn from the rich field of Victorian print culture, including gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, and tracts on early photography. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument lends a new understanding to the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention to the historical particularities and real events that informed British aesthetic values. Lavishly illustrated and marked by meticulous research, The Literate Eye offers an eloquent argument for the influence of Victorian art culture on the museum worlds of modernism, in a revisionary account that ultimately relocates the notion of "the modern" to the heart of the nineteenth century.

“We are all inside this thing—but how?” This book explores 21st century art’s reckonings with the technosphere. Almost unimaginable in its complexity and scale, a man-made megastructure surrounds all of us, and often seems inescapable. Outlining the poetics of encryption that attend to this infrastructural condition, Samman explores dramatic motifs including confinement, capture, and burial, as well as access and exclusion from secured domains. Poetics of Encryption excavates the art of our times as it quests through caves, cables, codes, satellites, and icons. Toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming it surveys a counter-intuitive aesthetic of the interface: Addressing those who cannot write code, this analogy in contemporary art stages its own ‘digital’, both virtually and analogue.

Artworld Prestige examines the ways in which cultural arguments about value develop: the processes by which some practices, artists, and media in the artworld win and others lose. Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen argue that the concept of prestige, although uncomfortable and consistently overlooked, is an essential model for understanding artworld values, as important as the more common models centered on economics or power. Prestige shapes the forms of attention art is given, as well as the processes by which some affects dominate art discourse and others fall away. But prestige does its work silently, and its principles are used unself-consciously. People effortlessly display the protocols of being an insider. A form of socially constructed agreement, prestige shapes what we see, and does so with great power. Prestige is inescapable, a version of Althusserian ideology or Foucauldian power that both constrains and enables. It is also flexible, defining the seriousness of artists as diverse as Dan Peterman and Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter and Takashi Murakami, Elizabeth Peyton and Joseph Kosuth, Howard Finster and Frank Gallo. Cultural argument about value in art is a matter of deference and conferral, performed through thousands of tiny acts of estimation that suggest one cultural form is less relevant, worthy of attention than another; acts that instinctively grant more attention to reviews in Artforum over Artnews; to the Tate Modern over the Hirshhorn; to anxiety over pleasure; to Duchamp over Matisse; to conceptual art over abstract painting, and abstract painting over figure painting; to painting over ceramics, and video over painting. In order to argue candidly about cultural value, the artworld needs to understand the subtleties of prestige, of such things as what it means to be "serious." Not an expose but an explanation, Artworld Prestige offers such an understanding

Gyula Kosice (born 1924) is an innovative Argentine artist and poet. His constructions and sculptures were inspired as much by local discussions and disputes in the cafes of 1940s Buenos Aires as by the international avant-garde. In dialogue with Gabriel Perez-Barreiro in this latest volume from the Fundacion Cisneros' "Conversaciones/Conversations "series, Kosice recalls his contributions to an era of hotly debated movements and manifestos; the magazine "Arturo"; the formation of Arte Madi; his interactive mobiles; and his groundbreaking use of materials like neon and water to articulate a futuristic vision that includes "Hydrospatial City," a community suspended in space.

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any overlap between art and pornography, or are the two mutually exclusive? If they are, why is that? If they are not, how might we characterize pornographic art or artistic pornography, and how might pornographic art be distinguished, if at all, from erotic art? Can there be aesthetic experience of pornography? What are some of the psychological, social, and political consequences of the creation and appreciation of erotic art or artistic pornography? Leading scholars from around the world address these questions, and more, and bring together different aesthetic perspectives and approaches to this widely consumed, increasingly visible, yet aesthetically underexplored cultural domain. The book, the first of its kind in philosophical aesthetics, will contribute to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the many representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes, in both high art and demotic culture, in Western and non-Western contexts. It is sure to stir debate, and healthy controversy.

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In this 2002 book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment.