This book is concerned with why (or whether) paintings have value: why they might be worth creating and attending to. The author starts from the challenge expressed in Plato's critique of the arts generally, according to which they do not lead us to what is true and good, and may take us away from them. Rudd tries to show that this Platonic Challenge can be answered in its own terms: that painting is good because it does lead us to truth. What paintings can give us is a non-discursive "knowledge by acquaintance" in which the essence of the painting's subject-matter is made present to the viewer. Rudd traces this understanding of painting as ontologically revelatory from the theology of the Byzantine Icon to classical Chinese appreciations of landscape painting, to the work of Merleau-Ponty and other Phenomenologists inspired by European Modernist art. He argues that this account of painting as disclosing the essences of things can also take up what is right about expressive and formalist theories of painting; and that it can apply as much to abstract as to representational painting. But to disclose the reality of things can only be of value if the reality disclosed is itself of value; and in the concluding part of the book, Rudd argues that the value of painting can only be properly understood in the context of a wider metaphysics or theology in which value is understood, not as a human projection, but as a basic characteristic of reality as such.

This book explores the critical significance of the visual arts to transnational feminist thought and activism. This first volume in Marsha Meskimmon's powerful and timely Trilogy focuses on some of the central political challenges of our era, including war, migration, ecological destruction, sexual violence and the return of neo-nationalisms. It argues that transnational feminisms and the arts can play a pivotal role in forging the solidarities and epistemic communities needed to create social, economic and ecological justice on a world scale. Transnational feminisms and the arts provide a vital space for knowing, imagining and inhabiting - earth-wide and otherwise. The chapters in this book each take their lead from a current matter of political significance that is central to transnational feminist activist organizing and has been explored through the arts in ways that permit dialogues across geopolitical borders to take place. Including examples of artwork in full colour, this is essential reading for students and researchers in art history, theory and practice, visual culture studies, feminism and gender studies, political theory and cultural geography. The Transnational Feminisms and the Arts Trilogy Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections Transnational Feminisms and Art's Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies Transnational Feminisms and Posthuman Aesthetics: Resonance and Riffing

Creating Stylized Characters gives readers a valuable insight into the popular art of character design. Professional illustrators, animators and cartoonists, well versed in creating characters for video games, comics and film, guide the reader through accessible tutorial projects packed with images and advice. Any budding artist will soon be able to draw characters of all ages, shapes and sizes! This entertaining, beginner-friendly book is applicable to both digital and traditional media, and delves into many essential aspects of the character development process, from real-world research, to sketching gestures and poses, to exploring different genres, personalities and styles.

For much of the last half-century, George Dickie has been one of the preeminent philosophers of art in the Anglo-American tradition, deeply influencing the generations of theorists who have followed. He is most frequently associated with his "institutional theory of art," which situates the classification of objects as artworks in social practices and institutions, rather than in the ontology of objects or in features of human psychology. "

Art and Value" focuses broadly on questions of history, methods, and the nature of art theories, as well as the value and evaluation of art. The discussions are crisp and clear, and the conclusions are consistently illuminating.

This book serves as a valuable primer to aesthetics, as well as a summary and extension of Dickie's contribution to the field.

The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross's attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by collective political action in the territorial struggles of today. If everyday life is, as many have come to believe, the ideal vantage point for an analysis of the social, it is also the crucial first step in its transformation. The volume opens with a return to Henri Lefebvre's powerful attempt to think the everyday as both residue and resource, as the site of profound alienation and-by the same token-the site where all emancipatory initiatives and desires begin. The second section focuses on our attempts to represent our lived reality to ourselves in cultural forms, from painting and literature and film to an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the sub-genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of everyday life: detective fiction. The final section turns to present-day ecological occupations in the wake of the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and locates the everyday as a site for rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity.

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.

This book celebrates a number of artistic endeavours: music, painting and the skill of making in general with particular reflection upon Japanese aesthetics. Composer, Monty Adkins and visual artist, Pip Dickens (through a Leverhulme Trust Award collaboration) investigate commonality and difference between the visual arts and music exploring aspects of rhythm, pattern, colour and vibration as well as outlining processes utilised to evolve new works within these practices. The hand-cut paper Katagami stencil: a beautiful utilitarian object once used to apply decoration on to Japanese kimonos, is used as a poignant symbol the hand-made machine - by Adkins and Dickens both within the production of paintings and sound compositions and as a thematic link throughout the book. The book reviews examples of a number of contemporary artists and craftspeople and their individual approaches to making things well. It explores the balance between hand skills and technology within a works production with particular reference to Richard Sennetts review of material culture in The Craftsman. Shibusa includes contributing essays by arts writer, Roy Exley, who examines convergence and crossover within the arts and an in-depth history, and review, of the kimono making industry by Kyoto designer, Makoto Mori.

Ben Davis is the editor of Artinfo, one of the world's most popular resources for information and discussion on arts and culture. As a critic, he has become painfully aware of the role that class plays in art. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art, to the troubled status of outsider' and street art, to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself in a dysfunctional world.'

Essays examine nine intriguing objects made eloquent when matter and meaning converge. Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, nothing to explain, remark, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would stop speaking; we would become as mute as things are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. True to the particularity of things, each of the essays singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly. But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh. Each of the nine objects examined in this book had its historical moment, when the match of this thing to that thought seemed irresistible. At these junctures, certain things become objects of fascination, association, and endless consideration; they begin to talk. Things that talk fleetingly realize the dream of a perfect language, in which words and world merge. Essays Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Anke te Heesen, Caroline A. Jones, Joseph Leo Koerner, Antoine Picon, Simon Schaffer, Joel Snyder, and M. Norton and Elaine M. Wise. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books).

"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. This title brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Topics addressed in this title 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. This title will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in aesthetics, while also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers.

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity. The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization. It is essential reading for students and scholars of racial history and postcolonialism within visual culture and art history.

In this groundbreaking book, renowned art historian Hans Belting proposes a new anthropological theory for interpreting human picture making. Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a "living medium" that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, "An Anthropology of Images" presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function.

The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two "media of the body," the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.

Symmetry is a classic study of symmetry in mathematics, the sciences, nature, and art from one of the twentieth century's greatest mathematicians. Hermann Weyl explores the concept of symmetry beginning with the idea that it represents a harmony of proportions, and gradually departs to examine its more abstract varieties and manifestations--as bilateral, translatory, rotational, ornamental, and crystallographic. Weyl investigates the general abstract mathematical idea underlying all these special forms, using a wealth of illustrations as support. Symmetry is a work of seminal relevance that explores the great variety of applications and importance of symmetry.

This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it resituates the artistic production of this region within broader socio-cultural currents and analyzes its interconnections with international discourse, competing political and aesthetic ideologies, and continuous discussions over identity.

It has recently become apparent that criticism has fallen on hard times. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches which have sought to renew criticism's energies in the wake of a 'theatrical turn' in recent visual arts practice, and the emergence of a 'performative' arts writing over the past decade or so.

Issues addressed include the 'performing' of art's histories; the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction and other 'queer' forms of (in)attention; and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, "After Criticism" provides a set of experimental essays which demonstrate how 'the critical' might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture.

"Interpretation and Construction "examines the interpretation of intentional human behavior, focusing primarily on issues in art, law, and everyday speech.

The centerpiece of the book is the examination of two large-scale views about the nature of interpretation: historicism and constructivism. Historicists claim that interpretations discover meaning; constructivists claim that interpretations create meaning. Building on both views, Stecker offers a comprehensive theory of interpretation. Containing one of the clearest expositions of the issues and arguments that guide the debate, the book also offers an original way of resolving it that gives both historicists and constructivists their due.

Written by one of the leading figures on the theory of interpretation, this book will be of particular interest to philosophers of art and legal theorists, and to anyone interested in the problems posed by the interpretation of human artifacts, behavior, and speech.

This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.
Provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.
Explains the origins and development of the term Gothic.
Explores the evolution of the Gothic in both literary and non-literary forms, including art, architecture and film.
Features authoritative readings of key works, ranging from Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" to Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho."
Considers recurrent concerns of the Gothic such as persecution and paranoia, key motifs such as the haunted castle, and figures such as the vampire and the monster.
Includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, including fiction and film from the 1760s to the present day, and a comprehensive bibliography.

In this wide-ranging and challenging book, David Davies elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines. The centerpiece is a novel and provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are, with important consequences for how they are to be understood.

Beginning with a lively discussion of the difficulties that audiences experience in their attempts to grasp and appreciate much modern and contemporary art, Davies continues with illuminating considerations of important and influential works from a broad range of artistic media - including painting, music, literature, film, performance, and dance - steadily mounting a bold and persuasive theory of the arts which construes artworks as performances. Replete with examples drawn from both modern and traditional art, the book highlights core topics in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning.

This book is an ethnographic study of the travelling art exhibition Indian Highway that presented Indian contemporary art in Europe and China between 2008 and 2012, a significant period for the art world that saw the rise and fall of the national exhibition format. It analyses art exhibition as a mobile "object" and promotes the idea of art as a transcultural product by using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and multi-media studies as research method. This work encompasses voices of curators, artists, audiences, and art critics spread over different cities, sites, and art institutions to bridge the distance between Europe and India based on vignettes along the Indian Highway. The discussion in the book focuses on power relations, the contested politics of representation, and dissonances and processes of negotiation in the field of global art. It also argues for rethinking analytical categories in anthropology to identify the social role of contemporary art practices in different cultural contexts and also examines urban art and the way national or cultural values are reinterpreted in response to ideas of difference and pluralism. Rich in empirical data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of modern and contemporary art, Indian art, art and visual culture, anthropology, art history, mobility, and transcultural studies.

This anthology provides comprehensive coverage of the major contributions of analytic philosophy to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the earliest beginnings in the 1950's to the present time.
Traces the contributions of the analytic tradition to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the 1950's to the present time.
Designed as a comprehensive guide to the field, it presents the most often-cited papers that students and researchers encounter.
Addresses a wide range of topics, including identifying art, ontology, intention and interpretation, values of art, aesthetic properties, fictionality, and the aesthetics of nature.
Explores particular art forms, including pictorial art, literature, music, and the popular arts.

The 21st century's first major academic reassessment of Impressionism, providing a new generation of scholars with a comprehensive view of critical conversations Presenting an expansive view of the study of Impressionism, this extraordinary volume breaks new thematic ground while also reconsidering established questions surrounding the definition, chronology, and membership of the Impressionist movement. In 34 original essays from established and emerging scholars, this collection considers a diverse range of developing topics and offers new critical approaches to the interpretation of Impressionist art. Focusing on the 1860s to 1890s, this Companion explores artists who are well-represented in Impressionist studies, including Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cassatt, as well as Morisot, Caillebotte, Bazille, and other significant yet lesser-known artists. The essays cover a wide variety of methodologies in addressing such topics as Impressionism's global predominance at the turn of the 20th century, the relationship between Impressionism and the emergence of new media, the materials and techniques of the Impressionists, and the movement's exhibition and reception history. Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series, this important new addition to scholarship in this field: Reevaluates the origins, chronology, and critical reception of French Impressionism Discusses Impressionism's account of modern identity in the contexts of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality Explores the global reach and influence of Impressionism in Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, North Africa, and the Americas Considers Impressionism's relationship to the emergence of film and photography in the 19th century Considers Impressionism's representation of the private sphere as compared to its depictions of public issues such as empire, finance, and environmental change Addresses the Impressionist market and clientele, period criticism, and exhibition displays from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century Features original essays by academics, curators, and conservators from around the world, including those from France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Turkey, and Argentina The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Impressionism is an invaluable text for students and academics studying Impressionism and late 19th century European art, Post-Impressionism, modern art, and modern French cultural history.

Within a technological context, this volume addresses contemporary theories of consciousness, subjective experience, the creation of meaning and emotion, and relationships between cognition and location. Its focus is both on and beyond the digital culture, seeking to assimilate new ideas emanating from the physical sciences as well as embracing spiritual and artistic aspects of human experience. Developing on the studies published in Roy Ascott's successful Reframing Consciousness, the book documents the very latest work from those connected with the internationally acclaimed CAiiA-STAR centre and its conferences. Their artistic and theoretical research in new media and art includes aspects of:

"Art and Thought" is a collection of newly commissioned essays that explores the relationship between the discipline of art history and important movements in the history of western thought.Brings together newly commissioned essays that explore the relationship between the discipline of art history and movements in the history of western thought.Considers the impact of the writings of key thinkers, including Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, on the way in which objects are perceived and understood and histories of art are constructed, deconstructed, and reconfigured according to varying sets of philosophical frameworks.Introduces the reader to the dynamic interface between philosophical reflections and art practices.Part of the New Interventions in Art History series, which is published in conjunction with the Association of Art Historians.

"Sociology of the Arts" is a comprehensive overview of the sociology of art and an authoritative work of scholarship by a leading expert in the field. The book synthesizes the various theoretical models of art sociology, and provides empirical examples as well as stimulating exemplars of sociological work on the arts. Case studies of art works are from both ends of the cultural spectrum: fine arts (theatre, dance, symphony, opera) and popular arts (Hollywood movies, pop music, pulp fiction, TV drama, comedy and advertising). These studies, combined with the book's considerable theoretical breadth and insight, explore how art is created, distributed, received, consumed, and used by people who experience it. The book also discusses the newly emerging question of the art object itself, and the meaning of art works.

"Sociology of the Arts" is a clearly written, well-organized synthesis for students, and a unique contribution to the field. This international selection of perspectives, empirical research, and case studies makes this book essential for teaching and learning the sociology of art, and will be of great interest to scholars.