Art & Fear is about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. Drawing on the authors' own experiences as two working artists, the book delves into the internal and external challenges to making art in the real world, and shows how they can be overcome every day. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic, and word-of-mouth has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity. Written by artists for artists, it offers generous and wise insight into what it feels like to sit down at your easel or keyboard, in your studio or performance space, trying to do the work you need to do. Every artist, whether a beginner or a prizewinner, a student or a teacher, faces the same fears - and this book illuminates the way through them.

How older people have been perceived during various periods of history from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is the focus of this heavily illustrated study of the elderly in Western society. Herbert Covey presents the reader with a wide range of portrayals of the elderly in both art and literature and goes on to analyze, in detail, the images and symbols of aging, sexuality, family, and death found in these depictions. His analyses of the works reflect a variety of disciplines, including fine arts, gerontology, history, sociology, psychology, and literature. This book increases our consciousness of images of older people in Western culture by debunking common images and providing background information on how current images and perceptions have developed.

"Images of Older People in Western Art and Society" illustrates how society has both defined and portrayed advanced age in Western painting, drawing, literature, and drama. First, images of aging are presented. Then, recognizable symbols that have been used throughout history as metaphors for characteristics of aging are shown. Because the elderly are often closely involved with family, one chapter is devoted to images of the elderly within the family structure. Current art often shows the elderly as sexless, but that wasn't always so. Today, death is frequently associated with old age, although throughout history, death has been associated with all ages. Social historians, gerontological practitioners, and sociologists will find a great deal to study in this visual history. The book is illustrated with 41 black-and-white reproductions of paintings and drawings.

In the twentieth century, avant-garde movements have pushed the concept of art far beyond its traditional boundaries. In this dynamical process of constant renewal the prestige of thinking about art as a legitimizing practice has come to the fore. So it is hardly surprising that the past decades have been characterized by a revival or even breakthrough of philosophy of art as a discipline. However, the majority of books on aesthetics fail to combine a systematical philosophical discourse with a real exploration of art practice.

Thinking Art attempts to deal with this traditional shortcoming. It is indeed not only an easily accessible and systematic account of the classical, modern and postmodern theories of art, but also concludes each chapter with an artista (TM)s studio in which the practical relevance of the discussed theory is amply demonstrated by concrete examples. Moreover, each chapter ends with a section on further reading, in which all relevant literature is discussed in detail.

Thinking Art provides its readers with a theoretical framework that can be used to think about art from a variety of perspectives. More particularly it shows how a fruitful cross-fertilization between theory and practice can be created. This book can be used as a handbook within departments of philosophy, history of art, media and cultural studies, cultural history and, of course, within art academies. Though the book explores theories of art from Plato to Derrida it does not presuppose any acquaintance with philosophy from its readers. It can thus be read also by artists, art critics, museum directors and anyone interested in the meaning of art.

The first book to devote serious attention to questions of scale in contemporary sculpture, this study considers the phenomenon within the interlinked cultural and socio-historical framework of the legacies of postmodern theory and the growth of global capitalism. In particular, the book traces the impact of postmodern theory on concepts of measurement and exaggeration, and analyses the relationship between this philosophy and the sculptural trend that has developed since the early 1990s. Rachel Wells examines the arresting international trend of sculpture exploring scale, including American precedents from the 1970s and 1980s and work by the 'Young British Artists'. Noting that the emergence of this sculptural trend coincides with the end of the Cold War, Wells suggests a similarity between the quantitative ratio of scale and the growth of global capitalism that has replaced the former status quo of qualitatively opposed systems. This study also claims the allegorical nature of scale in contemporary sculpture, outlining its potential for critique or complicity in a system dominated by quantitative criteria of value. In a period characterised by uncertainty and incommensurability, Wells demonstrates that scale in contemporary sculpture can suggest the possibility of, and even an unashamed reliance upon, comparison and external difference in the construction of meaning.

This volume contains a selection from the proceedings of a conference organised by the International Feuchtwanger Society titled 'To Stay or not to Stay? German-speaking Exiles in Southern California after 1945'. The conference, held in September 2011 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, explored the decision faced by all German-speaking exiles in Southern California at the end of World War II whether to return to Europe or stay in the United States. The volume opens with an analysis of the experiences of post-1945 remigrants as reflected in a major exile publication, Der Aufbau. Six chapters focus on the particular case of Lion Feuchtwanger, illuminating the circumstances which led him to remain in California after 1945. Subsequent chapters throw fresh light on other members of the German-speaking literary community in California. Studies focusing on remigration from the UK and the Soviet Union widen the discussion, as do chapters on the problems faced by professional musicians exiled in East Asia and in Palestine. The volume concludes with the experience of remigrants in the media and film industry during the early post-war years. Der vorliegende Band enthalt ausgewahlte Vortrage, die auf der von der Internationalen Feuchtwanger Gesellschaft organisierten Konferenz "Bleiben oder Zuruckkehren? Deutschsprachige Exilanten in Sudkalifornien nach 1945" gehalten wurden. Die Konferenz, die im September 2011 an der Universitat von Sudkalifornien in Los Angeles und in der Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades stattfand, beschaftigte sich mit der weitreichenden Entscheidung, die die deutschsprachigen Exilanten in Sudkalifornien nach Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges treffen mussten: Sollten sie nach Europa zuruckkehren oder in den Vereinigten Staaten bleiben? Der Band beginnt mit einer Analyse der in der wichtigen Exil-Publikation Der Aufbau beschriebenen Erfahrungen von Remigranten nach 1945. Sechs Kapitel haben den speziellen Fall Lion Feuchtwangers zum Thema und untersuchen die Umstande, welche zu seiner Entscheidung fuhrten, nach 1945 in Kalifornien zu bleiben. Die darauffolgenden Kapitel eroertern neue Erkenntnisse uber andere Mitglieder des deutschsprachigen Literatenkreises in Kalifornien. Untersuchungen zur Remigration aus England und aus der Sowjetunion sowie zu den Problemen exilierter Musiker in Ostasien und Palastina erweitern und erganzen die Diskussion. Der Band schliesst mit Beitragen zu den Erfahrungen der Remigranten in den Bereichen Medien und Film im Deutschland der fruhen Nachkriegszeit.

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on the diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind the production and application of these colors; the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region to another. By emphasizing color's materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts. This book captures color's global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the 'discovery' of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techne, and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color's capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare's sonnets, red threads in women's needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages. The purpose of this book is to recover color's complex-and sometimes morally troubling-past, and in doing so, to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for our colorful world. With its nuanced and complex depiction of how color operated within local contexts and moved across the globe, this book will appeal to art historians, social and cultural historians, museum curators, literary scholars, rhetoric scholars, and historians of science and technology.

Understand the Complexities of Art Criticism in a Straightforward and Readable Manner An Introduction to Art Criticism offers a thorough overview of art criticism as it has been practiced since the 1700s. The text is built around excerpts from the work of hundreds of historical and contemporary critics, including a substantial history of art criticism and chapters on the fundamental aspects of criticism and the formation of an individual voice. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: * Understand and appreciate the rich history of art criticism as a field * Analyze the voice of critics Note: MySearchLab does not come automactically packaged with this text. To purchase MySearchLab, please visit: www.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a ValuePack of the text MySearchLab: ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205900771 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205900770

A contribution to the field of theological aesthetics, this book explores the arts in and around the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal movements. It proposes a pneumatological model for creativity and the arts, and discusses different art forms from the perspective of that model. Pentecostals and other charismatic Christians have not sufficiently worked out matters of aesthetics, or teased out the great religious possibilities of engaging with the arts. With the flourishing of Pentecostal culture comes the potential for an equally flourishing artistic life. As this book demonstrates, renewal movements have participated in the arts but have not systematized their findings in ways that express their theological commitments-until now. The book examines how to approach art in ways that are communal, dialogical, and theologically cultivating.

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women's agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim - to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

The concept of art as being purely for aesthetic contemplation, that is typical of industrial civilization, is not a very useful one for cross-cultural studies. The majority of the art forms that we see in museums and art books that have come from Native America or Africa or Oceania, are objects that were once part of a larger artistic whole from which they have been extracted. We need to try to piece together and imagine the artistic context as well as the cultural one if we are to attain a deeper sense of the import than the piece available to use provides. Even then, it is almost impossible to define the artistic whole. Perhaps we would do better to regard these pieces as fragments from the lifestyle of a people.

First published in 1982, The Sociology of Art considers all forms of the arts, whether visual arts, literature, film, theatre or music from Bach to the Beatles. The last book to be completed by Arnold Hauser before his death in 1978, it is a total analysis of the spiritual forces of social expression, based upon comprehensive historical experience and documentation. Hauser explores art through the earliest times to the modern era, with fascinating analyses of the mass media and current manifestations of human creativity. An extension and completion of his earlier work, The Social History of Art, this volume represents a summing up of his thought and forms a fitting climax to his life's work. Translated by Kenneth J. Northcote.

The eleven interconnected essays of this book penetrate the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime and bring the results to bear on the trauma of September 11 and the subsequent "war on terror." Through rigorous critical studies of major works of post- 1945 and contemporary culture, the book traces transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Critically engaging with the work of continental philosophers Theodor W Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and of contemporary artists Joeph Beuys, Damien Hirst, and Boaz Arad, the book confronts the shared cultural conditions that made Auschwitz and Hiroshima possible and offers searching meditations on the structure and meaning of the traumatic historical "event." Ray argues that globalization cannot be separated from the collective tasks of working through historical genocide. He provocatively concludes that the curent US-led "war on terror" must be grasped as a globalized inability to mourn.

This edited book will address creativity and innovation among the two cultures of science and art. Disciplines within science and art include: medicine (neurology), music therapy, art therapy, physics, chemistry, engineering, music, improvisation, education and aesthetics. This book will be the first of its kind to appeal to a broad audience of students, scholars, scientists, professionals, practitioners (physicians, psychologists, counsellors and social workers), musicians, artists, educators and administrators. In order to understand creativity and innovation across fields, the approach is multidisciplinary. While there is overlap across disciplines, unique domain specific traits exist in each field and are also discussed in addition to similarities. This book engages the reader with the comparison of similarities and differences through dialog across disciplines. Authors of each chapter address creativity and innovation from their own distinct perspective. Each chapter is transdisciplinary in approach. These perspectives entail a representation of their field through research, teaching, service and/or practice.

This is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets, and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In "Modernist Patterns," Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.

By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, "Modernist Patterns" expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.

Examining the complex intersections between art and scientific approaches to the natural world, Biocentrism and Modernism reveals another side to the development of Modernism. While many historians have framed this movement as being mechanistic and "against" nature, the essays in this collection illuminate the role that nature-centric ideologies played in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Modernism. The essays in Biocentrism and Modernism contend that it is no accident that Modernism arose at the same time as the field of modern biology. From nineteenth-century discoveries, to the emergence of the current environmentalist movement during the 1960s, artists, architects, and urban planners have responded to currents in the scientific world. Sections of the volume treat both philosophic worldviews and their applications in theory, historiography, and urban design. This collection also features specific case studies of individual artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock.

Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. This book surveys the resurgence of politicized art, tracing key currents of theory and practice, and mapping them against the dominant experience of the last decade: crisis. Drawing upon leading artists and theorists within this field - including Hito Steyerl, Marina Vishmidt, Art & Language, Gregory Sholette, John Roberts and Dave Beech - this book argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.

Provides a broad a bottom-up set of multiple international examples of projects initiated by social practitioners and by artists - and by collaboration between the two - in varied settings and domains. Provides a set of examples, methods, and ideas for including social workers, community workers, social change advocates, art therapists, psychologists, human geographers, and town and urban planners, but also social artists, cultural policy makers, and those interested in using social arts in participatory research. Will be of interest to community workers, social change advocates, art therapists, psychologists, human geographers, and town and urban planners and will inspire and guide all of the above groups on the theoretical, academic, training, and practice levels of using social arts.

First published in 2000. This is Volume VII of ten in the International Library of Philosophy in a series on Ancient Philosophy. Written around 1953, this book looks at Plato and his ideas on art based on his 'Dialogues'.

"In American Silences," Joseph Anthony Ward offers a unique analysis of the use and effects of silence in modern American realistic art. Beginning with the nineteenth-century literature that laid the foundation for silence in art, he moves to a brief analysis of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" and Ernest Hemingway's "In Our Time," showing how they, along with several other crucial works of twentieth-century American realism, incorporate the power of the silent into their expression without sacrificing the subjects and techniques of traditional realism.

Examining "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," James Agee's commentary on the life of tenant farmers, documented with photographs by Walker Evans, Ward traces the book's pattern of ""silence, then silence disturbed by sound, and ultimately silence restored."" Ward further supports his theory with a study of Agee's "A Death in the Family and Evans' American Photographs." Ward sees Agee's admiration of photography as a connection between the silence of the scenes he writes about and the silence of Evans' photographs. The use of silence is perhaps even more obvious in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Although throughout the book Ward suggests both the positive and negative qualities of silence in art, Hopper's paintings provide little in the way of postiveness.

For Ward, the art of silence is an art of extreme concentration that seeks essences rather than superficiality that nearly transcends realism itself. The theme of silence in American realism is a significant new one, but Ward's interpretation of the prose and his analysis of the photographs and paintings, many of which are reproduced in this book, establish validity for art as the voice of silence.

1. The first handbook to be published in the burgeoning field of Neuroaesthetics 2. Brings together leading academics from the field to present their cutting-edge research

A new direction in art criticism is laid out in this striking program for realigning the relationship between painting and criticism. Putting forth the idea that painting evolves and encounters new territory through a constant tension between art and criticism, this treatise draws on the work of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin as well as critics Arthur Danto and Rosalind Krauss. Each argument is accompanied by a detailed analysis of a wide range of classical, modern, and postmodern art pieces.