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Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art
Learn about key elements of character art from traditional and digital illustrator, Simone Grunewald. Simone, also known as "Schmoe", creates heart-felt and personal designs inspired by her everyday life experiences and passion for the arts. As a new mother, she also draws on her humorous experiences of bringing up a small child in the modern world. Discover in-depth visual breakdowns of Simone's techniques as well as a varied and extensive collection of Simone's stunning art. From linework advice to character design considerations, Simone generously shares her creative practice. A book that appeals to artists at every stage of their creative journey, this title teaches how to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls, as well as how to improve technique. Feel motivated to practice every day to develop engaging characters of all shapes, ages and sizes. With special focus on developing dynamic poses and expressions, Simone's advice will ensure that you create emotive characters with energy and personality.
While Kierkegaard is primarily known as a philosopher or religious thinker, his writings have also been used extensively by literary writers, critics and artists. This use can be traced in the work of major cultural figures not just in Denmark and Scandinavia but also in the wider world. They have been attracted to his creative mixing of genres, his complex use of pseudonyms, his rhetoric and literary style, and his rich images, parables, and allegories. The present volume documents this influence in the different language groups and traditions. Tome IV examines Kierkegaard's surprisingly extensive influence in the Anglophone world of literature and art, particularly in the United States. His thought appears in the work of the novelists Walker Percy, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Conner, William Styron, Don Delillo, and Louise Erdrich. He has also been used by the famous American literary critics, George Steiner and Harold Bloom. The American composer Samuel Barber made use of Kierkegaard in his musical works. Kierkegaard has also exercised an influence on British and Irish letters. W.H. Auden sought in Kierkegaard ideas for his poetic works, and the contemporary English novelist David Lodge has written a novel Therapy, in which Kierkegaard plays an important role. Cryptic traces of Kierkegaard can also be found in the work of the famous Irish writer James Joyce.
Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.
A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color red throughout the ages The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in the Western world. For many cultures, red was not just one color of many but rather the only color worthy enough to be used for social purposes. In some languages, the word for red was the same as the word for color. The first color developed for painting and dying, red became associated in antiquity with war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period, red held both religious significance, as the color of the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell, and secular meaning, as a symbol of love, glory, and beauty. Yet during the Protestant Reformation, red began to decline in status. Viewed as indecent and immoral and linked to luxury and the excesses of the Catholic Church, red fell out of favor. After the French Revolution, red gained new respect as the color of progressive movements and radical left-wing politics. In this beautifully illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, the acclaimed author of Blue, Black, and Green, now masterfully navigates centuries of symbolism and complex meanings to present the fascinating and sometimes controversial history of the color red. Pastoureau illuminates red's evolution through a diverse selection of captivating images, including the cave paintings of Lascaux, the works of Renaissance masters, and the modern paintings and stained glass of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers.
People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.
Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.
Music, Art and Diplomacy shows how a vibrant field of cultural exchange between East and West was taking place during the Cold War, which contrasts with the orthodox understanding of two divided and antithetical blocs. The series of case studies on cultural exchanges, focusing on the decades following the Second World War, cover episodes involving art, classical music, theatre, dance and film. Despite the fluctuating fortunes of diplomatic relations between East and West, there was a continuous circulation of cultural producers and products. Contributors explore the interaction of arts and politics, the role of the arts in diplomacy and the part the arts played in the development of the Cold War. Art has always shunned political borders, wavering between the guidance of individual and governmental patrons, and borderless expression. While this volume provides insight into how political players tried to harness the arts to serve their own political purposes, at the same time it is clear that the arts and artists exploited the Cold War framework to reach their own individual and professional objectives. Utilizing archives available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the volume provides a valuable socio-cultural approach to understanding the Cold War and cultural diplomacy.
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.
A major issue in the relation of art to the rest of society is the question of how art penetrates politics. From the perspective of most art scholars, this is a question of aesthetics-whether politics necessarily pollutes and debases the quality of the arts. From the perspective of social science, it has been primarily a question of meaning-how political messages are conveyed through artistic media. Recent work has begun to broaden the study of the arts and politics beyond semiosis and content focus. Several strands of scholarship are converging around the general issue of the social relationships within which art takes political form, that is, how art and artists do politics. This perspective of "doing" moves analysis beyond addressing the meaning of culture, to focus on the ways that art is embedded in-and intervenes in-social relationships, activities, and institutions. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from France and the United States to investigate these directions and themes by exploring the question of "how to do politics with art" from a comparative standpoint, putting sociological approaches in conversation with other disciplinary prisms. It will be of interest to scholars of social movements and politicization, the sociology of art, art history, and aesthetics.
Emphasizing the understanding of images and their influences on how they affect our attitudes, beliefs, and actions, this fully updated sixth edition offers consequential ways of looking at images from the perspectives of photographers, critics, theoreticians, historians, curators, and editors. It invites informed conversations about meanings and implications of images, providing multiple and sometimes conflicting answers to questions such as: What are photographs? Should they be called art? Are they ethical? What are their implications for self, society, and the world? From showing how critics verbalize what they see in images and how they persuade us to see similarly, to dealing with what different photographs might mean, the book posits that some interpretations are better than others and explains how to deliberate among competing interpretations. It looks at how the worth of photographs is judged aesthetically and socially, offering samples and practical considerations for both studio critiques for artists and professional criticism for public audiences. This book is a clear and accessible guide for students of art history, photography and criticism, as well as anyone interested in carefully looking at and talking about photographs and their effects on the world in which we live.
* Post-Bionian field theory is a hot topic in contemporary psychoanalysis * Psychoanalytic aspects of art theory remain very popular in psychoanalytic circles * First psychoanalytic book to look at the work of Cezanne
Through a series of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary interventions, leading international scholars of history and art history explore ways in which the study of images enhances knowledge of the past and informs our understanding of the present. Spanning a diverse range of time periods and places, the contributions cumulatively showcase ways in which ongoing dialogue between history and art history raises important aesthetic, ethical and political questions for the disciplines. The volume fosters a methodological awareness that enriches exchanges across these distinct fields of knowledge. This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, history, visual culture and historiography.
Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors addresses the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of interiors beyond their conventionally defined architectural boundaries. With provocative contributions from leading and emerging historians, theorists, and design practitioners, the book is rooted in new scholarship that expands traditional relationships between architecture and interiors and that reflects the latest theoretical developments in the fields of interior design history and practice. This collection contains diverse case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century including Alexander Pope’s Memorial Garden, Design Indaba, and Robin Evans. It is an essential read for researchers, practitioners, and students of interior design at all levels.
This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically "hysterical" performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.
Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources offers a comprehensive collection of key writings on a subject which has come to permeate fields as diverse as theatre, comparative literature, philosophy, law, history, English, and science and technology studies, in what has been termed the transdisciplinary 'performative turn'. The collected essays draw upon writing from these diverse disciplines - and more - together illustrating how performance has become an ever more vibrant and plastic discursive practice. It includes a wide range of historical and more contemporary perspectives from the northern and southern hemispheres, with writing drawn from South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe, Russia and the post-Soviet context, the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean. Expansive in their representation, the four volumes address current questions of protest culture, race and gender politics, biopolitics, indigenous studies and perspectives, postcolonialism and decoloniality, and language/translation, among others. Each volume is introduced by the editor and arranged thematically, so that the development of ideas can be traced within a theme. The set includes 90 essays covering the following major areas: discipline, method, documentation, and body politic. Together the four volumes of Theories of Performance present a major scholarly resource for the field.
Based on rare archival material and numerous interviews with practitioners, Art in the North of England 1979-2008 analyses the relation between political and economic changes stemming from the 1980s and artistic developments in the principal cities of the North of England in the late 20th century. Looking in particular at the art scenes of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, Gabriel Gee unveils a set of powerful aesthetic reactions to industrial change and urban reconstruction during this period on the part of artists including John Davies, Pete Clarke, the Amber collective, Richard Wilson, Karen Watson, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, John Kippin, and the contribution of organisations such as Projects UK/Locus +, East Street Arts, the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool. While the geographical focus of this study is highly specific, a key concern throughout is the relationship between regional, national and international artistic practices and identities. Of interest to all scholars and students concerned with the developments of British art in the second half of the 20th century, the study is also of direct pertinence to observers of global narratives, which are here described and analysed through the concept of trans-industriality.
Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.
Anatomy for Artists is an extensive compendium of high quality, detailed photography and drawings, showing the human figure in a variety of shapes, sizes and poses that can be used as a solid foundation for all character art.This thorough and detailed library of visual resources will consist of stunning photography and comprehensive drawings showing the muscular structure of figures of varying body types. These male and female references will act as an invaluable starting point for artists trying to create art based on the human figure. Whether you're a traditional sculptor, oil painter or 3D digital artist, the resources within this book will prove to be useful and informative and will help you improve the quality and accuracy of your own art.
Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense-the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second affirms a natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.) The book covers three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.
The reader Art and its global histories represents an invaluable teaching tool, offering content ranging from academic essays and excerpts, new translations, interviews with curators and artists, to art criticism. The introduction sets out the state of art history today as it undergoes the profound shift of a 'global turn'. Particular focus is given to British India, which represents a shift from the usual attention paid to Orientalism and French art in this period. The sources and debates on this topic have never before been brought together in a satisfactory way and this book will represent a particularly significant and valuable contribution for postgraduate and undergraduate art history teaching. -- .
Few phenomena are as formative of our experience of the visual world as displays of suffering. But what does it mean to have an ethical experience of disturbing or traumatizing images? What kind of ethical proposition does an image of pain mobilize? How may the spectator learn from and make use of the painful image as a source of ethical reflection? Engaging with a wide range of visual media--from painting, theatre, and sculpture, to photography, film, and video--this interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars of visual culture offers a reappraisal of the increasingly complex relationship between images of pain and the ethics of viewing. Ethics and Images of Pain reconsiders the persistent and ever pertinent nexus of aesthetics and ethics, the role of painful images as generators of unpredictable forms of affect, the moral transformation of spectatorship, the ambivalence of the witness and the representation of afflication as a fundamental form of our shared scopic experience. The instructive and illuminating essays in the collection introduce a phenomenological context in which to make sense of our current ecology of excruciating images, one that accentuates notions of responsibility, empathy, and imagination. Contributors trace the images of pain across a miscellany of case studies, and amongst the topics addressed are: the work of artists as disparate as Doris Salcedo, Anselm Kiefer and Bendik Riis; photographs from Abu Ghraib and Rwanda; Hollywood war films and animated documentaries; performances of self-immolations and incidents of police brutality captured on mobile phones.
With the emerging dominance of digital technology, the time is ripe to reconsider the nature of the image. Some say that there is no longer a phenomenal image, only disembodied information (0-1) waiting to be configured. For photography, this implies that a faith in the principle of an "evidential force" of the impossibility of doubting that the subject was before the lens is no longer plausible. Technologically speaking, we have arrived at a point where the manipulation of the image is an ever-present possibility, when once it was difficult, if not impossible. What are the key moments in the genealogy of the Western image which might illuminate the present status of the image? And what exactly is the situation to which we have arrived as far as the image is concerned? These are the questions guiding the reflections in this book. In it we move, in Part 1, from a study of the Greek to the Byzantine image, from the Renaissance image and the image in the Enlightenment to the image as it emerges in the Industrial Revolution. Part 2 examines key aspects of the image today, such as the digital and the cinema image, as well as the work of philosophers of the image, including: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard Stiegler.
This is a very readable, useful and above all, deeply historical account of some of the defining tropes in art history and performance today. Written by world renowned feminist art historian, Amelia Jones, this genealogy is a key work bridging art historical and performance studies approaches. Each chapter includes 'Ruptures' - bursts of intimately written accounts of experiences of performance (and related interludes) - which help make the content accessible.
The first university-level textbook on the power, condition, and expanse of contemporary fine art drawing A Companion to Contemporary Drawing explores how 20th and 21st century artists have used drawing to understand and comment on the world. Presenting contributions by both theorists and practitioners, this unique textbook considers the place, space, and history of drawing and explores shifts in attitudes towards its practice over the years. Twenty-seven essays discuss how drawing emerges from the mind of the artist to question and reflect upon what they see, feel, and experience. This book discusses key themes in contemporary drawing practice, addresses the working conditions and context of artists, and considers a wide range of personal, social, and political considerations that influence artistic choices. Topics include the politics of eroticism in South American drawing, anti-capitalist drawing from Eastern Europe, drawing and conceptual art, feminist drawing, and exhibitions that have put drawing practices at the centre of contemporary art. This textbook: Demonstrates ways contemporary issues and concerns are addressed through drawing Reveals how drawing is used to make powerful social and political statements Situates works by contemporary practitioners within the context of their historical moment Explores how contemporary art practices utilize drawing as both process and finished artifact Shows how concepts of observation, representation, and audience have changed dramatically in the digital era Establishes drawing as a mode of thought Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series, A Companion to Contemporary Drawing is a valuable text for students of fine art, art history, and curating, and for practitioners working within contemporary fine art practice. |
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