Intersections of Value investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience. It examines three appreciative contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art, nature, and the everyday. However, no important appreciative context or practice is completely centered on a single value. Hence, the book explores the way the aesthetic interacts with moral, cognitive, and functional values in these contexts. The account of aesthetic appreciation is complemented by analyses of the cognitive and ethical value of art, the connection between environmental ethics and aesthetics, and the degree to which the aesthetic value of everyday artefacts derives from their basic practical functions. Robert Stecker devotes special attention to art as an appreciative context because it is an especially rich arena where different values interact. There is an important connection between artistic value and aesthetic value, but it is a mistake to reduce the former to the latter. Rather, artistic value should be seen as complex and pluralistic, composed not only of aesthetic but also ethical, cognitive, and art-historical values.

Let us revive the true sense of fine arts: enchantment! In the conceptualised, commercialised, artificial approach to fine arts, we forgot its authentic experiential sense. It lies at the imaginative heart of all arts there to be retrieved by the creative recipient as the very 'truth of it all'.

Where, how, by whom and for what were the first museums of contemporary art created? These are the key questions addressed by J. Pedro Lorente in this new book. In it he explores the concept and history of museums of contemporary art, and the shifting ways in which they have been imagined and presented. Following an introduction that sets out the historiography and considering questions of terminology, the first part of the book then examines the paradigm of the Musee des Artistes Vivants in Paris and its equivalents in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second part takes the story forward from 1930 to the present, presenting New York's Museum of Modern Art as a new universal role model that found emulators or 'contramodels' in the rest of the Western world during the twentieth century. An epilogue, reviews recent museum developments in the last decades. Through its adoption of a long-term, worldwide perspective, the book not only provides a narrative of the development of museums of contemporary art, but also sets this into its international perspective. By assessing the extent to which the great museum-capitals - Paris, London and New York in particular - created their own models of museum provision, as well as acknowledging the influence of such models elsewhere, the book uncovers fascinating perspectives on the practice of museum provision, and reveals how present cultural planning initiatives have often been shaped by historical uses.

In 1972, Angela Carter translated Xaviere Gauthier's ground-breaking feminist critique of the surrealist movement, Surrealisme et sexualite (1971). Although the translation was never published, the project at once confirmed and consolidated Carter's previous interest in surrealism, representation, gender and desire and aided her formulation of a new surrealist-feminist aesthetic. Carter's sustained engagement with surrealist aesthetics and politics as well as surrealist scholarship aptly demonstrates what is at stake for feminism at the intersection of avant-garde aesthetics and the representation of women and female desire. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material, such as typescripts, journals, and letters, Anna Watz's study is the first to trace the full extent to which Carter's writing was influenced by the surrealist movement and its critical heritage. Watz's book is an important contribution to scholarship on Angela Carter as well as to contemporary feminist debates on surrealism, and will appeal to scholars across the fields of contemporary British fiction, feminism, and literary and visual surrealism.

The present volume tries to do justice to the variety of self-representational strategies in the art and literature of the late medieval and early modern period by focusing on both the traditional con texts of self-definition (such as courts, schools and religious institutions) and the more innovative contexts of humanist art and literature. The essays collected in this volume represent some of the scholarly approaches to historical testimonies of self-representation and self-fashioning, and hence deal with the literary, artistic, philosophical and theological conceptions of the self. They are preceded by a more general essay indexing the ways in which self-representational texts, ego-documents and self-testimonies should be defined.

In this book, the author of Color, Optical Appearance, Physical Phenomenon and Artistic Means of Expression, which has appeared in six languages, gives as overview of the theory of color from antiquity to the present. His study, clarified by numerous B/W and color illustrations, promotes the understanding of many concepts of color in this realm. The book offers instructions for the construction of one's own color-perception model which allows all color values within a color system to be viewed. Evolution in Color is an indispensable study for all who work with color including artists, glazers, architects, decorators, designers, ceramic and textile artists and the student of color theory.

This fully revised and updated third edition offers students and artists valuable insights into traditional color theory and its practical application using today's cutting-edge technology. The text is lavishly illustrated, stressing issues of contemporary color use and examining how today's artists and designers are using color in a multitude of mediums in their work. It is the only book that has parity between the male and female artists and designers represented, while containing more multicultural and global examples of art and design than any other text. This book begins with how we see color and its biological basis, progressing to the various theories about color and delving into the psychological meaning of color and its use. There are individual chapters on color use in art and design, as well as global and multicultural color use. One chapter investigates cross cultural life events such as marriages and funerals, while examining the six major religions' conceptual and psychological underpinnings of color use. The final chapter explores the future of color. Contemporary Color is the ideal text for color theory courses, but also for beginning art and design students, no matter what their future major discipline or emphasis may be. It provides the foundation on which to build their career and develop their own personal artistic voice and vision.

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.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello. This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Class signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio's exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians' zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group's experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.

While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental question of comparative arts: Are there many different arts, or is there one art which takes different forms? He considers various artistic media, especially literature, music, and painting, to discover which aspects of each medium are unique and which can be "translated" from one to another. Can a poem turn into a symphony, or a symphony into a painting?
Albright explores how different media interact, as in a drama, when speech, stage decor, and music are co-present, or in a musical composition that employs the collage method of the visual arts. Tracing arguments and questions about the relations among the arts from Aristotle's "Poetics" to the present day, he illuminates the understudied discipline of comparative arts and urges new attention to its riches.

Communication, Space, and Design looks at how our worldview shapes our relations to and conceptions of space and place, and how our spaces and designs impact our communication practices. By asserting that our spaces and designs are increasingly promoting various expressions of separation, this book contends that this separation makes us more private. We find this increasing inwardness, for example, in the rise of gated-communities, exclusionary suburbs, and hyper-suburbs. Ultimately, the book asks how our spaces and designs impact our understanding and embodying of democracy, civility, and justice. It also explores how this inward turn limits our sense of obligation to the world and each other by undermining our ability to develop the communicational resiliency and moral sophistication that comes through public interactions.

What is the future of conceptualism? What expressions can it take in the 21st century? Is there a new role for aesthetic experience in art and, if so, what is that role exactly? Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed uses one of this generation’s most important and influential artists to address themes crucial to contemporary aesthetics. Working in an impressive variety of artistic media, Creed represents a strikingly innovative take on conceptualism. Through his ingenious and thought-provoking work, a team of international philosophers, jurists and art historians illustrate how Creed epitomizes several questions central to philosophical aesthetics today and provides a glimpse of the future both of art and aesthetic discourse. They discuss key concepts for Creed’s work, including immediacy (in his photographs of smiling people), compositional order (in his geometric paintings), simplicity (in Work No. 218, a sheet paper crumpled into a ball) and shamelessness (in his videos of vomiting people). By bringing a working artist into the heart of academic discussions, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed highlights the relevance of philosophical discussions of art to understanding art today.

During much of the twentieth century, film was often assumed to be a 'flat' pictorial art, more often compared with painting and graphic media than with sculpture. In the last few decades, however, film has come to be more closely associated with sculpture, and in recent years, it has largely been through gallery installations not only that the sculptural aspect of film and video has been demonstrated, but also the extent to which filmic representation enlarges our understanding of sculptural space. This collection thus comprises the first rigorous exploration of the relationship between sculpture and film, charted over ten essays. The contributors explore some of the ways in which cinema reshaped the landscape of art and specifically sculpture and sculptural practice during the twentieth century. They also examine how film has functioned as a 'sculptural' medium at crucial moments in various stages of its evolution. In this way, it is a book about both sculpture and film, and sculpture as film.

This is the first book to focus on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), an avant-garde artists' collective active during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and one of the few tangible connections between radical European art groups from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Danes' deliberately unskilled painterly abstraction, embrace of the tradition of dansk folkelighed (the popular) and its iterations of egalitarianism and consensus reform, called for the political relevance of art and interrogated the ideologies underlying culture itself. The group's cultural activism presents an alternative trajectory of continuity, which challenges the customary view of World War II as a moment of artistic rupture.

This book reveals how, when, where and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siecle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Tauber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carriere, Salvador Dali, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siecle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby; water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carriere, John Gerrard Keulemans, Laszlo Mohology-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson's theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage's concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson's philosophies, Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.

Artists, designers and researchers are increasingly seeking new ways to understand and explore the creative and practical significance of the senses. This ground-breaking book brings art and design into the field of sensory studies providing a clear introduction to the field and outlining important developments and new directions. A compelling exploration of both theory and practice, Sensory Arts and Design brings together a wide variety of examples from contemporary art and design which share a sensory dimension in their development or user experience. Divided into three parts, the book examines the design applications of new technology with sensing capacities; the role of the senses in creating new imaginative environments; and the significance of the senses within different cultural practices. The thirteen chapters cover a highly diverse range of issues - from the urban environment, architecture and soundscapes to gustatory art, multisensory perception in painting, music and drawing, and the relationship between vision and smell. Initiated by Insight, a research group at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts -widely recognised as a center of research excellence - the project brings together a team of experts from Britain, Europe and North America. This timely book is destined to make a significant contribution to the scholarly development of this emerging field. An important read for students and scholars in sensory studies, design, art, and visual culture.

In this ambitious theoretical encounter with five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces a set of richly constructed artistic thought experiments. But in creating the work on the page these thought experiments are not thereby novelistic fictions. On the contrary, the fictiveness of each artist's work and biography is formed from Roberts's critical engagement with the historical and theoretical determinates of the work he has created - artwork and its theoretical engagement forming an interdependent whole.

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.

This volume explores how the visual arts are presenting and responding to Christian theology and demonstrates how modern and contemporary artists and artworks have actively engaged in conversation with Christianity. Modern intellectual enquiry has often been reluctant to engage theology as an enriching or useful form of visual analysis, but critics are increasingly revisiting religious narratives and Christian thought in pursuit of understanding our present-day visual culture. In this book an international group of contributors demonstrate how theology is often implicit within artworks and how, regardless of a viewer's personal faith, it can become implicit in a viewer's visual encounter. Their observations include deliberate juxtaposition of Christian symbols, imaginative play with theologies, the validation of non-confessional or secular public engagement, and inversions of biblical interpretation. Case studies such as an interactive Easter, glow-sticks as sacrament, and visualisation of the Bible's polyphonic voices enrich this discussion. Together, they call for a greater interpretative generosity and more nuance around theology's cultural contexts in the modern era. By engaging with theology, culture, and the visual art, this collection offers a fresh lens through which to see the interaction of religion and art. As such, it will be of great use to those working in Religion and the Arts, Visual Art, Material Religion, Theology, Aesthetics, and Cultural Studies.

Gardens provoke thought and engagement in ways that are often overlooked. This book shines new light on long-held assumptions about gardens and proposes novel ways in which we might reconsider them. The author challenges traditional views of how we experience gardens, how we might think of gardens as works of art, and how the everyday materials of gardens - plants, light, water, earth - may become artful. The author provides a detailed analysis of Tupare, a garden in New Zealand, and uses it as source material for his analysis of the philosophical issues art gardens raise. His new account of gardens highlights the polymodal, multi-sensual, and improvisatory character of the garden experience, it offers an ontological comparison between gardens and humans and other animals, and it explains how identical plants, and arrangements of plants, may be mundane when encountered beyond the garden but artful, meaningful, and aesthetically valuable when experienced within it.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on 'Taste and art', shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of 'good taste', contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on 'Taste making and the museum' examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, 'Taste after Bourdieu in Japan' offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of 'good taste', exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on 'Taste, the home and everyday life' juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of 'good taste' have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste 'after Bourdieu'. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images-photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings-from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision.