Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art
This book is a study of contemporary spirituality as it is practiced in the world today, characterized by its secular and inclusive nature, and applied to art and art education. It identifies the issues facing a formal introduction of contemporary spiritual concepts into a secular and multicultural arts educational environment. Lander begins by separating the notion of "the spiritual" from the study of organized religions. She uses examples of art from different cultures in contemporary spiritual systems, making the study a reference book for contemporary spirituality and spirituality in art education, with usable definitions and practical examples suitable for scholars in art and visual studies, art education, and contemporary spirituality.
This innovative new volume offers an in-depth exploration of scale, one of the most crucial elements in the creation and reception of art. * Illustrates how scale has compelled audiences to rethink the significance and importance of specific works of art * Takes a comparative art historical approach exploring issues of scale in an array of forms, from Islamic architecture to contemporary photography * A global consideration of scale, with examples of work from ancient Egypt, eighteenth-century Korea, and contemporary Europe * The newest addition to the Art History Special Issue Book Series
'Brad Evans in one of the brightest critical minds of his generation' - Henry A. Giroux Whether physical or metaphorical, institutional or interpersonal, violence is everywhere. A seemingly immutable fact of life, it is nonetheless rarely engaged with at the conceptual level. What does violence actually mean? And is it an inevitable part of the human condition? Conversations on Violence brings together many of the world's leading critical scholars, artists, writers and cultural producers to provide a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence. Through in-depth interviews with thirty figures including Marina Abramovic, Russell Brand and Simon Critchley, Brad Evans and Adrian Parr interrogate violence in all its manifestations, including its role in politics, art, gender discrimination and decolonisation. Provocative, eye-opening and bracingly original, Conversations on Violence sheds light on a defining political and ethical concern of our age.
What can be learned from a story woven out of fragmented moments of joy, pain, horror, and blissful awareness? Flesh Mapping is an attempt to create a pedagogy of shared narrative, place, and politics; to narratively map the injuries of the material, emotional, and spiritual impact of poverty, displacement, hunger and war on an individual life. The book is an invitation to instructors in education, anthropology, women's studies, and labor studies to re-imagine education as the praxis for liberation, renewal, and hope. It serves as a process of naming the injuries inflicted on real bodies by privilege and power, like sites on a map. The goal is not simply to name and make visible privilege but to simultaneously create emergent spaces of dissonance in education that can challenge and transform power at the site where the personal is political.
A voice contributing to the discourse on contemporary ethical issues in art and design, this text addresses the relationship of ethics to art and design practice, and the ability of the arts to "matter" in the 20th century "fin de siecle". Leading theoreticians and practitioners of art explore, through informal discussion or the formal essay, issues of political space, user-centred design, the social responsibility of the artist, design legislation, cultural hierarchy, modernism as colonialism, and the ethical opportunities and minefields of postmodernism.
In this classic study Faber Birren brings his expertise in color to the places we live; our homes, offices, factories, hospitals and schools. The colors used in these spaces have a profound effect on the people who inhabit them, and Faber Birren has spent many years researching the relationship. In this book he shares his findings and the practical applications toward healthier and more creative environments. In this newly revised edition, Mr Birren has added a chapter on the changing environment caused by the computer. He explores the new demands that today's technology puts on work and office spaces and shows the reader some helpful color and light solutions.
"The Ethics of Art" explores the growing ethical consciousness within the artistic community, as it relates to art's production and distribution mechanisms. It attempts to show how the artistic community engages in creative, social dialogue based upon the potential of the body. The first of this book's two sections, "Ecosophy," focuses on eco-art practices and the ways in which the ethical turn in the arts implies a greater receptivity to our environment. The second section addresses the contemporary dance scene as an example of this phenomenon, showing how it exhibits renewed interest in "caring" for one's body, rather than transgressing it, both on the individual level and on that of the larger "body politic" of cooperation and collaboration. In this volume, the singular voices of artists are as important as the scholarly contributions.
In 12 essays by a distinguished group of art historians, Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe explores the relationship between artistic and technological advances from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. * Provides a broad definition of technology for this period and addresses the influence of technological shifts on the history of early modern art * Covers c.1420-1820, the time period between the advent of the printed image and that of the photographically produced image * Discusses a wide range of early modern artists tools, instruments, skills, and techniques and their historical applications * Highlights a frequently overlooked aspect of research within art history that yields substantial insights into the analysis of the making and viewing of art
This collection offers a response to the view that migration disrupts national heritage. Investigating the mediation provided by migrant art, it asks how we can rethink art history in a way that uproots its reliance on space and place as stable definitions of style. Beginning with an invaluable overview of migration studies terminology and concepts, Art and migration opens dialogues between academics of art history and migrations studies through a series of essays and interviews. It also re-evaluates the cultural understanding of borders and revisits the contours of the art world - a supposedly globalised community re-assessed here as structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints, gatekeeping and patronage networks. -- .
As the theoretical alignments within academia shift, this book introduces a surprising variety of realism to abolish the old positivist-theory dichotomy that has haunted Art History. Demanding frankly the referential detachment of the objects under study, the book proposes a stratified, multi-causal account of art history that addresses postmodern concerns while saving it from its errors of self-refutation. Building from the very basic distinction between intransitive being and transitive knowing, objects can be affirmed as real while our knowledge of them is held to be fallible. Several focused chapters address basic problems while introducing philosophical reflection into art history. These include basic ontological distinctions between society and culture, general and "special" history, the discontinuity of cultural objects, the importance of definition for special history, scales, facets and fiat objects as forms of historical structure, the nature of evidence and proof, historical truth and controversies. Stressing Critical Realism as the stratified, multi-causal approach needed for productive research today in the academy, this book creates the subject of the ontology of art history and sets aside a theoretical space for metaphysical reflection, thus clarifying the usually muddy distinction between theory, methodology, and historiography in art history.
This book examines how we perceive and understand abstract art in contrast to artworks that represent reality. Philosophical, psychological and neuroscience research, including the work of philosopher Paul Crowther, are considered and out of these approaches a complex model is developed to account for this experience. The understanding embodied in this model is rooted in facet theory, mapping sentences and partially ordered analyses, which together provide a comprehensive understanding of the perceptual experience of abstract art.
Derek Matravers introduces students to the philosophy of art through a close examination of eight famous works of twentieth-century art. Each work has been selected in order to best illustrate and illuminate a particular problem in aesthetics. Each artwork forms the basis of a single chapter and readers are introduced to such issues as artistic value, intention, interpretation, and expression through a careful analysis of the artwork. Questions considered include what does art mean in contemporary art practice? Is the artistic value of a painting the same as how much you like it? If a painting isn't of anything, then how do we understand it? Can art be immoral? By grounding abstract and theoretical discussion in real examples the book provides an excellent way into the subject for readers new to the philosophical dimension of art appreciation.
Nominated for the 2016 Art in Literature: Mary Lynn Kotz Award, Library of Virginia Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed 'desirable' and 'of the moment' in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea. But how do opinions of what is 'good', 'progressive' and 'cutting edge' guide styles? What is it that makes works of art fashionable and commercial? Fashionable Art critically explores the relationships between art, commerce, taste and cultural value. Each chapter covers a major style or movement, from Chinese and Aboriginal art, Cubism and Pop Art to alternative identity and outsider art, exploring how contemporary art has been shaped since the 1970s. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Adorno and Bourdieu to Simmel and Zizek, expert visual cultural scholars Geczy and Millner engage with both historical and contemporary debates on this lively topic. Taking a complex view of the meaning of fashion as it relates to art, while also offering critiques of 'art as fashion', Fashionable Art is an original, key text that will be essential reading for students and scholars of art history, fashion studies and material culture.
Designed for readers with no or little prior knowledge of the
subject, this concise anthology brings together key texts in
aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialisation, mass politics and consumerism. From Manet onwards, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And from modernism's retreat into abstraction to subsequent demands placed on audiences, from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going. In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and extends from a malign condition to be struggled against, to an experience to be embraced, or explored as a site of resistance.In this anthology, the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment is contextualized in a long view which encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the USA of silence, repetition or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance and film; Punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition from the end of the 1980s of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labour alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous.Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alys, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Bernadette Corporation, John Cage, Critical Art Ensemble, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Robert Morris, John Pilson, Sigmar Polke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Faith Wilding, Janet Zweig.Writers include Ina Blom, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jennifer Doyle, Alla Efimova, Jonathan Flatley, Julian Jason Haladyn, The Invisible Committee, Jonathan D. Katz, Chris Kraus, Tan Lin, Sven Lutticken, John Miller, Agne Narusyte, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne, Patrice Petro, Christine Ross, Moira Roth, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Zinovyev.
Creative Encounters explores the forms and functions of contemporary interreligious dialogue by focusing on artists who are active in this field across different art forms and different religious positions. It seeks to understand how artists formulate a dialogical worldview in a religiously plural and post-secular context and what motivates them to engage in dialogue. Traditional normative theories of interreligious dialogue are called into question. Critical attention is brought to the narrow focus on dialogue as a purely intellectual quest for making the religious other, as an abstract but coherent theological and historical entity, intelligible. A contrasting view of dialogue as a question of interpersonal ethics inspired primarily by the philosophy of Buber is introduced. The study is thoroughly empirical in scope, building on in-depth interviews with artists. The analytical approach is qualitative, resting on a hermeneutically inspired epistemology.
New Perspectives on Brucke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brucke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brucke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Brucke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Brucke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.
Color Workbook presents a wide-ranging overview of color theory and design combined with student activities that reinforce color concepts through hands-on experience. With a practical focus partnered with accessible explanations and application exercises, this program continues to prove successful with students and instructors. The new edition contains enhanced images and updated interactive activities for students to apply the concepts in each chapter. When paired with the new MySearchLab with eText, this program has never been more engaging and accessible. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: * Identify color theoretical concepts * Learn color techniques * Recognize the use of design elements and principles * Apply color theories into one's personal artwork Note: MySearchLab with eText does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MySearchLab with eText, please visit www.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a ValuePack of the text + MySearchLab (at no additional cost): ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205877117 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205877119.
An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary art and critical discourse, "Narrating the Catastrophe" guides readers through unfamiliar textual landscapes where "being" is defined as an act rather than a form. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's notion of intersubjective narrative identity as well as the catastrophe theory of Gilles Deleuze, Jac Saorsa establishes an alternative perspective from which to interpret and engage with the world around us. A highly original--and visually appealing--take on a high-profile issue in contemporary critical debate, this book will appeal to all those interested in visual arts and philosophy.
From the opening of The Louvre to the launch of Tate Modern and beyond, this accessible and succinct publication traces the development of the museum concept - encompassing curatorial, scholarly, political and cultural spheres - and its evolving role within society. In the first section, Schubert looks at the complex history of the museum in specific cities at critical moments, for instance New York between 1930 and 1950 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and the Museum of Modern Art was founded. The second section focuses on the success and unprecedented development of the museum in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, highlighting the need for cities and institutions to revise their programmes in response to a surge of interest in the arts. The final section looks at the museum's predicament nearly a decade after The Curator's Egg was originally published in 2000, exploring the museum's evolution in a post-9/11 environment.
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.
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.
In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. If a painting does not represent, what is it, other than mere paint, flung in the public's face? Whistler's answer was simple: painting is music - or it is poetry. Georges Braque, half a century later, echoed Whistler's answer. So did Braque's friends Apollinaire and Ponge. They presented their poetry as music too - and as painting. But meanwhile, composers such as Satie and Stravinsky were presenting their own art - music - as if it transposed the values of painting or of poetry. The fundamental principle of this intermedial aesthetic, which bound together an extraordinary fraternity of artists in all media in Paris, from 1885 to 1945, was this: we must always think about the value of a work of art, not within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the value of art in another medium. Peter Dayan traces the history of this principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', why it declined as a vision from the 1960s and how, in the 21st century, it is fighting back. |
You may like...
|