![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art
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.
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.
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.
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.
Henry James records in his autobiography a transformative childhood experience in the Louvre when he foresaw the 'fun' that art might bring him. Many of his novels and stories indeed go on to dramatise the circumstances of the artist's life, and their allusions to art are extensive. This complete collection of essays and reviews presents the observations of a major author whose critical judgments have become central to an understanding of late-nineteenth-century art. Readers will find James's texts as they first appeared, with a wealth of editorial support, which captures the mood and values of the art scene in Britain, France and America - its interesting minor figures, as well as names still familiar. Many of these items are difficult to access and have not previously been available in a scholarly edition. The editorial apparatus includes a general introduction, a chronology, a textual variants section, and a biographical guide to artists.
Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. This anthology explores the ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art. In an era of diet pills, record antidepressant usage, yoga and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, dictating every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty and the productive body that have defined the western scientific paradigms; contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, incorporating personal and singular approaches to vexed experiences surrounding questions of health and identity. Raw, confrontational and affective, the writings in Health engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies and the maladies that seize them also reveal structural aspects of our societies, particularly how sickness intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender and class. This reader questions the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape people's perceptions of illness and normativity. Artists surveyed include Oreet Ashery, Lorenza Boettner, The Canaries and Taraneh Fazeli, Dora Garcia, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Mahmoud Khaled, Carolyn Lazard, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Simone Leigh, Mujeres Creando, Park McArthur, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Pedro Reyes, Tabita Rezaire. Writers include Khairani Barokka, Dodie Bellamy, Rizvana Bradley, bell hooks, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Susan Sontag, R.D. Laing, Paul B. Preciado.
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.
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.
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.
The essential guide to colour theory and mixing for artists. Full of beautiful, intricate handpainted colour wheels and practical advice on using and mixing colour, this book is a must-have for any artist working with pigment and paint. Starting from the basics of colour and working up to the complexities of tonality, harmony, opacity and pigment, artist Ian Goldsmith explores and explains all the key elements of colour and what it can do. A comprehensive paint index at the back of the book provides an indispensable reference guide for choosing and purchasing materials that no practising artist should be without. Including:
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.
The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the "end of things," one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism-and romantic studies-within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.
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.
In The Power of the Avant-Garde, contemporary artists from different art disciplines enter into dialogue with their colleagues from the historical avant-garde movement. Luc Tuymans talks about 'Le Grand Cheval' of Raymond Duchamp-Villon; Marlene Dumas describes her passion for Edvard Munch; John Baldessari discusses the genius Marcel Broodthaers,...This book makes surprising links, shedding new light on the power and influence of art before, during and after World War I.
Contemporary art is deeply engaged with the subject of classical myth. Yet within the literature on contemporary art, little has been said about this provocative relationship. Composed of fourteen original essays, Contemporary Art and Classical Myth addresses this scholarly gap, exploring, and in large part establishing, the multifaceted intersection of contemporary art and classical myth. Moving beyond the notion of art as illustration, the essays assembled here adopt a range of methodological frameworks, from iconography to deconstruction, and do so across an impressive range of artists and objects: Francis Alys, Ghada Amer, Wim Delvoye, Luciano Fabro, Joanna Frueh, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Duane Hanson, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Kara Walker, and an iconic photograph by Richard Drew subsequently entitled The Falling Man. Arranged so as to highlight both thematic and structural affinities, these essays manifest various aspects of the link between contemporary art and classical myth, while offering novel insights into the artists and myths under consideration. Some essays concentrate on single works as they relate to specific myths, while others take a broader approach, calling on myth as a means of grappling with dominant trends in contemporary art.
Gewalt und Krieg sind heute wie auch in der Vormoderne keine ausschliesslich mannliche Domane, sondern Raume der Manner und Frauen gleichermassen. In Zeiten kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen werden Geschlechterrollen ausgebildet, konforme und abweichende Verhaltensweisen ausprobiert und Konzepte von Mannlichkeit und Weiblichkeit entwickelt. Erstmals fur die Epoche des Mittelalters (7.-16. Jahrhundert) werden daraus resultierende Fragestellungen im interdisziplinaren und kulturubergreifenden Vergleich untersucht. Die Beitrage eroertern Geschlechterbeziehungen auf Darstellungs- und Handlungsebene und beschreiben Interaktionsformen in Kontexten von Gewalt und Krieg. UEber den europaischen Raum mit seinen zahlreichen Fehden und Heerzugen hinaus werden auch die Kreuzzuge in den Blick genommen.
Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples. Steven Leuthold discusses both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies from African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American art. Individual chapters address broad intercultural issues in art, including Art and Culture, Primitivism and Otherness, Colonialism, Nationalism, Art and Religion, Symbolism and Interpretation, Style and Ethnicity, A Sense of Place, Art and Social Order, Gender, and the Self, considering these themes as constructs that frame our understanding of art. Cross-Cultural Issues in Art draws upon ideas and case studies from cultural and critical studies, art history, ethno-aesthetics and area studies, visual anthropology, and philosophy, and will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in these fields.
There is growing interest in the relationship between the arts and Christian faith. Much has been written about the arts and theology and the place of the arts in church life. Not as much has been written, however, about how the arts might actually advance spiritual formation in terms of the cumulative effect of religious experience and intentional practices. This book provides a modest step forward in that conversation, a conversation between theological aesthetics and practical theology. Understanding aesthetics as 'the realm of sense perception' and spiritual formation as 'growing capacities to participate in God's purposes', James McCullough suggests how these dynamics can mutually enhance each other, with the arts as an effective catalyst for this relationship. McCullough proposes an analysis of artistic communication and explores exciting examples from music, poetry, and painting, which render theoretical proposals in concrete terms. This book will engage both those new to the arts and those already deeply familiar with them.
Learn how to paint on your iPad like the professionals in Beginner's Guide to Procreate, a comprehensive introduction to this industry-standard software. Accessible and versatile, Procreate is an ideal tool for anyone wanting to give digital painting a go. Step-by-step tutorials, quick tips, and inspiring artwork ensure you'll have all you need to create stunning concept art quickly and easily.
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. -- .
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.
For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists. The Artist s Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include:
Through the examination of great artists lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
|