You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From Walt Disney World to the movie Natural Born Killers, this book explores uncommon indicators of the spiritual in contemporary art and culture. Drawing on a diversity of perspectives in philosophy and aesthetics to highlight conscious and unconscious manifestations of the sacred in art, this work makes a compelling case for its continued contemporary relevance. Contributors include Andrew Doerr, Melissa E. Feldman, Cher Krause Knight, Debra Koppman, Janice Mann, Dawn Perlmutter, Crispin Sartwell, and Susan Shantz.
Portraiture, the most popular genre of painting, occupies a central position in the history of Western art. Despite this, its status within academic art theory is uncertain. This volume provides an introduction to major issues in its history.
Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. Art can be considered as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. The author demonstrates that art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought, employing work from artists as Picasso, Watteau, Bacon, Dumas and Matthew Barney. Art confronts viewers with the 'pain points' of cultural experience, and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is concieved.
Winner, Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award in Business, Management and Accounting In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for everything from motion studies to employee selection to advertising. This practice gave rise to many features of modern industry familiar to us today: consulting, "scientific" approaches to business practice, illustrated advertising, and the use of applied psychology. In this imaginative study, Elspeth H. Brown examines the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. Discussing, among others, the work of Frederic...
AIDS & Representation explores portraits and self-portraits made in response to the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Addressing the work of artists including Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres through the interrelated themes of sickness and mortality, desire and sexual identity, love and loss, Fiona Johnstone shows how the self-representational practices of artists with HIV and AIDS offered a richly imaginative response to the limitations of early AIDS imagery. Johnstone argues that the AIDS epidemic changed the very nature of visual representation and artistic practice, necessitating a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human f...
The portrait has historically been understood as an artistic representation of a human subject. Its purpose was to provide a visual or psychological likenesses or an expression of personal, familial or social identity; it was typically associated with the privileged individual subject of Western modernity. Recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences however has responded to the complex nature of twenty-first century subjectivity and proffered fresh conceptual models and theories to analyse it. The contributors to Anti-Portraiture examine subjectivity via a range of media including sculpture, photography and installation, and make a convincing case for an expanded definition of portraiture. By offering a timely reappraisal of the terms through which this genre is approached, the chapter authors volunteer new paradigms in which to consider selfhood, embodiment and representation. In doing so they further this exciting academic debate and challenge the curatorial practices and acquisition policies of museums and galleries.
This book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism – the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture’s determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist magically captures. Every artist that has engaged with portraiture has had to deal with these issues and, therefore, with the question of being and identity.
Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.
From contemporary deployments of taxidermy, magic lanterns and microscopy to the visualization of forgotten lives, marginalized narratives and colonial histories, this book explores how the work of artists including Mat Collishaw, Yinka Shonibare, Tessa Farmer, Mark Dion, Dorothy Cross and Ingrid Pollard reimag(in)es the Victorians in the ‘present’. Examining how recent paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and films revisit and re-present nineteenth-century technologies, practices and events, the book’s rich interdisciplinary approach applies literary, media and linguistic theories to its analysis of visual art, alongside in-depth discussions of the Victorian inventions, c...
Work by contemporary artists from the U.S. and the U.K. that evokes a Victorian sensibility. The essays look at parallels between the two periods: turn-of-the-century anxiety, intellectual curiosity, consumerism, a preoccupation with sex and morality, an infatuation with new technology.