Download or read book Our Beautiful Dry and Distant Texts written by James Elkins and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or as objective discovery and reporting.
Download or read book Tintoretto s Difference written by Kamini Vellodi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative account of the philosophical problem of 'difference' in art history, Tintoretto's Difference offers a new reading of this pioneering 16th century painter, drawing upon the work of the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Bringing together philosophical, art historical, art theoretical and art historiographical analysis, it is the first book-length study in English of Tintoretto for nearly two decades and the first in-depth exploration of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for the understanding of early modern art and for the discipline of art history. With a focus on Deleuze's important concept of the diagram, Tintoretto's Difference positions the artist's work within a critical study of both art history's methods, concepts and modes of thought, and some of the fundamental dimensions of its scholarly practice: context, tradition, influence, and fact. Indicating potentials of the diagrammatic for art historical thinking across the registers of semiotics, aesthetics, and time, Tintoretto's Difference offers at once an innovative study of this seminal artist, an elaboration of Deleuze's philosophy of the diagram, and a new avenue for a philosophical art history.
Download or read book Projecting a Camera written by Edward Branigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Projecting a Camera, film theorist Edward Branigan offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding film theory. Why, for example, does a camera move? What does a camera "know"? (And when does it know it?) What is the camera's relation to the subject during long static shots? What happens when the screen is blank? Through a wide-ranging engagement with Wittgenstein and theorists of film, he offers one of the most fully developed understandings of the ways in which the camera operates in film. With its thorough grounding in the philosophy of spectatorship and narrative, Projecting a Camera takes the study of film to a new level. With the care and precision that he brought to Narrative Comprehension and Film, Edward Branigan maps the ways in which we must understand the role of the camera, the meaning of the frame, the role of the spectator, and other key components of film-viewing. By analyzing how we think, discuss, and marvel about the films we see, Projecting a Camera, offers insights rich in implications for our understanding of film and film studies.
Download or read book The Winchester Guide to Keywords and Concepts for International Students in Art Media and Design written by Annie Makhoul and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This welcome new resource for international students in art, design, and media provides clear explanations of the terminology they must master in order to fulfill their academic potential and enrich their professional careers. Offers a much-requested new resource that fills a gap in the academic market Tailored specifically to the needs of international students in art, design, and media Color-coded key words and phrases for quick reference Includes sections on study skills, academic expectations in Western institutions, methodologies, and important theorists An ideal handbook for curators and gallery staff everywhere for whom English is a non-native language
Download or read book The A to Z of Aesthetics written by Dabney Townsend and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics is not a "factual" discipline; there are no aesthetic facts. The word itself is derived from the Greek word for "feeling" and the discipline arises because of the need to find a place for the passions within epistemology--the branch of philosophy that investigates our beliefs. Aesthetics is more than just the study of beauty; it is a study of that which appeals to our senses, most often in connection with the classification, analysis, appreciation, and understanding of art. The A to Z of Aesthetics covers its history from Classical Greece to the present, including entries on non-western aesthetics. The book contains a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the main concepts, terminology, important persons (philosophers, critics, and artists), and the rules and criteria we apply in making judgments on art. By providing concise information on aesthetics, this dictionary is not only accessible to students, but it provides details and facts to specialists in the field.
Download or read book Sensible Objects written by Elizabeth Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.
Download or read book Visual Studies written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest book, James Elkins offers a road map through the field of visual studies, describing its major concerns and its principal theoretical sources. Then, with the skill and insight that have marked his successful books on art and visuality, Elkins takes the reader down a side road where visual studies can become a more interesting place. Why look only at the same handful of theorists? Why exclude from one's field of vision non-Western art or the wealth of scientific images?
Download or read book Globalizing Contemporary Art written by Lotte Philipsen and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2010-10-31 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, contemporary art is a global phenomenon. Biennales, museums, art fairs, galleries, auction houses, academies and audiences for contemporary visual art are all institutions whose presence on a global scale has widened tremendously during the past two decades. Thus, by including contemporary art from non-Western regions, these traditional Western art institutions have not only broadened their scope to a greater extent, but have also been challenged themselves by the new cultural, economic and media world order of globalization. How contemporary art is made 'international' is the subject of this book, tracing as it does developments during the past two decades, while focusing particularly on the mechanisms of 'globality' which are at work in the art world today. The book critically investigates fundamental questions like: What is 'New Internationalism' in contemporary art, and how it affected the art world? How does New Internationalism relate to concepts like ethnicity, aesthetics, standard art history, and new media? And how is New Internationalism, rather paradoxically, furthered to a greater extent by global capitalism than it is by seemingly progressive art projects?
Download or read book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.
Download or read book Cultivating Picturacy written by James A. W. Heffernan and published by Baylor University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art.
Download or read book Site Sight Insight written by John Dixon Hunt and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space. Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years—a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the Désert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Download or read book Art History Versus Aesthetics written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented collection, over twenty of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject including Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Jay Bernstein ponder the disconnect between these two disciplines. The volume has a radically innovative structure: it begins with introductions, and centres on an animated conversation among ten historians and aestheticians. That conversation was then sent to twenty scholars for commentary and their responses are very diverse: some are informal letters and others full essays with footnotes. Some think they have the answer in hand, and others raise yet more questions. The volume ends with two synoptic essays, one by a prominent aesthetician and the other by a literary critic. This stimulating inaugural volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question; Does philosophy have anything to say to art history?
Download or read book The Hybrid Practitioner written by Caroline Voet and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring different, interrelated roles for the architect and researcher The practice of architecture manifests in myriad forms and engagements. Overcoming false divides, this volume frames the fertile relationship between the cultural and scholarly production of academia and the process of designing and building in the material world. It proposes the concept of the hybrid practitioner, who bridges the gap between academia and practice by considering how different aspects of architectural practice, theory, and history intersect, opening up a fascinating array of possibilities for an active engagement with the present. The book explores different, interrelated roles for practicing architects and researchers, from the reproductive activities of teaching, consulting and publishing, through the reflective activities of drawing and writing, to the practice of building. The notion of the hybrid practitioner will appeal strongly to students, teachers and architectural practitioners as part of a multifaceted professional environment. By connecting academic interests with those of the professional realm, The Hybrid Practitioner addresses a wider readership embracing landscape design, art theory and aesthetics, European history, and the history and sociology of professions.
Download or read book Master Narratives and their Discontents written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bracing engagement with the many versions of art history, James Elkins argues that the story of modernism and postmodernism is almost always told in terms of four narratives. Works of art are either seen as modern or postmodern, or praised for their technical skill or because of the politics they appear to embody. These are master narratives of contemporary criticism, and each leads to a different understanding of what art is and does. Both a cogent overview of the state of thinking about art and a challenge to think outside the art historical box, Master Narratives and their Discontents is the first volume in a series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.
Download or read book Partisan Canons written by Anna Brzyski and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-08 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change. Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history. Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos
Download or read book Postcolonising the Medieval Image written by Eva Frojmovic and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of this book involves the application of postcolonial theories and/or concepts used in postcolonial and cognate studies to the field of medieval European art, including Byzantine art, and Byzantine art in Asia Minor.
Download or read book Stories of Art written by James Elkins and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoughtful, engaging, and intimate history of art that offers a critical analysis of the assumptions on which the entire discipline of art history depends. Concise and original, this accessible second edition continues to act as an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks of the past. Cultures have their own stories – about themselves, about other cultures – and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. James Elkins persuasively demonstrates there can never be one story of art now that art historians are concerned with gender, diversity, inclusiveness, and decolonization. Stories of Art is an interactive, iconoclastic text, encouraging readers to imagine how they would present art history in an age of multiple narratives. Elkins discusses decolonizing the discipline, representing race and ethnicity, Eurocentrism, post-nationalism, and indigenous voices while examining histories of art written in China, Persia, Turkey, and India. This new edition features QR codes to 27 short videos that introduce challenging ideas about art and history in a clear and open way, encouraging active reading, and including ideas for writing exercises and class conversations. A must read for students and scholars interested in exploring the cultural function of art history.
