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 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 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History written by James Elkins and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a provocative essay of reflections on traditional mainstream scholarship on Chinese art as done by towering figures in the field such as James Cahill and Wen Fong. James Elkins offers an engaging and accessible survey of his personal journey encountering and interpreting Chinese art through Western scholars' writings. He argues that the search for optimal comparisons is itself a modern, Western interest, and that art history as a discipline is inherently Western in several identifiable senses. Although he concentrates on art history in this book, and on Chinese painting in particular, these issues bear implications for Sinology in general, and for wider questions about humanistic inquiry and historical writing. Jennifer Purtle's Foreword provides a useful counterpoint from the perspective of a Chinese art specialist, anticipating and responding to other specialists’ likely reactions to Elkins's hypotheses.
Download or read book A Realist Theory of Art History written by Ian Verstegen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Art written by Jonathan Vickery and published by Berg. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been so topical, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s. With entries by leading international experts, this book presents a concise, critical appraisal of thinkers and their ideas about art and its place in the wider cultural context. A guide to the key thinkers who shape today's world of art, this book is a vital reference for anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, its history, philosophy and practice.Theodor ADORNO * Roland BARTHES * Georges BATAILLE * Jean BAUDRILLARD * Walter BENJAMIN * JM BERNSTEIN * Pierre BOURDIEU * Nicolas BOURRIAUD * Benjamin BUCHLOH * Daniel BUREN * Judith BUTLER * Noël CARROLL * Stanley CAVELL * TJ CLARK * Arthur C. DANTO * Gilles DELEUZE * Jacques DERRIDA * George DICKIE * Thierry DE DUVE * James ELKINS * Hal FOSTER * Michel FOUCAULT * Michael FRIED * Dan GRAHAM * Clement GREENBERG * Fredric JAMESON * Mike KELLEY * Mary KELLY * Melanie KLEIN * Joseph KOSUTH * Rosalind KRAUSS * Julia KRISTEVA * Barbara KRUGER * Niklas LUHMANN * Jean-François LYOTARD * Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY * WJT MITCHELL * Robert MORRIS * Linda NOCHLIN * Adrian PIPER * Griselda POLLOCK * Robert SMITHSON * Jeff WALL * Albrecht WELLMER * Richard WOLLHEIM
Download or read book Renaissance Theory written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Theory presents an animated conversation among art historians about the optimal ways of conceptualizing Renaissance art, and the links between Renaissance art and contemporary art and theory. This is the first discussion of its kind, involving not only questions within Renaissance scholarship, but issues of concern to art historians and critics in all fields. Organized as a virtual roundtable discussion, the contributors discuss rifts and disagreements about how to understand the Renaissance and debate the principal texts and authors of the last thirty years who have sought to reconceptualize the period. They then turn to the issue of the relation between modern art and the Renaissance: Why do modern art historians and critics so seldom refer to the Renaissance? Is the Renaissance our indispensable heritage, or are we cut off from it by the revolution of modernism? The volume includes an introduction by Rebecca Zorach and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on Renaissance art including Stephen Campbell, Michael Cole, Frederika Jakobs, Claire Farago, and Matt Kavaler.
Download or read book Interpreting Art written by Sam Rose and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds. Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic ‘intention’ at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s ‘reception’? How can ‘context’ be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time? Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.
Download or read book Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin Greek and Slavic Traditions written by Maria Alessia Rossi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework of this volume provides a holistic view of the visual culture of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, as well as notions of cross-cultural contact, while putting on the global map of art history the eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Postcolonising the Medieval Image written by Eva Frojmovic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court.
Download or read book Stories of Art written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of Art is James Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. 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. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them. Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in ‘the story?’ What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the centre of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual. True multiculturalism may be an impossibility, but art lovers can each create a ‘story of art’ that is right for themselves.
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 177 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 Is Art History Global written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the third volume in The Art Seminar, James Elkin's series of conversations on art and visual studies. Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.
Download or read book Engaging with Literature of Commitment Volume 2 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection ranges far and wide, as befits the personality and accomplishments of the dedicatee, Geoffrey V. Davis, German studies and exile literature scholar, postcolonialist (if there are ‘specialties’, then Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Black Britain), journal and book series editor.... The volume opens with essays on cultural theory and practice, proceeds to close analyses of ‘settler colony’ texts from Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand (drama, fiction, and poetry) as well as Pacific drama and Canadian indigeneity, thence ‘homeward’ to the UK (black drama, Scottish fiction, the music of Morrissey) and to German themes (exile literature; fictions about Hitler). Because Geoff’s commitment to literature has always been ‘hands-on’, the book closes with a selection of poems and experimental prose. Writers discussed include Carmen Aguirre, Hany Abu-Assad, Beryl Bainbridge, Albert Belz, Peter Bland, Peter Carey, Lynda Chanwai–Earle, Kamala Das, Robert Drewe, Éric Emmanuel–Schmitt, Toa Fraser, Stephen Fry, Dianna Fuemana, Mavis Gallant, Alasdair Gray, Xavier Her¬bert, Janette Turner Hospital, Elizabeth Jolley, Wendy Lill, Varanasi Nagalakshmi, Arundhati Roy, Daniel Sloate, Drew Hayden Taylor, Jane Urquhart, Roy Williams, and Arnold Zweig.
Download or read book A Museum on the Verge written by Jeffrey Abt and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of America's largest and oldest municipal art museums. However, even as the museum grew into a distinguished collection, there were threats of closure. The DIA has walked a financial tightrope since it opened just over a century ago, and was nearly closed by government funding cuts in the 1970s and 1990s. Now Jeffrey Abt tells how the DIA has had to struggle to maintain its fine art collection with barely enough income to remain open. A Museum on the Verge goes behind the scenes at the DIA to disclose the political, economic, and social forces that shaped the museum from its founding to the present day. Drawing on new archival research, Abt reveals that the growing discrepancy between the museum's size and its operating budget was the result of a century of ad hoc solutions to institutional problems that left the DIA vulnerable to annual income losses -- especially reductions of government funding. He also explains its complex relations with private and government entities and delineates the integral role of the museum's support group, the Founders Society. Abt's account is supplemented by a wealth of material, including legal documents and numerical data taken at five-year intervals from the 1880s through 2000 that is presented in both tables and graphs. The data, which comprehensively survey vital statistics such as attendance, collections growth, and finances, provide a rich resource for comparative research on other museums. As a case study of a prominent public institution, A Museum on the Verge offers an invaluable research model for scholars and museum professionals alike.
Download or read book Systems We Have Loved written by Eve Meltzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early 1960s, theorists like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, Systems We Have Loved shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront. Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century’s most transformative movements—one artistic, one expansively theoretical—and she reveals their shared dream—or nightmare—of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art’s embrace of the world as an information system, Systems We Have Loved breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.
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 Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style written by Pablo Helguera and published by Jorge Pinto Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2007 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This funny book masquerades as an old-fashioned guide to the manners and foibles of the art world, written by a savvy 21st century artist. But it is clever, and has many voices: snide like Miss Manners, sweet and impeccable like Emily Post, sharp like Swifts encyclopedia of clichs, and sneaky like David Wilsons fabricated documents for the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
