Download or read book Art and Essence written by Stephen Davies and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional new collection comprises 13 new essays on the nature and definability of art. Presenting a wide offering of contemporary philosophical perspectives—including theoretical, historical, cross-cultural, and evolutionary—Art and Essence offers thorough critical discussion on the extensive contemporary philosophical literature on the subject. The work here contrasts the idea of theorizing about why we make and consume art with that of defining it; furthermore, the authors consider the possibility that art has no definable essence and discusses differences and connections between art and nature. More historical chapters focus on ancient and medieval approaches to art, while others discuss the work of philosophers such as Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. Non-Western cultures cultivated their own, distinctive art practices and philosophies, as discussed in chapters on India and Japan, and contemporary philosophers have added their own unique perspectives. The authors are among the leading philosophers on the subjects they cover, making Art and Essence an invaluable tool for scholars of a wide variety of fields.
Download or read book Sense and Essence written by Birgit Meyer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts—the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion"—the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.
Download or read book Art and Culture written by Clement Greenberg and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1971-06-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Clement Greenberg is, internationally, the best-known American art critic popularly considered to be the man who put American vanguard painting and sculpture on the world map. . . . An important book for everyone interested in modern painting and sculpture."—The New York Times
Download or read book The Culture of Possibility written by Arlene Goldbard and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Van Jones said it well: "If we're going to end this fiscal madness and start rebuilding America, we're going to have to get creative We need a tsunami of music, film, poetry and art. The Culture of Possibility shows us how creativity can take our story back from Corporation Nation, tilting the culture towards justice, equity, and innovation. I urge you to read this book " We are in the midst of seismic cultural change. In the old paradigm, priorities are shaped by a mechanistic worldview that privileges whatever can be numbered, measured, and weighed; human beings are pressured to adapt to the terms set by their own creations. How we feel, how we connect, how we spend our time, how we make our way and come to know each other-these are all part of the scenery. In the new paradigm, things are given their true value. People care passionately about how they and the things they value are depicted. They revive themselves after a long workday with music or dance, by making something beautiful for themselves or their loved ones, by expressing their deepest feelings in poetry or watching a film that never fails to comfort. In the new paradigm, it is understood that culture prefigures economics and politics; it molds markets; and it expresses and embodies the creativity and resilience that are the human species' greatest strengths. The bridge between paradigms is being built by artists and others who have learned to deploy artists' cognitive, imaginative, empathic, and narrative skills. The bridge is made of the stories that the old paradigm can't hear, the lives that it doesn't count, the imagined future it can't encompass. Using first-person stories, drawing on both history and headlines, embracing new knowledge from education, medicine, cognitive science, spirituality, politics, and other realms, The Culture of Possibility shows why, how, and where we can build a bridge to a sustainable future.
Download or read book Art and Faith written by Makoto Fujimura and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a world-renowned painter, an exploration of creativity’s quintessential—and often overlooked—role in the spiritual life “Makoto Fujimura’s art and writings have been a true inspiration to me. In this luminous book, he addresses the question of art and faith and their reconciliation with a quiet and moving eloquence.”—Martin Scorsese “[An] elegant treatise . . . Fujimura’s sensitive, evocative theology will appeal to believers interested in the role religion can play in the creation of art.”—Publishers Weekly Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Makoto Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of “making.” What he does in the studio is theological work as much as it is aesthetic work. In between pouring precious, pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create the prismatic, refractive surfaces of his art, he comes into the quiet space in the studio, in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise. Ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, and from Mark Rothko to Japanese Kintsugi technique, he shows how unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives. This poignant and beautiful book offers the perspective of, in Christian Wiman’s words, “an accidental theologian,” one who comes to spiritual questions always through the prism of art.
Download or read book Symbolic Essence and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture written by William H. Jordy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence'), this collection contains critical writings on works by Mies, Corbusier, Kahn, and Venturi, as well as one previously unpublished text. Jordy leads readers to discover important connections of architecture with art, literature, intellectual history, symbolic structures, social purpose and community. He significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture.
Download or read book The Invention of Art written by Larry E. Shiner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of ine art is a modern invention - and that the lines drawn between art and craft emerged only as the result of key European social transformations during the long eighteenth century"--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Carole A Feuerman written by Carole Feuerman and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 1999 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Carole A. Feuerman's sculpture combines superrealist technique with a humanist approach to her subjects. This first monograph on her work is filled with David Finn's dramatic photographs covering two decades of her work, including many enlarged details and multiple views, providing a cinematic, almost three-dimensional experience. The work - in resin, cast marble, bronze, and other materials, often painted - ranges from early erotic reliefs through full-scale sculptures of athletes and nudes. Her women at their toilette are sculptural tours-de-force, yet their intimacy recalls Degas's works on similar themes. Recent fragments and body mappings are experiments with abstraction, deconstruction and conceptualism, at the same time that they explore the emotional life of their subjects penetrating to their spirit." "All of Feuerman's work reflects the two aspects of her vision. Her work is motivated by questions about the nature of reality, and her remarkable skill as an artist leads the viewer to the same questions. Yet beyond the simulacrum of reality, Feuerman also manages to convey the feeling behind the intense physicality, the passion and sensuality behind the seemingly mundane pose."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Perfection written by Lorenzo Pericolo and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2019 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether a painting, a sculpture, or a building, works of art in early modern Europe must achieve the highest degree of perfection. If in the Middle Ages perfection is mostly perceived as a technical quality inherent in craftsmanship--a quality that can be judged according to often unspoken criteria agreed upon by the members of a guild--from the fifteenth century onwards perfection comes to incorporate a set of rhetorical and literary qualities originally extraneous to art making. Furthermore, perfection becomes a transcendent quality: something that cannot be measured only in terms of craftsmanship. In the Baroque period, perfection turns into obsession as a result of the emergence of historical models of artistic evolution in which perfection is already historically embodied--in the first place, Vasari's investiture of Michelangelo as a universal canon for painting, sculpture, and architecture. This book aims to define, analyze, and reassess the concept of perfection in the arts and architecture of early modern Europe. What is perfection? What makes a work of art unique, emblematic, or irreplaceable? Does perfection necessarily relate to individuality? Is the perfect work connate with or independent from its author? Can perfection be reproduced or represented? How do artists react to perfection? How do post-Vasarian models of art history come to terms with perfection? To what extent perfection in early modern Europe is the matter of rhetoric, literary theories, theology, and even scientific observation?
Download or read book Concerning the Spiritual in Art written by Wassily Kandinsky and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-20 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. 12 illustrations.
Download or read book Japanese Art in Detail written by John Reeve and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Japanese art? This book supplies an answer that gives a reader both a true picture and a fine understanding of Japanese art. Arranged thematically, the book includes chapters on nature and pleasure, landscape and beauty, all framed by themes of serenity and turmoil, the two poles of Japanese culture ancient and modern.
Download or read book Against Art and Culture written by Liam Dee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a negative definition of art in relation to the concept of culture, this book establishes the concept of ‘art/culture’ to describe the unity of these two fields around named-labour, idealised creative subjectivity and surplus signification. Contending a conceptual and social reality of a combined ‘art/culture’ , this book demonstrates that the failure to appreciate the dynamic totality of art and culture by its purported negators is due to almost all existing critiques of art and culture being defences of a ‘true’ art or culture against ‘inauthentic’ manifestations, and art thus ultimately restricting creativity to the service of the bourgeois commodity regime. While the evidence that art/culture enables commodification has long been available, the deduction that art/culture itself is fundamentally of the world of commodification has failed to gain traction. By applying a nuanced analysis of both commodification and the larger systems of ideological power, the book considers how the ‘surplus’ of art/culture is used to legitimate the bourgeois status quo rather than unravel it. It also examines possibilities for a post-art/culture world based on both existing practices that challenge art/culture identity as well as speculations on the integration of play and aesthetics into general social life. An out-and-out negation of art and culture, this book offers a unique contribution to the cultural critique landscape.
Download or read book A New Literary History of America written by Greil Marcus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-23 with total page 1129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.
Download or read book Definitions of Art written by Stephen Davies and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last thirty years, work in analytic philosophy of art has flourished, and it has given rise to considerably controversy. Stephen Davies describes and analyzes the definition of art as it has been discussed in Anglo-American philosophy during this period and, in the process, introduces his own perspective on ways in which we should reorient our thinking.Davies conceives of the debate as revealing two basic, conflicting approaches—the functional and the procedural—to the questions of whether art can be defined, and if so, how. As the author sees it, the functionalist believes that an object is a work of art only if it performs a particular function (usually, that of providing a rewarding aesthetic experience). By contrast the proceduralist believes that something is an artwork only if it has been created according to certain rules and procedures. Davies attempts to demonstrate the fruitfulness of viewing the debate in terms of this framework, and he develops new arguments against both points of view—although he is more critical of functional than of procedural definitions.Because it has generated so much of the recent literature, Davies starts his analysis with a discussion of Morris Weitz's germinal paper, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics." He goes on to examine other important works by Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and Ben Tilghman and develops in his critiques original arguments on such matters of the artificiality of artworks and the relevance of artists' intentions.
Download or read book Creative Reckonings written by Jessica Winegar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.
Download or read book Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture written by Laurie Hanquinet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Arts and Culture offers a comprehensive overview of sociology of art and culture, focusing especially – though not exclusively – on the visual arts, literature, music, and digital culture. Extending, and critiquing, Bourdieu’s influential analysis of cultural capital, the distinguished international contributors explore the extent to which cultural omnivorousness has eclipsed highbrow culture, the role of age, gender and class on cultural practices, the character of aesthetic preferences, the contemporary significance of screen culture, and the restructuring of popular culture. The Handbook critiques modes of sociological determinism in which cultural engagement is seen as the simple product of the educated middle classes. The contributions explore the critique of Eurocentrism and the global and cosmopolitan dimensions of cultural life. The book focuses particularly on bringing cutting edge ‘relational’ research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to bear on these debates. This handbook not only describes the field, but also proposes an agenda for its development which will command major international interest.
Download or read book The Essence of Line written by Jay McKean Fisher and published by Pennsylvania State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rarely seen drawings and watercolors by some of the most influential French artists of the nineteenth century are the subject of this richly illustrated publication from The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum. From revealing preparatory sketches to exquisite finished watercolors, more than 100 works by artists such as Eugene Delacroix, Honore Daumier, Paul Cezanne, and Edgar Degas illuminate the range of French art over the course of a century of innovation. The BMA and the Walters have combined holdings of more than 900 French drawings from the nineteenth century, one of the nation's strongest and richest collections of French art from this period. The publication also includes works from the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives. The Essence of Line offers the first comprehensive discussion of the formation of these collections and their significance for the history of French art. The catalogue includes essays by Jay McKean Fisher, William R. Johnston, and Cheryl K. Snay that provide insights into the artistic, commercial, and social functions that drawings served for their creators and collectors, as well as how collecting patterns influenced the development of modernism. Conservator Kimberly Schenck bridges the worlds of the collector and of the artist by examining the production and the use of drawing materials in an epoch of radical changes in technique as well as style. Published on the occasion of an exhibition jointly organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum, this book presents a panorama of sketches, watercolors, and presentation drawings, many of them little known outside a small circle of experts. It is correlated with an online database of more than 900 nineteenth-century French drawings in the holdings of these Baltimore museums.
