You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
How are we to think of works of art? Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson deploys an extraordinary range of references—from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch—to explore the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.
Great ideas don’t just happen. Innovation springs from creative thinking—a method of the human mind that we can study and learn. In The Art of Ideas, William Duggan and Amy Murphy bring together business concepts with stories of creativity in art, politics, and history to provide a visual and accessible guide to the art and science of new and useful ideas. In chapters accompanied by charming and inviting illustrations, Duggan and Murphy detail how to spark your own ideas and what to do while waiting for inspiration to strike. They show that regardless of the field, innovations happen in the same way: examples from history, presence of mind, creative combination, and resolution to action. The Art of Ideas features case studies and exercises that explain how to break down problems, search for precedents, and creatively combine past models to form new ideas. It showcases how Picasso developed his painting style, how Gandhi became the man we know today, and how Netflix came to disrupt the movie-rental business. Lavishly illustrated in an appealing artistic style, The Art of Ideas helps readers unlock the secret to creativity in business and in life.
Art after Liberalism is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging social crises. It is also an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others. The apparent failures of liberal thinking mark its starting point. No longer can the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development be counted on to produce a world worth living in. No longer can talk of inclusion, representation, or a neutral public sphere pass for something like equality. It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fund...
The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creatio...
Artistic research has become an established mode of inquiry and knowledge production in many fields. Johanna Schindler examines the collaborative practices of two artistic research projects in the fields of digital musical instrument design and responsive environments. How are individual research modes organized? Which forms of knowledge are at stake? And what sort of influence do institutional settings, spatial arrangements, and boundary objects have on the emerging research dynamics? Schindler's ethnographic study explores these questions and suggests concrete measurements that can be utilized to adapt the research environments, funding structures, and evaluation criteria of artistic research projects to the specific needs of this emerging field.
Arthur C. Danto is unique among philosophers for the breadth of his philosophical mind, his eloquent writing style, and the generous spirit embodied in all his work. Any collection of essays on his philosophy has to engage him on all these levels, because this is how he has always engaged the world, as a philosopher and person. In this volume, renowned philosophers and art historians revisit Danto's theories of art, action, and history, and the depth of his innovation as a philosopher of culture. Essays explore the importance of Danto's philosophy and criticism for the contemporary art world, along with his theories of perception, action, historical knowledge, and, most importantly for Danto...
Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.
Describing an outstanding example of the use of forensic art therapy in a criminal case, David Gussak, contracted by the defence to analyse the evidence in this instance, recounts his findings and presentation in court, as well as the future implications of his work for criminal proceedings.
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at on...
Many on the left lament an apathy or amnesia toward recent acts of war. Particularly during the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, opposition to war seemed to lack the heat and potency of the 1960s and 1970s, giving the impression that passionate dissent was all but dead. Through an analysis of three politically engaged works of art, Rosalyn Deutsche argues against this melancholic attitude, confirming the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war. Deutsche selects three videos centered on the deployment of the atomic bomb: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Hiroshima Projection (1999), made after the first Gulf War; Silvia Kolbowski's After Hiroshima mon amour (200...