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Kitsch
Kitsch: the mere word evokes mental images of cutesy collectibles, treacly trinkets, sweetly sentimental scenes, thematically trite tabletop tchotchkes, or perhaps anemic appropriations of canonical works of art. Frequently dismissed as facile, lowbrow, or one-off, throwaway aesthetics, kitsch elicits responses that range from the sardonic smirk laced with derision to the grin glimmering with the indulgence in a “guilty” pleasure. Kitsch, however, is surprisingly mobile and complex, as evidenced by its recent renewal as “kitschy cool.” This ambiguity not only allows it to gesture towards a disparate array of artifacts and ideations, but also to be pushed and pulled in various applica...
The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn
A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artists career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstra...
The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art
With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist a...
Partisan Canons
Case studies that counter the idea of a transcendent art canon by demonstrating that the content of any and every canon is historically and culturally specific.
Thomas Kinkade
An anthology on American artist Thomas Kincaid, exploring his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture.
Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds
Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds foregrounds how the two important fields of visual culture and Internet culture interact. This collection of essays explores the intersections, overlaps and disparities in terms of how the two discourses illuminate our everyday negotiations as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and virtual/visual imaginings for constructing who we are. What is being examined here are the ways in which we use visual/virtual lenses to see the world both individually and collectively. This book represents a transnational effort that began as a series of conversations during the Mid Atlantic Popular/American Culture conferences from 2005–2009. Th...
Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
This book deals with historical consciousness and its artistic expressions in contemporary Greece since 1989 from the point of view that contemporary Greeks have been faced with the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past and, on the other, a traumatic contemporary history of wars, expulsions, civil strife and political and economic crises. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective traumas call for interpretations not only from historians but also from artists and storytellers. Therefore, the chapters in this volume explore the ways in which sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece. Through a...
Insulting Music
Insulting Music explores insult in and around music and demonstrates that insult is a key dimension of Western musical experience and practice. There is insult in the music we hear, how we express our musical preferences, as well as our reactions to settings and sites of music and music making. More than that, when music and insult overlap, the effects can both promote social justice or undermine it, foster connection or break it apart. The coming together of music and insult shapes our sense of self and view of other people, underlining and constructing difference, often in terms of race and gender. In the last decade, music’s power dynamics have become an increasingly important concern for music scholars, critics, and fans. Studying musicians such as Frank Zappa, Nickleback, Taylor Swift, and the Insane Clown Posse, and musical phenomena such as musician jokes, the use of music to torture people, and the playing of music in restaurants, this book shows the various and contradictory ways insults are used to negotiate those existing dynamics in and around music.
The Changing Meaning of Kitsch
This book inaugurates a new phase in kitsch studies. Kitsch, an aesthetic slur of the 19th and the 20th century, is increasingly considered a positive term and at the heart of today’s society. Eleven distinguished authors from philosophy, cultural studies and the arts discuss a wide range of topics including beauty, fashion, kitsch in the context of mourning, bio-art, visual arts, architecture and political kitsch. In addition, the editors provide a concise theoretical introduction to the volume and the subject. The role of kitsch in contemporary culture and society is innovatively explored and the volume aims not to condemn but to accept and understand why kitsch has become acceptable today.
The Computer Culture Reader
The Computer Culture Reader brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to probe the underlying structures and overarching implications of the ways in which people and computers collaborate in the production of meaning. The contributors navigate the heady and sometimes terrifying atmosphere surrounding the digital revolution in an attempt to take its measure through examinations of community and modes of communication, representation, information-production, learning, work, and play. The authors address questions of art, reality, literacy, history, heroism, commerce, crime, and death, as well as specific technologies ranging from corporate web portals and computer games to social ...
