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Fringe and Fortune
Why does the distinction between high and popular art persist in spite of postmodernist predictions that it should vanish? Departing from the conventional view that such distinctions are class-related, Wesley Shrum concentrates instead on the way individuals form opinions about culture through the mediation of critics. He shows that it is the extent to which critics shape the reception of an art form that determines its place in the cultural hierarchy. Those who patronize "lowbrow" art--stand-up comedy, cabaret, movies, and popular music--do not heed critical opinions nearly as much as do those who patronize "highbrow" art--theater, opera, and classical music. Thus the role of critics is cru...
Fringe and Fortune
Item looks at the role and impact of critics with reference mainly to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Intellectual Pursuits
This book is a venture in constructive clarification of several basic topics in current humanities and social science discourses that are badly muddled. The heart of the clarification is contained in Barber's definition of culture, derived from social system theory, that provides us with a better understanding of today's debate on intellectuals and the pursuit of science. Barber examines the ways in which intellectual culture is defined, the construction of ideologies and ideologists, and the structure of cultural sub-systems (high-middle-low). The book deftly interweaves these concepts to illuminate the present and historical situations of conflict in the universities and elsewhere. He distinguishes between those who emphasize the cultural norm of knowledge for its own sake, and those whose norms are primarily ideological and reformist. Intellectual Pursuits: Toward an Understanding of Culture will challenge both students and scholars to consider their own intellectual positions from both within, and without, the academy, and sharpens our perspectives on the role of intellectuals in society.
The Arts of Democracy
Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America.
Christianity and Civil Society
In this book, well-known author Robert Wuthnow considers three aspects of the relationship between Christianity and civil society: whether civil society is in jeopardy and what effects Christianity's declining influence has on civil society; whether Christians can be civil in the face of conflicts that have arisen among religious groups in the public arena and the so-called culture wars that many in the media have been discussing; and growing multiculturalism in the United States, how Christians are responding to this new diversity, and how Christianity can regain a critical voice for itself in these debates.
Netflix Recommends
Introduction -- Why we need film and series suggestions -- How algorithmic recommender systems work -- Cracking the code, part I : developing Netflix's recommendation algorithms -- Cracking the code, part II : unpacking Netflix's myth of big data -- How real people choose films and series -- Afterword : robot critics vs. human experts -- Appendix : designing the empirical audience study.
Good Taste, Bad Taste, & Christian Taste
Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive, "ecumenical" approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has "teeth but no fangs." While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in the making of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.
The Avant-Garde in Interwar England
The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange...
Cinephilia
They obsess over the nuances of a Douglas Sirk or Ingmar Bergman film; they revel in books such as François Truffaut's Hitchcock; they happily subscribe to the Sundance Channel—they are the rare breed known as cinephiles. Though much has been made of the classic era of cinephilia from the 1950s to the 1970s, Cinephilia documents the latest generation of cinephiles and their use of new technologies. With the advent of home theaters, digital recording devices, online film communities, cinephiles today pursue their dedication to film outside of institutional settings. A radical new history of film culture, Cinephilia breaks new ground for students and scholars alike.
