This study explored the effect of learning strategies in a student organization on cake art creativity. The participants were 27 student members of a cake decorating art club from one central university in Taiwan. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was adopted, with 90 h of experimental teaching over 16 weeks. The results, which included the use of a questionnaire, classroom observation, and in-depth interviews, suggest that in terms of creativity, the group participating in flipped classroom learning significantly outperformed the group using (...) traditional learning strategies. Furthermore, flipped classroom learning promoted learner motivation and satisfaction. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of the game and its presence in creative activity. The gameplay is presented as an important part of human life. The presence of both elements in a person's work shapes him as a "creative" and "creating" entity. The introduced characteristics are analyzed from the point of view of the historical context, where the concepts of a creative person and a person playing are equated to each other. Their similarity is established (...) on the basis of the description of the signs of the game revealed at the beginning of the XX century. Game and art are considered abstractly from a specific cultural background, as functions that organize a person and preserve an abstract character. The features of the game highlighted in the article are given as evidence that plastic art stores it at its core as well as musical art. Their division within the cult and myth has led to the question of whether there is a game in art. The solution to this question lies in the field of the role of the participant in the game. Analysis from the point of view of the roles of the "creator" and "observer" allows us to uncover misconceptions about applied art and its game function.The findings showed that the position of the "observer" does not always allow you to see a complete picture of the process of plastic creativity. Due to the secrecy of most of the activity in the inner world of the artist, the observer cannot see the mechanical work of the gameplay. On this basis, he concludes about the insufficiency of plastic art. Analysis from the position of a creative person, on the contrary, indicates the full compliance of applied arts with the gameplay. On this basis, it is indicated that the game is not only an abstract concept that characterizes a person's life, but also the main component of any creative process. (shrink)

The article deals with the professional decorative and applied art of Krasnoyarsk from the 50s of the twentieth century to the present. The aspect of consideration is the use of the ethnographic motif of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the features of its embodiment in the products of Krasnoyarsk artists of decorative and applied art. Using the example of the creativity of N.V. Kasatkina, A.G. Tkachev, A.S. Moskvitin, A.S. Migas, S.E. Anufriev and E.A. Krasnova, the aspects of the use (...) of the ethnographic motif and their transformation over time, which led to the formation of archeoart in modern decorative and applied art and the features of its embodiment in the works of the main conclusions of the study are shown. The principles of the use, functioning and transformation of signs of an ethnographic motif in works of decorative and applied art in the Krasnoyarsk Territory are presented. The process of forming a new style in art took place from quoting and simple stylization of individual objects of ethnography in the works of artists to the gradual increase of signs of an ethnographic motif in the works of masters, which led to the formation of a new understanding of the region in art. The main visual concept of modern archeoart is the representation of Yenisei Siberia as the "cradle of humanity". The ethnographic motif associated with the history and mythology of indigenous peoples becomes the starting point in the artistic image, through which the elevation of regional visual signs to symbols understandable to every person takes place. (shrink)

Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration? The huge popularity of Neuro-Linguistic Programming therapies and training has not been accompanied by knowledge of the empirical underpinnings of the concept. The article presents the concept of NLP in the light of empirical research in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research Data Base. From among 315 articles the author selected 63 studies published in journals from the Master Journal List of ISI. Out of (...) 33 studies, 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% - results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results. The qualitative analysis indicates the greater weight of the non-supportive studies and their greater methodological worth against the ones supporting the tenets. Results contradict the claim of an empirical basis of NLP. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the transformation of traditional folk culture archetypes of wood, stone, thread in modern decorative and applied art, as well as ways of using threads, wood and stone as materials for the manufacture of objects of modern art. The research does not aim to repeat classical ethnographic studies or to refer monographs on the history of culture. The article is an attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the modern practice of decorative and applied art (...) from the point of view of the philosophy of culture and practical aesthetics. This approach is a unique experience in the analysis of jewelry and decorative practices of processing heterogeneous materials of natural origin. The cluster of masters of decorative and applied art in Russia is expanding, there are more and more opportunities and materials for creativity, but the authors of the products themselves are not engaged in stylistic, art criticism or philosophical understanding of their activities. Nevertheless, their works, according to researchers, reflect the oldest mythological images that are the cornerstones of Russian culture and represent the heritage of world culture, transformed by post-culture and man-made trends that have penetrated, among other things, into art. Archetypes of wood, stone, thread, preserved since ancient times, acquire new meanings and new forms of embodiment in the works of modern authors. (shrink)

Publication de deux poèmes byzantins du 12ème s. attribués à Théodore Prodomos, qui fournissent un certain nombre de renseignements sur les tentes des camps d'hiver des Comnène, et en particulier sur celle de la maison d'Irène la Sevastokratorissa. Cette étude mène l'auteur à un commentaire historico-artistique des éléments décrits: il compare d'abord ceux-ci avec l'art des 11ème et et 12ème s., et particulièrement avec l'art profane, puis il s'interroge sur l'authenticité des descriptions par rapport aux figures de rhétorique employées dans (...) ces textes. (shrink)

When art meets craft -- Glass -- Metal -- Stone -- Textiles -- Other materials -- Interviews.

This book, a companion volume to Professor Pollitt's The Art of Rome: Sources and Documents, presents a comprehensive collection in translation of ancient literary evidence relating to Greek sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Its purpose is to make this important evidence available to students who are not specialists in the Classical languages or Classical archaeology. The author's translations of a wide selection of Greek and Latin texts are accompanied by an introduction, explanatory commentary, and a full (...) bibliography. An earlier version of this book was published twenty-five years ago by Prentice-Hall. In this new publication Professor Pollitt has added a considerable number of new passages, revised some of his earlier translations and presented the texts in a different order which allows the reader to follow more easily the development of sculpture and painting as perceived by the ancient writers. The new and substantial bibliography, organised by topics as they appear in the book, emphasises works that deal directly with the literary sources or that supplement our knowledge of the personalities and monuments described in the sources. This collection will be welcomed by students and teachers of Greek art who have long been in need of an authoritative and reliable sourcebook for their subject. (shrink)

The arts have been almost completely marginalized - at a time when, arguably, they are more important than ever. Whether we understand by “the arts” painting, sculpture and architecture, or more broadly, the whole aesthetic realm and the arts faculties of universities concerned with this realm, over the last half century these fields have lost their cognitive status. This does not mean that there are not people involved in the arts, but they do not have the (...) standing participants in these fields once had. The arts lost the battle of the “two cultures”; science prevailed over the arts and humanities. Architecture is being redefined as an applied science rather than one of the arts. The arts were then finally routed (with hardly a fight) by economists. They have been absorbed into the advertising, entertainment, decoration and building industries, and, as universities have been transformed into transnational business corporations, arts faculties have lost their reason for existence. This paper challenges this marginalization. (shrink)

The stone lion played an important role in ancient Chinese architectural decoration and was often used in traditional Chinese architecture in different Chinese dynasties. China is not the natural habitat of the lion, but this animal has long been revered by the Chinese. The stone lion is a metaphor of the Chinese culture. The stone lions are one of the most important artistic expressions in various arts. As the stone lion culture emerged, developed and matured, its artistic image has (...) become a unique spiritual and cultural symbol in China. This article consists of three parts: the historical status and symbolic significance of stone lions; the characteristics and evolution of the stone lion image in different dynasties of China; and the decorative characteristics of stone lions in different subject-spatial environments. The article is devoted to research and interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the Chinese stone lion, its decorative characteristics in different subject-spatial environments; analysis of its characteristics and evolution of its image in different historical epochs. Using various examples the article shows how culture and ideology have influenced the evolution of the characteristics of the image of the Chinese stone lion. (shrink)

As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new person who would (...) live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin. (shrink)

In education, art has often been perceived as entertainment and decoration and is the first subject to go when there are budget cuts or test-score pressures. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas's idea of the primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totality of our being, enables self-transformation and ethics, and ensures community as a totality of singularities, and on Maurice Blanchot's expansion of radical alterity to art, Guoping Zhao argues that the role of art in education must be reconsidered and greatly (...) expanded. Art as alterity takes students beyond where they are and what they have, and teaches them to appreciate and respect difference and diversity. If art as alterity is so essential to human subjectivity and society, and if education is conceived as a process of human growth and formation, art as alterity is essential to education and needs to be more seriously engaged and more fully integrated into the whole educational process instead of being isolated in arts education. Zhao concludes the essay by pondering the pedagogical implications of such a reconsideration of art as alterity in education. (shrink)

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, 'impressively atful minds'. Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioural singularities - science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art - that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the (...) basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this book, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford. (shrink)

Many secret signs and symbols area associated with the Yoruba as we have it amongst many tribes in Nigeria. Some of these signs and symbols have deep meanings and have connotations amongst the tribe. They form the everyday language of the people and a thorough understanding of them is key in their relationship with one another as a people. The objective of this study is to express the cultural connotations of selected symbols in relation to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. (...) The study hinges on the theories of Mimesis, Structural Formalism and Semiotics. This was validated through ethnographic study of symbols such as art, architecture, clothing, body marks and decorations among others to discover deep and hidden information about cultural beliefs and assumptions among the people under study. Pertinent literatures were reviewed, interviews were conducted, information was sourced from the internet and personal experience was explored. The study points out to the fact that a lot of deep and secret meanings are attached to the selected signs and symbols. The paper concludes that meanings expressed are generally accepted by a host of the Yoruba people; however, there could be slight differences in belief system from one locality to another. The paper had contributed to the pool of knowledge by bringing unknown and hidden meanings of selected signs and symbols of the Yoruba people to limelight. The paper recommends that signs and symbols commonly used in communication among the Yoruba people of Nigeria should incorporated into the curricula of schools; especially Yoruba as a subject and taught to preserve the tradition from extinction. It is also recommended that folklores, mythology and oral tradition be encouraged among younger generation so as to preserve cultural values. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to Ukrainian Art Nouveau architecture, which became a unique phenomenon in the development of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture. Along with the reality that architecture in Ukraine evolved as a component of the European artistic movement, a distinctive architectural style was formed, based on the development of the traditions of folk architecture and ornamentation. This style produced much innovation in the shaping, decor, and ornamentation of buildings. Significant contributions to the development of architectural modernism in (...) Ukraine were made by Opanas Slastion, Vasyl Krychevskyi, Yevhen Serdiuk, Oleksandr Verbytskyi, Serhii Tymoshenko, Oleksandr Lushpynskyi, Ivan Levynskyi, Dmytro Diachenko, and others. Ukrainian Art Nouveau architecture was represented by five main architectural styles: modernist, folkloric, rationalist, neo-baroque, and Vienna Secession. Due to an attainment of the possibilities embodied in the constructions, developed techniques, and in the design of interior space and external features — such as walls, roofs, doors and windows, columns and balustrades — this style formed its own expressive system, which included a significant number of socially significant types of buildings. The styles of Ukrainian architectural modernism have not exhausted their potential and may yet have a continuation in contemporary architecture and that of the future. (shrink)

Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life is an inquiry into everyday practices with an aesthetic dimension such as collecting, walking and domestic life. I examine the implications of a critical engagement with these practices for philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies. Traditional aesthetic theory has been informed by a fine arts model of creativity and aesthetic experience and, thus, has not adequately treated everyday aesthetic life. The rapidly expanding field of contemporary cultural studies, on the other hand, has been (...) marked by a dramatic shift in attention toward non-fine art objects like film and television. However, the attention of cultural studies remains, for the most part, limited to mass produced commodities, thereby presenting a narrow picture of aesthetic life outside the fine arts. Cultivation presents an alternative to both approaches. Following John Dewey, I develop a model of cultivation that allows me to locate and describe creativity and aesthetic experience in everyday life. Seen within the framework of everyday life, cultivation becomes more than the development of aesthetic sensibility, as in traditional connoisseurship. Instead, it includes as well the ongoing development of the capacity to satisfy this sensibility through the creative manipulation of one's actions and the world. This Pragmatist version of cultivation emphasizes the importance of creating occasions for aesthetic experience, that is, of refining and developing experience through the design of aesthetically motivated endeavors like walking, interior decoration and collecting. Cultivation is essentially a process: we do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and re-organized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences. This model of cultivation is then deployed in extended analyses of everyday practices. In these analyses, I develop a critical approach that seeks to understand practice as a creative process whose possibilities are intrinsically open to development. (shrink)

When we speak of prehistoric art, we think almost instantly of visual art, although we know that even the least technologically developed peoples on earth also expressed themselves by means of music, dance, gesticulation, and poetry; they practised the arts of eloquence, of moving and decorating their bodies, and of awakening social or sexual interest; prehistoric peoples developed any number of other aspects of artistic creativity and of externalization of the self, of which we can for the time being (...) only recover (since archaeology does not reconstruct temporal arts) that which leaves decipherable physical traces. (shrink)

This article tries to provide elements of discussion and reflection rather than answers to the following question: for many centuries or even millennia, man, at least in so far as prehistory and history have recorded it, made a close connection between the beautiful, the true and the useful and he sought an aesthetic response in the minute manifestations of his daily existence as well as of his intellectual life. Today, and even more so for just the past fifty or one (...) hundred years, art seems to be relegated to specific domains, expelled from the daily life of the average person. Yesterday, and for centuries and millennia, mankind was not satisfied with the fact that a house, a temple, a church, a fortification or a castle were lodgings, proper places to hold reunions, strong-holds built for a particular purpose, it was equally important that they be beautiful; a key did not only have to open a lock, a carriage had not only to run, a bit to control a horse, spurs to reassure the rider, a glass pane to close a window, a table to have a place setting, a chest of drawers to contain clothes, clothes to cover the body, a pen to write, a manuscript to transmit the signs of the alphabet—no, it was also necessary that these signs, that manuscript, the pen, the spurs, the bit, the key … be designed and decorated in such a way so as to evoke in the persons who merely saw them, without even using them, an affective emotion of beauty. Nor was it enough that science or a technique be true or useful, they had also to be beautiful. (shrink)

So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of (...) what life inspires in us to give back. In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers. . . . For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class. By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a (...) prescription or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

A collection of William Morris' letters and lectures on his home furnishings firm, stained glass, textiles, furnishing and decorating a house, printing, and art and society.

This book begins by considering responses by French artists to the First World War, showing how Purism, Dada, and early Surrealism are related to the ethos of post-war reconstruction. The authors then discuss the language of construction in places as dissimilar as France, Germany, and the Soviet Union; the contrasting demands of the utility and decoration of objects and paintings; and the relationship of surrealism to questions of sexuality and gender and to Freudian theory. The book concludes by addressing the (...) widespread debate over realism in art: whether it represents an alternative to the elitism of the avant-garde or whether avant-garde art should play a role in the development of a modern realism. (shrink)

The iconography of the Communion of the Apostles, a theme well established in Byzantine art after Iconoclasm, first appears in a securely dated context in the silver patens from Riha and Stuma. These silver plates were produced in Constantinople sometime between 575 and 578. The iconography with the twofold depiction of Christ is usually explained as a reflection of the liturgical practice of the Eucharist, namely, as a reflection of the two actors in the Eucharistic rite, the priest and a (...) deacon distributing bread and wine. I argue instead that during the early Byzantine period the twofold depiction of Christ is an expression of the two natures of Christ directed against the Miaphysites. I propose that the exceptional appearance of the scene in the two early Byzantine silver patens from church treasures from northern Syria is likely to be explained by its Christological significance with regard to Chalcedonian Eucharistic doctrine during the persecution of the Miaphysites in the 570s. (shrink)

Divided beauty (Dresden, 1764) -- Little gods of the street (Munich-Berlin, 1828) -- Plebeian heaven (Paris, 1830) -- The poet of the new world (Boston, 1841-New York, 1855) -- The gymnasts of the impossible (Paris, 1879) -- The dance of light (Paris, Folies Bergère, 1893) -- The immobile theatre (Paris 1894-95) -- Decorative art as social art: temple, house, factory (Paris-London-Berlin) -- Master of surfaces (Paris, 1902) -- The temple staircase (Moscow-Dresden, 1912) -- The machine and its shadow (Hollywood, (...) 1916) -- The majesty of the moment (New York, 1921) -- Seeing things through things (Moscow, 1926) -- The cruel radiance of what is (Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941). (shrink)

Reviving the Renaissance: The Use and Abuse of the Past in Nineteenth‐Century Italian Art and Decoration. By Rosanna Pavoni, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii + 281 pp. $69.95, £45.00 cloth.

This dissertation investigates how art, truth, and politics are tightly integrated in Raphael's historical narratives in the Stanza d'Eliodoro. ;The first chapter argues for the importance of paying careful attention to pictorial structure--that close analysis of painting can make a strong contribution to the social history of art. The second chapter begins this interpretive path. It first describes the room's decorative ensemble as a whole and how the histories are located within its complex figurative scheme. Then, drawing upon Martin (...) Heidegger's analysis of postmedieval processes of Vorstellung, it defines the pictorial narratives themselves as representations and concludes that as pictorial representations these narratives appear unable to ground the truth of sacred history. ;Chapter 3 focuses on the Expulsion of Heliodorus, a mural replete with self-referential models of both its own mode of authorship and mode of reception. These self-referential cues help define what it means for the Heliodorus to be not only a pictorial representation but more extensively a work of art. It is Raphael's art of representation that shows forth and validates the metaphysical truth of papal history. ;The latter part of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4 offer readings of the Heliodorus as well as the three other histories--the Liberation of St. Peter, Mass at Bolsena, and Repulse of Attila--construing them as theologico-political narratives of the divinity of papal power. All four histories express at the level of narrative form the dilemma of the papacy's contemporary political trajectory only for this predicament to find imaginative "resolution" through the movement of the narrative action. This chapter expounds upon the configurations of historical time in the decorative scheme and how this projects the political unconscious of papal desire. Yet the fifth and final chapter concludes that the Eliodoro narratives are not simply collective wishfulfillments but more properly public symbols that rhetorically address a beholder so to persuade him to accept as true the papacy's desired self-image of its own historical mission. Raphael's art of representation was essential towards this end. (shrink)