Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form (...) of formalism, this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United StatesJane DuranAngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of strands (...) of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.Wolff is primarily concerned with three areas of exclusion/construction for the turn in the visual arts, painting in particular, that began at the opening of the twentieth century. Toward the beginning of the work, she notes that there was always a continuous realist and figurative genre at work even in modernist circles, but it seldom achieved anything like the recognition that the more typically abstract works we associate with the rise of modernism gained. She associates this area of nonrecognition with the work of women in particular, and these two areas alone — the realist/figurative and any work done by a woman artist — constitute two of her most important foci in AngloModern. In addition, and with some difficulty, since it adds a layer of complication, she is concerned about the exclusion and marginalization of Jewish artists during thisperiod — both in galleries and in thecommentary generated by the art world — although it is clear that many of the major "abstract" works associated with modernism were, in fact, produced by Jewish artists.Wolff is at her best in laying out in precise detail how it is that the culture of the art world throws up nearly insurmountable barriers against those deemed unworthy at a fairly early point in the construction of any new movement. The single strongest chapter in the work may well be the second, "Questions of Discovery: the Art of Kathleen McEnery," in which Wolff shows how various processes of categorization kept the work of this extremely talented woman from receiving anything like the recognition it deserved for a long period of time. Wolff sums up her overall project, and how it will relate to an artist such as McEnery, in her Introduction, when she writes:The story of modern art that is challenged [in her book] is the narrative tracing the development of Western painting from France to the United States, in a lineage more or less running from Manet and Post-Impressionism, by way of Cubism and Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism. It is a story produced and reinforced by critics, academics, curators, and museum directors.(p. 3)Women artists, for example, were frequently excluded not only becausethey were women, but because they may have tended to engage in painting that was more realist, which itself [End Page 118] became coded as "feminine," and so forth. McEnery's intriguing portraits of the early two decades of the twentieth century were "discovered," as Wolff notes for the l987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, despite the fact that McEnery had at one point been fairly well-known (pp. 41-42). A woman at work in a figurative tradition, and working in suburban circles far away from the geographical centers of the art world, she was quickly at the mercy of the canonical forces of art historical construction.As we attempt to educate our students about rubrics, social movements, and the relationship of the arts to the political events of an era, we can do little better than to cite, for illustrative purposes, a number of interesting cases, and Wolff does just that. In sharp and incisive prose, she not only investigates McEnery's disappearance from the approved version of the early American modernist scene, but she also examines the construction of the early group displayed at the Whitney, the notion of the "feminine" in the work of Simmel and Benjamin, and, finally, the notion of the "Jewish artist." As her exemplar for the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesLee UfanBorn in Haman County, Korea, in 1936, Lee Ufan is a leading practitioner and theorist of the Mono-ha School, which emerged in Japan in the 1960s. With his distinct approach and individualistic artistic expression, he has established a unique style of his own that goes beyond such categorization. In his work, Lee leaves areas unmade and produces yohaku (empty spaces and margins), while cutting personal expression to a (...) minimum. This approach draws out the unique tension and stillness of a particular space, a characteristic of his work. Lee lives and works in Paris and Kamakura, Japan. Among many other places, his work is part of the collections at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Collection in London, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—THE MIRROR ROAD, 2021 / 2022 Stone and stainless steel Stones, height 90 cm (set of 2), stainless steel plate, 2 x 100 x 1000 cm Collection of the artist Photo: Shu Nakagawa[End Page 168] Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—THE INFINITE THREAD, 2022 Stainless steel and string Dimensions variable Installation view: Lee Ufan: Requiem, Alyscamps, Arles, France, October 30, 2021–September 30, 2022 Collection of the artist © Studio Lee Ufan / Photo: Claire Dorn[End Page 11] Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—SHE AND HE, 2005 / 2022 Stone and Steel Stone, height 70 cm; steel plate, 2 x 200 x 170 cm Collection of the artist Photo: Shu Nakagawa[End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—ESCARGOT, 2018 / 2022 Stone and stainless steel Stone, height 50 cm; stainless steel, 200 x 300 x 253 cm Photo: Shu Nakagawa[End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—DISSONANCE, 2004 / 2022 Stone and stainless steel Stones, height 35 and 45 cm (set of 2); stainless steel poles, 350 cm (set of 2) Collection of the artist Photo: Shu Nakagawa[End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolutionRELATUM—THE ARCH, 2014 / 2022 Stone and stainless steel Stones, height 230 cm (set of 2) (actual size); stainless steel arch, 427 x 500 x 200 cm; stainless steel plate on the ground, 2 x 200 x 1000 cm Collection of the artist Photo: Shu Nakagawa[End Page 135]Copyright © 2023 Cornell University... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Roots of RomanticismJames SchmidtIsaiah Berlin. The Roots of Romanticism. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bollingen Series XXXV:45. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi + 171. Cloth. $19.95.Originally delivered in the spring of 1965 and subsequently broadcast several times over the BBC, Berlin's lectures on romanticism have long been esteemed (...) by his admirers. Berlin nevertheless resisted their publication, hoping one day to write a book on romanticism. His literary executor Henry Hardy reports, however, "not so much as a sentence of the intended work was ever written" (x). Thus Hardy's edition of these lectures constitutes Berlin's most extended reflection on a theme that loomed large in his understanding of the modern world: the romantic critique of the Enlightenment.Surprisingly few romantics actually appear in these pages. Those who do arrive late, linger briefly, and are usually German. Fichte enters on page 88, followed by Schelling (97) and the Schlegel brothers (104), with brief appearances by E. T. A. Hoffman and Johann Ludwig Tieck (114-6). Only in his closing ruminations on the impact of romanticism does Berlin cast a glance at Byron, Chateaubriand, and Sir Walter Scott. Most of the book explores what Berlin takes to be romanticism's "roots," which he locates in a few eighteenth-century German writers who, when romanticism finally burst upon the scene, were either disgusted by it (Jacobi, Schiller, and Goethe) or dead (Hamann). A few years later Berlin made these proto-romantics the charter members of the movement he dubbed "the Counter-Enlightenment"—a concept that would have a considerable career of its own. Berlin's concern is thus less with romanticism per se than "with the revolution of which romanticism, at any rate in some of its guises, is the strongest expression and symptom" (xiii).As Berlin saw it, this revolution involved a rejection of the idea that 1) "all [End Page 451] genuine questions can be answered," 2) "all these answers are knowable," and 3) "all these answers must be compatible with one another" (21-2). Upon these three principles, he insists, "the whole Western tradition rested" (21), and their rejection constitutes "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West" (1). Berlin holds that the Enlightenment left these principles unshaken. It was the romantics who questioned the "ruinous" belief that "there is one single solution to all human ills" (which carries the insidious corollary that "you must impose this solution no matter what cost") and thus laid the foundations for "liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life" (146-7), causes which are usually associated (wrongly, according to Berlin) with the Enlightenment.These arguments will not be unfamiliar to those who know Berlin's works. Reading him is a bit like listening to Vivaldi: taken individually, his essays are clever, vigorously argued, and elegantly crafted; but reading them in sequence soon leads to a nagging sense of having heard it all before. Berlin's work was animated by an awareness of the diversity of plausible answers that could be given to the question of how life should be lived and by an impassioned defense of this plurality of possibilities against the illusion of an ultimate solution. One can admire the defense of liberalism that Berlin drew from these convictions and yet have reservations about the historical accuracy of his account of the relationship between romanticism and the Enlightenment. It is hard to see Hamann as a supporter of pluralism and harder still to see the philosophes—who rejected the dogmatic esprit de systèm in favor of an experimentalist esprit systématique—as oblivious to the multiplicity of ways in which good lives could be lived. Lessing's views on religious questions were a good deal more skeptical and open-ended than Jacobi's. Fichte and Schelling sought to bring a greater systematic coherence to Kant's philosophy, not to dismantle it. Once one moves from general claims about "romanticism" and "the Enlightenment" to assess specific thinkers, the picture becomes a good deal messier than Berlin lets on. Early romantics... (shrink)

"Charles Marville is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century. Accompanying a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in honor of Marville's bicentennial, Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris surveys the artist's entire career. This beautiful book, which begins with the city scenes and architectural views Marville made throughout France and Germany in the 1850s, also explores his portraits and landscapes s before turning to his photographs of Paris made both (...) before and after the city's dramatic modernization in the 1850s and 1860s. Commissioned to record the city in transition, Marville created one of the earliest and most powerful photographic series documenting urban transformation on a grand scale. Despite the importance of his work, Marville has long been an enigma in the history of photography, in part because many of the documents about his life were thought to have been lost in a fire that destroyed Paris's city hall in 1871. Based on meticulous research, this volume reveals many new insights into Marville's personal and professional biography, including the central fact that he was born Charles-Franðcois Bossu. He shed this name and adoptedthe pseudonym Marville when he began his career as an illustrator in the 1830s. With five essays by respected scholars, this book offers the first comprehensive examination of Marville's life and career and delivers the much-awaited public recognition his photographs so richly deserve"--. (shrink)

In The Shock of Recognition, Lewis Pyenson uses a method called Historical Complementarity to identify the motif of non-figurative abstraction in modern art and science. He identifies the motif in Picasso's and Einstein's educational environments. He shows how this motif in domestic furnishing and in urban lighting set the stage for Picasso's and Einstein's professional success before 1914. He applies his method to intellectual life in Argentina, using it to address that nation's focus on an inventory of the natural (...) world until the 1940s, its adoption of non-figurative art and nuclear physics in the middle of the twentieth century, and attention to landscape painting and the wonder of nature at the end of the century. (shrink)

Review of “The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37”, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, November 25, 2011-March 4, 2012. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 153-57.

This collection brings together a selection of writings on art by the internationally acclaimed novelist, historian and critic Marina Warner. For 30 years Warner has published widely on a range of art-world subjects and objects, from contemporary installation and film works to paintings by Flemish and Italian Renaissance masters, through Victorian photography and twentieth-century political drawings and prints. Warner's extraordinary curiosity in art and culture is conveyed in writing that is at once poetic and playful, elegant and rigorous, training our (...) eyes on the smallest of details while painting a broad-brushstroke landscape of art past and present. Themes familiar to Warner's readers--myth and fantasy, psychic and sexual experience, the vast and marvelous expanse of the human imagination--are treated in the lectures and articles, stories, interviews and essays contained here, some of which are published for the first time or republished from out-of-print sources. For the first of two volumes, editor Vivian Sky Rehberg has assembled themed sections titled "Playing in the Dark," "Telling Tales" and "Phantom Technologies." Texts include interviews with Tacita Dean and Paula Rego; catalogue essays on Leonora Carrington, Henry Fuseli, Zarina Bhimji, Tony Oursler and Fischli/Weiss; articles on Tracy Emin, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois; stories for artist's books by Kiki Smith and Helen Douglas; and lectures on Francis Bacon, Hieronymous Bosch and William Kentridge. "The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought" invites us to explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the traces of our artistic heritage. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history. Holder of 12 honorary degrees and two honorary fellowships, Warner is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged the The Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Turner Prize; she is a regular broadcaster on the BBC, and has taught and given lectures worldwide, including the National Gallery and ICA, London and the Prado in Madrid; she has delivered the Presidential Lecture at Stanford University and the Carpenter Lecture at Harvard. She has been awarded a CBE, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France and Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella di Solidareità, Italy. Warner is a winner of the Aby Warburg Prize and a Getty Scholar. Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic based in Paris and Rotterdam. A founding editor of "Journal of Visual Culture," she is a contributing editor of "Frieze," and has written for numerous contemporary art publications. Previously Chair of the department of Critical Studies at Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, where she taught modern and contemporary art, Rehberg is currently Course Director for the Masters in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.. (shrink)

Recent advances in a variety of scientific disciplines have revealed the limitations of the Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe. One of the interesting aspects of this development is the increasing convergence of science and the "perennial philosophy." The new research has led to a critical revaluation of ancient spiritual systems long ignored or rejected because of their assumed incompatibility with science. Here are Swami Muktananda on the mind. Swami Prajnananda on Karma. Swami Kripananda on the Kundalini. Ajit Mookerjee on the (...) Kundalini. Joseph Chilton Pearce on spiritual development. Mother Teresa on love and service. Jack Kornfield on Buddhism for Americans. Fritjof Capra on the new paradigms. Rupert Sheldrake on morphic resonance. Karl Pribram on the holographic model. Claudio Naranjo on meditation, and more. The papers in this book were presented at the seventh Conference of the International Transpersonal Association held in Bombay. The ITA is a non-profit organization that brings together individuals of different nationalities, professions, and philosophical or spiritual preferences who share in the view that there is a fundamental unity underlying all of humanity and the material world. The cover photo is from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in the Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CommentatorsDavid CarrierI am immensely thankful to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Klaus Ottmann, and Sean Ulmer for their comments on my book. And to Daniel A. Siedell for organizing this mini-symposium, which really is an author's dream. By gently pressing me to think about important issues, these sympathetic commentators have advanced dialogue.When writing Museum Skepticism I became very aware that there are two (...) kinds of literature that discuss museums. There are memoirs of curators or other museum employees, and there are the commentaries by academics, which usually look at museums from the outside. My ambition was to look at this institution in a way that would both be sympathetic to the practical concerns and embody a theoretical point of view. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer complained that I was only looking at the museum from the outside.1 That certainly is correct, but for obvious reasons people who work in museums are unusually unwilling to describe their inner workings. To have a good theory of the museum, you need to be practical. Often, for example, critics complain about the proliferation of shops and restaurants, urge that admission be free, or say that blockbuster shows are destructive and overcrowded. However one judges such moralizing, the museum director who needs to balance the budget can hardly be guided by such reasoning. One can be critical, as I am, about the power of the super-rich in museum life. But in what other way could funding be found? The history of debates about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) points to obvious ways in which, in America at least, reliance on public funding poses problems. My goal, then, was to develop a realistic analysis.Sean Ulmer correctly notes that to understand the art in museums, we must consider its prior history. Chinese paintings, Islamic decorations, Maori sculpture, and premodern European art were not made to be displayed in public galleries. And so there are legitimate questions about how to set it alongside modernist art, whose natural home is the art museum. Allowing this much, I am not sure why he thinks it impossible to describe museums in a single book. We need to understand how artifacts with such varied origins can be coherently displayed in one building. Here, then, we get to Ulmer's second concern—museum displays. Recently museums have experimented with thematic displays. The Museum of Modern Art in New York did that before its recent reconstruction; the Tate Modern has such a system; and during summer 2006 the Whitney tried such a plan. I understand the need of museums to experiment, to find new ways to attract visitors to the permanent collection. Still, a straight chronological display has the obvious advantage of presenting that history of art in which, for example, Impressionism leads to Cubism, and then on to Abstract Expressionism. The obvious danger of thematic displays is that they bewilder the larger public. [End Page 22]When I said that museums are top-down institutions, I was thinking of the grander public museums where the function of the trustees is to raise money, either by giving themselves or by networking. These people who provide funding no doubt have their own agendas, but they, in turn, respond to larger economic and political concerns. I would be astonished if the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Arthur Danto or Leo Steinberg to be a trustee; or, to look closer at hand, if the Carnegie Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art asked me to play that role. Since we are mere professors, what practical help could we provide? I expect that at smaller museums the situation is different. But here, again, it is important to be realistic. Cleveland's art historians have not had any influence on the rebuilding plan for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of course I would be flattered if the new director asked for my opinion, but to be honest, I am not sure that I could tell him anything useful. When Ulmer discusses the comparative role of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, he touches on a very important point. Like him, I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Waiting for Godot in New Orleans A tragicomedy in two acts, a project in three partsPaul Chan Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of “stage” (2007) (Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionOrganizing map of New Orleans 1 (2007) (Page 14) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of bicycle for Pozzo (2007) (Page 28) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of shopping cart for (...) Lucky (2007) (Page 40) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of tree (2007) (Page 54) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of disaster tour bus for boy (2007) (Page 68) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign on St. Claude (2007) (Page 81) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign in Lower Ninth Ward (2007) (Page 93) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign in Gentilly (2007) (Page 107) Click for larger view View full resolutionFlyer (2007) (Page 124) Click for larger view View full resolutionDancing before the 1st Lower Ninth Ward Performance (2007) (Page 138) Click for larger view View full resolutionJ. Kyle Manzay and Wendell Pierce in Act I (2007) (Page 150) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of entire project as a musical score (2007) (Page 165)ImagesPaul Chan lives and works in New York. His recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); and ICA Boston (2005). Group exhibitions include The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Work / New Acquisitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Eighth Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2005); Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2004). Chan is also well known for his political interventions—in 2002 he broke US sanctions and federal law to visit Baghdad, and in 2004 he garnered police attention for The People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention, a free map distributed throughout New York to help protesters to get in or out of the way of the RNC. Most recently Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to produce a site-specific outdoor presentation of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.Artist statementWaiting for Godot in New Orleans A tragicomedy in two acts, a project in three partsby Samuel BeckettEstragon Vladimir Lucky Pozzo a boy City of New Orleans in 2007ACT IEight months research. Four months teaching and street organizing. Five free site-specific performances.ACT IIA country road. A tree. Evening.Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Arnold Gehlen is one of the most controversial figures of German intellectual history. Gehlen’s commitment to National Socialism is mostly seen in close connection with his theoretical focus on institutions. According to Gehlen, what mankind requires above all is order and thus the protection of institutions. And yet, by reducing Gehlen’s sociology to the necessity of order one misses the analytical scope of his writings. As this article aims to show, the strength of Gehlen’s sociology lies less in its (...) theory of institutionalization than in its attempt to comprehend change, i.e. the conceptual clarification of the interplay between radical innovation and institutionalization. In order to apprehend Gehlen’s understanding of change we have to look at his sociology of art as it is art which works as ‘a small symbol of society’. To approach Gehlen from this perspective is not to rehabilitate the controversial thinker. Instead, I am trying to show that Gehlen’s theoretical framework is as complex as modern culture itself and should therefore not prematurely be declared a reactionary testimony of the past. (shrink)

The aesthetic is present everywhere—in the street, in department stores, movie houses, mountainsides, as in the art gallery, the cathedral, the sacred grove. By universalizing the concept of the aesthetic, modern art has destroyed the barrier that once marked off Beauty and the Sublime as separate realms of being. In the eyes of modern art and modernist aesthetics, anything can legitimately appeal to taste. President Eisenhower, complaining about modern art, said that he had been brought up (...) to believe that art was intended to carry one away from the dangers and unpleasantness of everyday life but that the new paintings reminded him of traffic accidents. A recent statement by Francis Bacon, the celebrated British painter, also mentions traffic accidents. Bacon agrees with Ike that this type of event is not excluded by modern art. But Bacon finds traffic accidents to be a source of beauty. "If you see somebody lying on the pavement with the blood streaming from him," he explains in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in spring 1975, "that is in itself—the color of the blood against the pavement—very invigorating . . . exhilarating. . . . In all the motor accidents I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty." Harold Rosenberg is a professor, poet and art critic for the New Yorker. Among his influential works are The Tradition of the New, The Anxious Object, Artworks and Packages, Act and Actor, The De-Definition of Art, Discovering the Present, and Art on the Edge. (shrink)

Arnold Gehlen is one of the most controversial figures of German intellectual history. Gehlen’s commitment to National Socialism (a commitment he never disavowed) is mostly seen in close connection with his theoretical focus on institutions. According to Gehlen, what mankind requires above all is order and thus the protection of institutions. And yet, by reducing Gehlen’s sociology to the necessity of order one misses the analytical scope of his writings. As this article aims to show, the strength of Gehlen’s (...) sociology lies less in its theory of institutionalization than in its attempt to comprehend change, i.e. the conceptual clarification of the interplay between radical innovation and institutionalization. In order to apprehend Gehlen’s understanding of change we have to look at his sociology of art as it is art which works as ‘a small symbol of society’. To approach Gehlen from this perspective is not to rehabilitate the controversial thinker. Instead, I am trying to show that Gehlen’s theoretical framework is as complex as modern culture itself and should therefore not prematurely be declared a reactionary testimony of the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical CultureCarol PosterThe description of various works of logical and rhetorical theory as “Aristotelian,” although far from unusual, is not particularly informative, because it assumes, incorrectly, that there is some ultimate singular Aristotle being imitated by all authors who consider themselves, or who are labeled by others, Aristotelian. In fact, there never has been an interpretation of (...) Aristotle that satisfies the canon of St. Vincent of Lerins, “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”; instead, there have been almost as many Aristotles as there have been interpreters of Aristotle. Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993), therefore, is not so much situated against the background of some single, unique, undisputed Aristotle but, rather, as he himself mentions, within an evolving tradition of Aristotelianism.The historical transformations of Aristotle include two distinct traditions, one oriented toward scientific-technical philosophy andthe other toward rhetorical-poetic and ethical humanism.1 The technical-philosophccical tradition, in which Aristotle was conceived primarily [End Page 375] as metaphysician and natural philosopher, emphasized the logical treatises of the organon, the speculative systems of the Physics and Metaphysics, and the scientific works of the biological treatises. This tradition originated in the Greco-Roman middle and Neoplatonic schools and has had a continuous history stretching through the Middle Ages, Counterreformation, neo-Thomism, and certain contemporary European postmodernisms. The rhetoricalhumanistic tradition, on the other hand, emphasizing the Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and ethical treatises, views Aristotle as a practical philosopher, concerned with the productive arts and those matters about which knowledge is probable rather than certain. This rhetorical-humanistic tradition was a relatively negligible aspect of Aristotle’s ancient reception, had a slight presence in the Islamic and Latin traditions, developed in certain strands of Renaissance humanism, and came to fruition in the late eighteenth century, primarily, though not exclusively, within a Protestant tradition. In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain, the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle found expression directly in neoclassical poetics and, in a more complicated fashion, in a group of authors (including the Scottish moderates and the slightly later Oxford Noetics) who enlisted Aristotle in a battle against skepticism and materialism. It is the latter of the two strands of the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle that resurfaces (albeit in an indirect and mediated fashion) in the work of Alastair MacIntyre, Richard McKeon (and other members of the Chicago school), and Thomas Farrell, who used Aristotle’s model of probable deliberation and habituated virtue to construct an alternative to twentieth-century skepticism and materialism.Significant Strata of Aristotelian ReceptionThe history of Aristotelian reception is not monolithic. There has been tremendous variation across periods and national traditions of what works were considered authentically Aristotelian, which of those works were considered important, and how they were interpreted. The phases of Aristotelian reception immediately relevant to Farrell’s work include Greco-Roman Platonism, Islamic commentary, medieval Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanistic textual recovery, neoclassical “Aristotelianism,” early modern Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism, and the nineteenthcentury rehabilitation of Aristotle. This article will summarize briefly pre eighteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle as prolegomena to a close analysis of the works of two eighteenth-century Scotsmen, James Moor [End Page 376] and John Gillies, whose reconfiguration of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Organon as tools for practical wisdom in modern society anticipated (and, albeit indirectly, influenced) Farrell.2AntiquityTwo distinct strands of Aristotelian reception, the rhetorical-humanistic and technical-philosophical, originated in antiquity. Of these, the rhetorical-humanistic strand was substantially less important. Neither the Poetics nor the Rhetoric was well known in antiquity. The Rhetoric was not the subject of a Greek commentary until the Byzantine period and, although occasionally cited by Greco-Roman rhetoricians including Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, was not widely or carefully read.3 The Poetics was also virtually unknown and was never the subject of an ancient commentary.4The Greek commentaries on Aristotle, which are predominantly technical-philosophical in character, include some fifteen thousand pages of extant text. Despite the existence of a distinct ancient Peripatetic school, the majority of commentaries were produced in the Platonic schools, where the works of Aristotle... (shrink)

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their (...) own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symposium: The Future of the Art Museum: Curatorial and Educational Perspectives:IntroductionDaniel A. SiedellIntroductionThere are few futures pondered more often than the art museum's. The new millennium has spawned a veritable cottage industry of such prognostication. Most of it has occurred from the perspectives of building expansion, audience growth, and collection development. These are not, by any means, unimportant considerations. However, such sustained attention to them by directors, marketers, board (...) members, collectors, and the mass media tend to obscure the fact that these areas of concern are not ends in themselves. A new museum wing, higher attendance, and more gifts of art to the collection mean little unless they serve to facilitate specific curatorial and educational ends, which themselves are in the service of expanding and deepening their capacity to enhance the experience of art. The future of the art museum rests on the ability of curators and educators to develop new and more robust curatorial and educational work that is responsive to both the larger culture and to the vocational standards of their respective professions. Curators and educators need, then, to be more self-critical of their practices.This symposium brings together a few of these professionals to reflect on the future of the art museum from the perspective of those involved in the day-to-day production, presentation, and interpretation of works of art. It is occasioned by the publication of David Carrier's book, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries, recently published by Duke University Press, and more specifically, Carrier's conclusion, which offers its own reflection on the future of the art museum. A frequent contributor to the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Carrier is a philosopher and art critic whose interests range widely from the art criticism of John Ruskin and Adrian Stokes to the writing of art history and the paintings of Sean Scully.1 Carrier's book, written while a scholar in residence at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, explores the history and philosophy of art museums from the point of view of the narratives on which they rely as well as produce. And it is narratives that art educators and curators produce, affirm, and expand when they curate exhibitions and do educational programming.Because they are "public" institutions (even when they are private organizations) and serve many competing audience constituencies, art museums [End Page 1] often suffer from an acute identity crisis, even while they build large expansions, engage in aggressive campaigns to court collectors, placate increasingly more powerful governing boards, and expand their programming to the point that it ceases to be education. The business of the art museum often masks these deep crises, which eventually become a neurosis that plagues curatorial and educational practice. A symptom of this illness can be seen in the misplaced tension between curators and educators as a battle between the "scholars" and the "popularizers," the "elites" and the "community."In 1946 Alfred H. Barr Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art presented a paper called "Research and Publication in Art Museums."2 In it Barr not only recognizes the importance of museum scholarship; he argues that such scholarship, unlike that of the academic art historian, must engage and interact with "the man off the street." Indeed, Barr passionately believed that museum scholarship not only could but should engage a broader and more diverse public all the while remaining committed to scholarly ideals. Barr acknowledges the tensions between museums as "popular community centers" and museums as places of "research and publication." But, he continues, "Both can be done provided we have enough faith to believe in the values of both and enough skill to persuade others to agree with us."3 Barr's expansive definition of scholarship is instructive and a challenge. "By publication I mean not only the scholarly treatise but also the popular article or book, the classroom or public lecture, the gallery talk, publicity releases."4 For Barr, scholarship is not merely a curator's or educator's opportunity to address her professional colleagues and strengthen guild rank; it is a value that is infused throughout all work... (shrink)

With the introduction of Deleuze’s conception of the flow of desire, Foucault’s explication of Velasquez’s Las Meninas is enhanced through a new interpretation of Picasso’s lengthy cubist study of Las Meninas. By examining the arrow-headed structuration of the painting as filtered through panopticism, the single sided diamond that Foucault discovers in Velasquez’s painting is rendered as only half of the picture. Focusing the cone of sight on the panoptic figure and inverting the cone, with the bodies at the edges of (...) the painting serving as the hinges that hold the double perspective together, completes the diamond structuration of the painting with the inclusion of the synoptic dimension. As the viewer’s eyes are drawn across the figures in the forefront of the painting towards the circular mirror hanging on the black wall at the back of the painting, the opposite maneuver is happening simultaneously. The viewer usurps the position of an ambiguous and ever changing subject, and fills out this pan-synoptic scene. A new diagram that conjoins the operative structure of surveillance can decode the valuations of desired commodities, diagnose the economy of control, and program a mode of becoming that breaks our complicity in the social machine and produces unfamiliar, unforeseen, and transgressive behaviors that blaze lines of escape from the predominant system. The goal in this paper, by drawing together these Deleuzian and Foucauldian ideas and applying them to contemporary art, is to map or diagram the manipulation and reproduction of gender identities in the modern world. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the culturological analysis of the new model of the subject in the twenty first century. The methodology of work is based on the wave theory of social development. Modern society enters the state of the "fourth wave". The fourth wave comes in place of the agrarian, industrial and informational societies. This wave is called "new Industrialization" in contemporary economic context. The modern economy needs the revival of the industrial sector with the support of (...) the national state. New industrialization is countering the global control and fragmentation of the world. The national state is changing its concept from unitary to glocal and multi-polar. Consciousness of citizens should also change. The subject of the fourth wave is a cultural nomad. He makes travels to the global world and switches cultural codes in different contexts. The term "altermodern" is the word of curatorial practice of "zero". It means the nomadic consciousness, the ability to cultural wanderings. Nomadic consciousness is based on the model of transculture. Trans-national and trans-cultural view is a synchronization in the human minds of different cultural worlds. Man is at the point of their collision, belongs to all the worlds and does not apply to any one. It accumulates in its consciousness projections of different cultures, their possible alternatives and development. Nomadism, transculture and altermodern - is the gap between globalization and antiglobalism. Globalism causes unification of cultures. Anti-globalism leads to a revenge of fundamentalism and ethnic isolation. Nomadic consciousness of the altmodern balances between the universal and particular principles of human existence. Opposition to ideology is a distinctive feature of transcultural altmodern. The fourth wave is characterized by total radicalization of the world as a result of the revival of the neoliberalism of the right-wing dictatorships on the territory of the Third World countries. "The doctrine of shock" is the source of the formation of neo-totalitarianism. Art liberates him. Psychoanalysis is a means of liberation from ideologies. The procedure for dismissal is based on art therapy in the aesthetic cluster. Altermodern is an era of increasing role of artists in shaping the consciousness of a cultural subject. Art-galleries of the world use techniques of psychoanalytic work with the public. They provide rearrangement of the subject in the direction of an open dynamic consciousness without boundaries and prejudices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IconsEwa HarabaszArtistEwa Harabasz was born in Czestochowa, Poland. She currently lives and paints in New York City, where she is represented by The Luxe Gallery. Her paintings have been recently featured in several solo shows in Poland, most recently at Galeria BWA in Bielsko Biala, Le Guern in Warsaw, Galeria Miejska Arsenal in Poznan, and Galeria Wozownia in Torun. Her work was also featured in a solo exhibition (...) at the Luxe Gallery in New York. Her paintings have been included in a number of group shows including “Poza” at Real Art Ways in Hartford (see the catalog, “Poza: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art”). Ewa Harabasz's new work will be presented in 2008 as part of the group show “Identity and Otherness in the Face of Anxiety” at the Socio-Political Contemporary Art Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.Harabasz has worked in church and religious art conservation in Italy and Poland, and grew up in Czestochowa, the seat of a Polish national religious shrine—a Byzantine icon called “Black Madonna.” She has been a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University since 2005.StatementThe images painted by Ewa Harabasz present themselves as ambiguous “icons”: it is unclear whether they refer to media representations of present-day war and destruction or to religious or spiritual iconography. Harabasz appropriates mass media images from the wars in Bosnia and Iraq, the Beslan tragedy, and London underground transportation terrorism by using photographic transfer methods combined with painting on wood in the style of inspirational religious art. Harabasz insists that the spectacle inherent in her images is a critical reflection on how the destruction and horror of human suffering in war and terrorism is often glamorized and dramatized, and turned into present-day pseudo-icons by the mass media to be consumed by the public as a “redeeming” experience. Writer Dora Apel cautions viewers to reflect “that these works are less analogous to the Byzantine icons of Harabasz's native Poland than the International Gothic paintings of the late Middle Ages, which demanded of religious art that it correlate with people's everyday experience. Paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries employed an extensive use of gold to create a sumptuous surface but combined it with a radical naturalism. The images ultimately pictured the workings of secular power, combined with religious figures. This came about at a time when religion focused increasingly on human and humane concerns. Similarly Harabasz uses a spiritual lens to focus on worldly experience, achieving, for modern sensibilities, the same elegance, coloristic splendor, narrative detail, and lyricism as those earlier medieval works.”Harabasz says that despite her obvious references to the Madonna images and other religious iconography, she wishes these images to be viewed as “false icons.” While saints and martyrs are immortalized via religious art, the survivors and victims whom media notoriously immortalize had no choice in their suffering. [End Page 81] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 82] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 83] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 84] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 85] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 86] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 87] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 88] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 89]Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

There can be little doubt, from the enduring contemporary popularity of art galleries and museums, that such visual arts as painting and sculpture are sources of perceptual and emotional satisfaction and pleasure to a large viewing public. Still, given the contemporary unfamiliarity of much of the subject matter of past art and the absence of any clearly comprehensible subject matter in much modern (abstract and other) art, it may be less clear what younger or older viewers might come to (...) learn from their viewing of much or any educational value. This paper first offers an overview of the complex history of development of visual art from past to present in light of the shifting standards of artistic and aesthetic evaluation that have variously guided such development. However, it is argued that, while any educated appreciation of visual art cannot be had without some understanding of such history, it also requires a clear grasp of conceptual relations between the artistic and the aesthetic and of the significant interplay of diverse criteria of evaluation in any and all serious artworks past or present. Given this, visual arts may provide a unique route to educational understanding of the broadest liberal character. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 59-69 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Views on Ritual Pactice Protestant Character of Modern Buddhist Movements Yukio MatsudoUniversity of HeidelbergWhat is the relationship between ritual and ethical activities in Nichiren Buddhism, as practiced in the Soka Gakkai (SG)? SG is a lay Buddhist organization which is, as such, involved extensively in secular affairs, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. (...) The question is, therefore, not at all whether there is a connection of religious practice and ethical activities. Rather it begs an explanation regarding its ideological background. In this respect a further reflection on a metareflection level would be useful to clarify the "modern" character of SG, which may be discussed in relation to Christian Protestantism since it has been regarded as a spiritual background for the formation of modern ethos such as individualism, egalitarianism, and social engagement. Thus, I will depict the fundamental feature of Nichiren Buddhism as "reformative Buddhism," which makes the practice of Buddhism congruent with "modern" understanding of religious roles in daily life as well as social engagement. On the other hand, I will also discuss some problems being inherent to the Western acculturation of the reformed and "engaged Buddhism." 1 The Ethical Activities of the SG in the World Ethical and Social Aspects of the Movement It is generally well known that the lay Buddhist organization, SG, as a whole has initiated wide and multifaceted activities even in an international level in order to transform its religious ideals into social reality, specifically in the field of educational, cultural, social, and peace-promoting programs. For this purpose it established educational institutes ranging from kindergartens to universities as well as research [End Page 59] institutes such as the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (founded 1961), the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century (founded 1993), the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (founded 1996), and other centers for ecological researches. For promoting mutual respect and understanding through cultural expressions and exchanges several institutes have been established, like the Min-On Concert Association (founded 1963), the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum (founded 1991), and La Maison Littéraire de Victor Hugo in Bièvre, France (founded 1992). On a global level, its political involvement is, for a large part, situated as a NGO in the frame of the UNO and the UNESCO. With the help of the UNO, SG has organized all over the world expositions translating its concerns for peace, e.g., "Nuclear War: Threat to our World" and "War and Peace." With the Simon Wiesenthal Center it organized an exhibition "The Courage to Remember: Anne Frank and the Holocaust Exhibition." The issue of human rights is another of its major concerns. Commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, SG held an exhibition entitled "Toward the Century of Humanity: An Overview of Human Rights in Today's World" at the UN office in Geneva. Also, money received from fund-raising activities has been donated to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and related agencies to provide medical supplies and food, and to support educational programs in the areas concerned. To expose the horrors of war, SG has also published life histories written by members about their sufferings in war: "Women against War," "Cries for Peace," and "Peace is our Duty." Segmental Differentiation of Organizational Structure To meet the requirements of functional differentiation of today's modern societal life SG is organized in a segmental and hierarchical structure. The basic structure is the regional units, organized in a hierarchical model, and all members are integrated "in each group" in their residence area. At the same time each member belongs to a specific "division" which is organized according to gender, age, and occupation. There are the four divisions of men, women, young men, and young women. Additionally there are divisions for school boys and girls, university students, as well as divisions according to occupation such as artists, lawyers, medical doctors, academics, and so on. These divisional differentiations reflect the need... (shrink)

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and (...) in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

The object of the study is the process of globalization, the subject of the study is its impact on the structure of the art market and national artistic cultures. Based on the idea of a dialogical cultural model, which was adhered to by V. Bybler and M. Bakhtin, the author justifies the use of the term "dialogue of cultures" to characterize the processes taking place in the space of the modern art market. Special attention in the study is (...) paid to the analysis of its structural transformations: according to the author, inclusivity, which primarily consists in the decentralization of the internal structure of the art market, is a key characteristic that allows to periodize its development into classical and modern stages. A special contribution of the author of the study is an in-depth analysis of exhibition projects: "Magicians of the Earth" by J.-Y. Martin, as well as "Cities in Motion" by H.-W. Obrist and H. Hanru. It is established how these projects aroused the interest of Western collectors in the exotic and changed the share of representation in the art market of non-European art. The main conclusion is that the process of globalization of the art market acutely poses the problem of deformation of the perception of cultural heritage: the appeal of the Western world to traditional cultures in the forms of cultural and art tourism leads to fragmentation and differentiation of once integral national artistic cultures. (shrink)

A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work (...) of art in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. In ths tension lies the particular pleasure of Steele’s poetry. (shrink)

The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers and artists, where the depiction of the social world gave way to an (...) exploration of states of being. The paradigm for that turn inward in modern art was set by the artist Kadhim Haidar, in a series of paintings exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, in 1965, under the title The Epic of the Martyr [Malḥamat al-shahīd]. The paintings reconstructed imagery from the mourning processions that annually commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al-Husayn. This paper argues that the ritual imagery contains a grammar of experience, forged in the early history of Islam, that linked justice to a state of being, and that the transposition of the imagery into painting activated that grammar in the artwork. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a comprehensive view of the economic thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. Organized as a chronological account of the rise and progress of political economy in eighteenth century Scotland, each chapter discusses the way in which the moral and economic improvement of the Scottish nation became a common concern. Contributors not only explore the economic discourses of David Hume, James Steuart and Adam Smith but also consider the neglected economic writings of Andrew Fletcher, Robert (...) Wallace, Francis Hutcheson, William Robertson, John Millar and Dugald Stewart. This book addresses the question of how these economic writings interacted with the moral, political and historical arguments of the time and shows how contemporary issues related to the union with England, natural jurisprudence, classical republicanism and manners and civilization all contained an economic dimension. Key chapters include: The ancient modern controversy in the Scottish Enlightenment The 'Scottish Triangle' in the shaping of political economy: David Hume, Sir James Steuart and Adam Smith Civilization and history in Lord Kames and William Robertson Adam Smith in Japan This view of the origin of economic science in Britain is markedly different from traditional accounts and will be of interest to economic, political and social historians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon FerdinandDavid TooheyMapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity BY SIMON FERDINAND Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019Mapping Beyond Measure is a geographical and theoretical critique of map art and the tradition of modern mapmaking. The book focuses in depth on a few related examples of map art and departs from (...) critical theory and post-Marxist readings of space. Simon Ferdinand emphasizes fine art and art-film as appropriate counterweights to the authoritarian calculation in modern cartography and, unexpectedly, map art’s critique of mapmaking.Mapping Beyond Measure follows the well-trodden path of critiquing a medium, mapping, and map art as irredeemably authoritarian.1 Situated in this approach, Ferdinand argues that map art reproduces modernist cartography’s assumptions even while critiquing mapping. Aiming to subvert this shortcoming, Ferdinand explores Peter Greenway’s semi-abstract map art films that do not prioritize science over artists. Greenway’s films, especially A Walk Through H, are shown as being as close to an idea of mapping beyond calculation as possible. Indeed, for Ferdinand, Greenway’s map art films are an improvement on “postmodern” theorists.Mapping Beyond Measure explores a small, though logically (and practically) related group of map artists. The first three chapters explore differing approaches to map art, from Soviet painting that unintentionally [End Page 126] heralds globalization and map art’s latent desires to dominate the world, to more contemporary map art about looming societal collapse through the death of nature and mass casualties from aerial bombardment of cities. The following two chapters focus on how mapping creates nation-states. These chapters elucidate the tragic inability of map artists to escape globalization and calculation, the latter exasperated by G.I.S. techniques. These map artists serve as an ensemble that spotlights what, to Ferdinand, are inevitable difficulties that ethical practitioners of map art face in escaping the pitfalls of calculation in mainstream mapping.In chapter 6 Ferdinand explains how Greenway’s film A Walk Through H gets as close as possible to challenging map art through semi-abstract, two-dimensional additions to maps and using movie cameras to create an illusion of movement. Thus, the hierarchy of scientists over artists is partially dismantled. Indeed, Ferdinand lauds Greenway for creating alternatives to established political theorists. Interestingly, Ferdinand replaces ontology with the concept of “chorein” suggesting a more fluid conception of mapping that is not available in theories of space or cartographic practices of calculation. Nonetheless, compared to one of the articles referenced, Ferdinand downplays the destructive nature of chorein as a militaristic, colonial use of maritime space to emphasize its creative potential.2Ferdinand’s examples are primarily Eurocentric, even, surprisingly, in the exception: his focus on Japanese map artist Satomi Matoba. Here Ferdinand departs from Eurocentric examples only to focus on Japan—the most privileged nation-state in Asia. Even in this focus on Japan, which also includes Hawai‘i, Ferdinand does not depart from a frame familiar to Europe: World War II. Indeed, the discussion of Pearl Harbor (a U.S. military base) focuses on U.S. foreign policy, not on Hawai‘i. This thematic choice is relevant to other map artists in Ferdinand’s book. Ferdinand’s critique of calculability is based mainly on the consequences of Nazism, as theorized by Stuart Elden. However, Ferdinand’s theoretical interventions on uneven development in maps and map art would have been more substantial with the addition of detailed, localized, narrative accounts of violence suffered by non-white populations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and various European cities. Instead, we get an anonymous logic of maps that uses the idea of the past and potential [End Page 127] future destruction of cities to assume that everyone suffered to the same extent in World War II.While I am reluctant to criticize a book for not offering a solution to what it critiques, to a certain extent, the solution offered by Ferdinand contradicts his normative critique of calculability. In exploring Alison Hildreth’s map art, Ferdinand praises nuanced, temporally layered artistic explorations of ecological destruction and extinction. Likewise, A Walk Through H, is... (shrink)

Resumen: La impronta colonial en el pueblo mapuche llevó a gran parte de sus producciones culturales al borde de la extinción; una de ellas es el tallado monumental en madera, vinculado a procesos ceremoniales en la cultura ancestral. No obstante, desde la década de los noventa, este reaparece junto con los procesos de recuperación y fortalecimiento de la identidad cultural, y adquiere una rápida expansión en el antiguo territorio mapuche dinamizando la frontera política y cultural de este pueblo bajo dos (...) vertientes, como práctica cultural tradicional o como expresión de un arte moderno mayoritariamente urbano. En este marco, este trabajo indaga cómo la instalación del tallado monumental resignifica los espacios urbanos y rurales del Güllumapu. Se sostiene que estas producciones culturales actúan semiotizando el espacio de contacto cultural, refundando el antiguo wallmapu o territorio mapuche, proceso que se realiza al inscribir una fuerte carga simbólica que convoca un nuevo sentido del tiempo-espacio histórico en el territorio mediante una “producción de localidad”, articulando categorías de identidad cultural y nacional, y colaborando en la recuperación de las fronteras al construir una narrativa de la identidad cultural y nacional en un contexto adverso.: The colonial stamp on the Mapuche people led their cultural productions in large part to the brink the extinction. One of these is monumental wood carving, linked to ceremonial processes in the ancestral culture. However, since the 1990s, this has reappeared together with the processes of recovery and strengthening of the cultural identity, and has rapidly expanded into the old Mapuche territory, invigorating the political and cultural border of this people with two main focuses: as a traditional cultural practice or as an expression of mainly urban modern art. In this framework, this study investigates how the installation of monumental carving is redefining the urban and rural spaces of Güllumapu. It is maintained that these cultural productions act by semiotizing the cultural contact space, refounding the old wallmapu or Mapuche territory, a process done by inscribing a strong symbolic power that summons a new sense of the historical time-space in the territory through a “production of place”, articulating categories of cultural and national identity and collaborating in the recovery of the borders by constructing a narrative of the cultural and national identity in an adverse context. (shrink)

Chinese animation of the beginning of the XXI century shows significant progress. A number of cartoons and animated series have been released. The hypothesis of the study is that their imagery, plots, and artistic features differ from foreign cartoons and gradually acquire a national identity. This process began in the 2000s, and its pace is only increasing, while it arouses interest from foreign studies, including Russian ones. The typological analysis of the images of the characters of famous Chinese cartoons (...) created at the beginning of the XXI century, as well as the analysis of stylistic and artistic features used by the authors to convey the uniqueness of the character, as well as to emphasize its belonging to Chinese culture, is the main problem of the article. The purpose of this research is to study the specifics of modern Chinese cartoon characters, to identify the features of the development process and the formation of their individual traits in accordance with national characteristics. Chinese animators tend to use the language of traditional art, attributes and symbols characteristic of the national culture. An appeal to the analysis of modern cartoon pictures allows us to highlight the main features of animated characters "with Chinese specifics". In addition, it is of interest to compare the features of the formation of images associated with China in foreign animated films and the characteristic features of characters appearing in the works of modern Chinese animators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14.1 (2004) 47-54 [Access article in PDF] Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research*(A Recommended Manuscript) Adopted on 16 October 2001Revised on 20 August 2002 Ethics Committee of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203 Human embryonic stem cell (ES) research is a great project in the frontier of biomedical science for the twenty-first century. Be- cause the research (...) involves the use of human embryos, it triggers serious debate on ethical issues. Opponents consider the embryo to be an early form of human life that should be respected and not destroyed. However, the majority of scientists support embryonic stem cell research, believing that it offers good prospects for the treatment of diseases that have remained incurable until now and so will benefit humankind. The Ethics Committee of the Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai seriously discussed the ethical debate initiated by embryonic stem cell research. We concluded that we should support the scientists of our country in actively carrying out human embryonic stem cell research for the noble cause of "medicine being a beneficent art." For the healthy and orderly development of human embryonic stem cell research in our country, we put forward the following recommended Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as a reference for leaders, administrative departments, and related scientists. Preface Article 1. Human embryonic stem cells are the primitive cells that play the main role in the growth and development of a human body. These [End Page 47] primitive cells have the potential for infinite proliferation, self-renewal, and multi-directional differentiation. If scientists can discover the mechanism of differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, it will be possible to induce differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to form various types of human cells for clinical cell therapy. If human embryonic stem cell research can be integrated with modern biomedical engineering techniques, it also will be possible to make repair and replacement of human tissues and organs a reality. Article 2. There are two ways to classify human embryonic stem cells. One way is to classify them according to their potential for differentiation. There could be three kinds of stem cells: totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and unipotent stem cells.A totipotent stem cell has the potential to develop into a whole individual. It can differentiate into the more than 200 cell types in the whole body, construct any tissue or organ of the body, and finally develop into a whole individual. The fertilized egg and the cleavage cells at the very early stage of embryonic development are totipotent stem cells.A pluripotent stem cell has the potential to differentiate into many cell types derived from the three embryonic layers. However, it has lost the capacity to develop into a complete organism.A unipotent stem cell is derived from the further differentiation of the pluripotent stem cell. It can differentiate only into one cell type such as a hematopoietic stem cell, neural stem cell, and others.The other way is to classify human stem cells according to their source. There could be two kinds of human stem cells: embryonic stem cells and tissue stem cells (also called adult stem cells). The former involves experimentation with embryos, which has serious ethical implications. Ethical issues associated with the latter are mainly expressed in the various opinions regarding the allocation of health resources. Article 3. Human embryonic stem cells are the group of cells called the blastocyst inner cell mass during the early stage of embryonic development. They are the main source of totipotent stem cells, and hence the focal and hot point in stem cell research. Studies on the clinical application of embryonic stem cells probably will involve use of the somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) technique, which destroys the early human embryo. At present, the ethical and moral debate is very serious in human embryonic stem cell research regarding whether the research will develop... (shrink)

This chapter maps out some of the views of Scottish thinkers concerning human progress. It briefly considers Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who was the first to promote the language of republicanism in Scotland and to conceptualize the ‘militia issue’. It then examines Adam Ferguson’s debate with David Hume and Adam Smith. Whereas the former reasserted civic tradition and played a role in the cause of a Scottish national militia, Hume and Smith, by supporting commercial societies, pointed Scotland (...) in a quite different direction. The chapter moves on to the gender ambivalence of civilization in which women were seen as the vectors of the new values of modernity, but also as responsible for the loss of the ancient virtue of male citizens in arms. Finally, the chapter considers some of the historical alternatives to modernity, which found their models in the past: Stuart’s gothic feudalism, and the world of Ossian. (shrink)

In contemporary Chinese art the national traditions and modern trends of the art world are especially relevant. Since the 1980s, in the works of a number of authors, interest began to manifest itself in the techniques of silk work, which was characteristic of ancient and medieval painting on scrolls, which was later replaced by more accessible drawings on paper. At the present stage, such painting has reached its heyday and is highly appreciated in the art market. The most (...) famous masters engaged in silk painting are Mu Yilin and Dong Wenzheng. The analysis of their creations allows us to see how the artists discovered the expressive possibilities of this material, including its transparency, refraction, color and tone saturation. The object of attention is the Chinese tradition of painting on silk, and the subject is the features of its development at the beginning of the XXI century on the example of the work of famous artists and the options they take into account in the compositions of techniques, figurative structure and expressive means of the old masters. The purpose of the article is to identify the main themes and artistic means that modern artists use in their silk works, as well as the option of integrating an ethno-cultural component into their work. (shrink)

Canadian landscapes on gallery walls in art museums serve as a primer for understanding the nation. Visitors cannot easily escape the purposeful emptiness of rugged scenes meant to visually assure them of the nation’s right to colonial possession. Most viewers respond positively to these pretty pictures because such ways of seeing the art history of Canada has been naturalized and normalized, appearing politically neutral.Ubiquitous Canadian landscape paintings also reinforce colonial claiming of land and authorize erasure of Indigenous relations with (...) the land. Understanding the noted landscapes as something other than part of a national narrative, however, has not been widely accepted, even as a sanctioned mandate to broaden art historical narratives has resulted in displaying additional Indigenous art in galleries. In an analysis that considers ways to re-vision the privileged colonial narrative present in Canadian art museums, deeper ethical issues arise in relation to institutional structures. Here the analysis focuses on three projects in and around Canada 150, including examples such as Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the rehanging of Norval Morrisseau’s Artist and Shaman between Two Worlds at the National Gallery of Canada, and the Michael Belmore and A. J. Casson: Nkweshkdaadiimgak Miinwaa Bakeziibiisan/Confluences and Tributaries exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery. This essay explores questions regarding whether ways of seeing land differently come about simply by hanging Indigenous art on institutional walls or whether more systemic change is required. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:164 BOOK REVIEWS "was presented with wine in the name of the whole University." That evening, one of the feasters recalled that this was the man who had written the foremost theological defense of the Royal Supremacy: the following morning, when Gardiner asked for vessels and vestments to say Mass before proceeding on his way, they were refused him, as to an excommunicate or a schismatic. This incident is (...) significant for a number of reasons: it shows that, whatever anyone else might have thought, Gardiner certainly thought he was a Catholic. The ambiguity of that label, and how far exactly it extended, is also quite evident. Some explanation of the difficulty and some consistency of usage in the text of the biography would have been welcome. The text itself appears to have a number of editorial flaws: p. 201 begins in the middle of a paragraph, and the opening lines are omitted. In the second paragraph of p. 176, numbers are transposed so that what is printed as 1534 should read 1543 (in the context, a significant difference). The book is, on the whole, a contribution to scholarship that is long overdue. That a man who was so powerful (not to say feared) during his own lifetime should wallow in oblivion is confusing. Redworth 's biography, for all its incompleteness, is of great value in piecing together the life of this leader, both political and ecclesiastical, who sought to fashion the emerging English Church and nation into a recognizably Catholic form. Dominican House of Studie$ Washington, D.C. W. BECKET SOULE, 0.P. Art and the Word of God (Arte e la Parola di Dio): A Study of Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga, O.P. Edited by VINCENT I. ZARLENGA, O.P. (text in English and Italian). River Forest, Illinois: Fra Angelico Art Foundation, 1990. Pp. xiv + 109. The religious order of the Dominicans (Order of Preachers) was founded in the thirteenth century by St. Dominic with the specific purpose of preaching the Gospel or " ministry of the Word." With the Franciscan Order it shared in the creative, artistic impulse that produced the medieval cathedrals. It is often said that the great Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, for all its intellectual rigor, is also a work of art comparable to the gothic masterpiece of Chartres cathedral. Dominicans and Franciscans thought that the Gospel should find expression not only in words, but in poetry, music, architecture, and BOOK REVIEWS 165 the plastic arts. Among the artists who were members of the Dominican Order are the recently beatified Fra Angelico (BL Giovanni da Fiesole ), Bartolommeo della Porta, an important influence on Raphael and other High Renaissance painters, Juan Mayno the gifted Spanish contemporary of El Greco, Pere Couturier, the advocate of modern church art and friend of Matisse, and the American sculptor, Thomas McGlynn. Carrying on this Dominican tradition, Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga (1919-1986), a native of Italy, worked in the United States from 1949 until his death. The present work, edited by his brother Vincent, also a member of the Order, makes available a chronological catalogue of his paintings, sculptures, and designs in glass, with many illustrations in full color, along with a biography and critical appreciations by others, including Cardinals Joseph Bernadin and Mario Luigi Ciappi. It is an important contribution to the history of Catholic religious art in the United States. The noted German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar built his whole theology not on the goodness and truth of God, but on His beauty, or in biblical terms, God's "glory." According to St. Thomas Aquinas, " beauty " is the " radiance of truth," that is, it is truth as truth is related well to our knowing powers. Like the fit between the key and the lock, beauty is the fit between known and the knower. That is why a landscape on a cloudy day looks dull and uninteresting, but when the sun comes out it appears strikingly beautiful. The sun's illumination has made the dim objects vividly visible, radiant to our eyes. This is what the artist does for us. He does not clothe the facts of reality with an adventitious beauty, but he illumines those facts so that... (shrink)

Out of the consideration of the same artistic essence and aesthetic function of drama and opera as theater, many directors devoted their lives to building a "golden bridge" between drama and opera: on the one hand, to maintain the traditional characteristics of opera, but "to make use of new ideas, new techniques, and new organization, so that the face of the old opera can be renewed". On the other hand, their early practice of new drama also made them realize that (...) Chinese drama, which lacked roots, "in terms of scriptwriting and acting, its only master was the Chinese opera. On the other hand, their early practice of new drama also made them realize that Chinese drama, which lacked roots, was "still the only master of Chinese opera in terms of scriptwriting and performance" and therefore needed to draw on the aesthetic spirit and artistic techniques of traditional opera, and in their later years they hoped that drama would "create the latest and most beautiful dramatic art on the basis of tradition". Many directors have left an important legacy for the 20th century Chinese theater by their thinking about and defending the aesthetic nature of theater and its "independent and dignified" artistic status, as well as by their important ideas and remarkable practice of fusing drama and opera to create modern Chinese national theater. It is of great importance to evaluate the effect of fusion. In this paper, we study the deep integration effect measurement of traditional drama and modern drama directing art based on intelligent computing and time-series data analysis, which effectively solves this problem. (shrink)

Wealth and Virtue reassesses the remarkable contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the formation of modern economics and to theories of capitalism. Its unique range indicates the scope of the Scottish intellectual achievement of the eighteenth century and explores the process by which the boundaries between economic thought, jurisprudence, moral philosophy and theoretical history came to be established. Dealing not only with major figures like Hume and Smith, there are also studies of lesser known thinkers like Andrew (...) Fletcher, Gershom Carmichael, Lord Kames and John Millar as well as of Locke in the light of eighteenth century social theory, the intellectual culture of the University of Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century and of the performance of the Scottish economy on the eve of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. While the scholarly emphasis is on the rigorous historical reconstruction of both theory and context, Wealth and Virtue directly addresses itself to modern political theorists and economists and throws light on a number of major focal points of controversy in legal and political philosophy. (shrink)