Artistic Medium Artistic medium is an art critical concept that first arose in 18th century European discourse about art. Medium analysis has historically attempted to identify that out of which works of art and, more generally, art forms are created, in order to better articulate norms or standards by which works of art and art … Continue reading Artistic Medium →.

Artistic Medium Artistic medium is an art critical concept that first arose in 18th century European discourse about art. Medium analysis has historically attempted to identify that out of which works of art and, more generally, art forms are created, in order to better articulate norms or standards by which works of art and art … Continue reading Artistic Medium →.

This article, corresponding to a part of the restitution of a financed international research project between France, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Belgium, aims to offer a modelisation and qualitative evaluation of mediation care settings based on an original methodological tool that involves identifying the typical games at the foundations of creativity, following a multidisciplinary perspective. Therapeutic mediations are settings or devices organised around a “pliable medium”, often artistic, like painting, modeling, writing, ​and theatre, which are very widespread in (...) institutional practices, both in France and abroad. The scientific objectives of this research consist in a multi-disciplinary exploration (anthropology, criminology, neuroscience, clinical psychology) of the process of creative symbolisation understood as a process of transformation involving play. According to this orientation, play can be defined as a psychic process whereby a subjective experience can be explored with pleasure, and consequently symbolised and appropriated. Our fundamental and original hypothesis is that play is at the source of the creative process, conceived as a work of metabolisation by the psyche of playful experiences during the different stages of life. The review of the understanding of play in psychoanalysis, anthropology, criminology and neuroscience emphasises the richness of this model and the importance of reflecting on the typical games in the field of psychic care. A clinical example of treatment in a pictorial therapeutic mediation setting of a child with psychotic disorders makes it possible to identify a number of typical games as well as the modalities of interpretation of the therapists through play. These multidisciplinary studies lead to the presentation of a general table of typical games, and these first results highlight the richness of identifying typical games in clinical settings. Ultimately, the multidisciplinary approach shows the interest of the model of play in the evaluation of therapeutic mediation settings, with a convergence of the different disciplines emphasising the pertinence of this model. The scientific impact of this research overlaps with its societal impact, through the development of innovative tools for evaluating therapeutic mediations, in order to take account of the evolution of the different forms of social expression of psychic suffering. (shrink)

Science at the Club explores the architecture of the nightclub space as a nucleus for queer testimony, relating it to a judiciary courtroom. This performance challenges legal doctrines of forensic identification and the binary of life and death, by transforming biological and forensic material into ephemeral essences within the performance of the dance floor. Divided into a case study surrounding my performances at nightclubs, research courses taken in human remains recovery and visits to various burial sites of South Texas, I (...) pull from a variety of interdisciplinary studies relating to queer death theory, building on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ in relation to the human corpse, racial politics in science and the biological arts in a nightclub context. Science at the Club creates a catalyst platform challenging racial and scientific histories of the body and land within the current US political climate, while exploring questions of resurrection and disintegration with a focus on the language of forensics and identity. (shrink)

Drawing upon Bernard Stiegler’s and Jacques Rancière’s conceptions of medium as a milieu this article seeks to address the question of the political aspects of the aesthetic in relation to the notion of medium. Based on the analysis of this theoretical question the article interprets and discusses artistic endeavors to re-appropriate and reconfigure conservative symbolic orders and media milieus that have become dissociated in relation to works of art by Alfredo Jaar and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Technological advancements often lead to revolutions in the creation of art; but, what is unclear is whether such advancements always correspond to revolutions regarding the artistic medium. The notion of an artistic medium is central to our thinking about, engagement with, and appreciation of art. Accounts of the interpretation, understanding, and experience of art must at some point grapple with the role of the artistic medium against such endeavors. Moreover, artists do not choose their (...) medium by accident, but presumably do so with an eye to the specific and unique affordances of their chosen medium. This chapter will explore the ways in which technology affects these issues. One question we could ask is, when does some technology itself become a new artistic medium? Some technological advancements result in the creation of a new artistic medium—like photography—while others do not—like procedural music. Finding “technology” itself to be too broad of a concept to define a distinctive and theoretically useful notion of an artistic medium, this chapter will examine generally what sort of barriers or challenges one might face when thinking of different technologies as themselves constituting an artistic medium. Specific attention will be paid to the notion of the medium and the theoretical and aesthetic work that such a notion plays in regard to works of computer art. (shrink)

I argue that the physical marks on a canvas resulting from an artist's intentional, stylistic and expressive acts cannot themselves be the artist's expression, but instead they serve to signify or indicate those acts. Thus there is a kind of indicative content associated with a picture that is distinct from its subject matter (or 'representational content'). I also argue that this kind of indicative content is closely associated with the specific artistic medium chosen by the artist as her (...) expressive medium, for which reason I call this kind of content medium content (or medium-related content). (shrink)

Is it appropriate to honor artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? In this article, after arguing that honoring involves identifying a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honoring immoral artists. First, we argue that honoring can serve to condone their behavior, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. Second, we argue that honoring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead (...) to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. Third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honoring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. We end by considering how we might respond to these reasons. (shrink)

Artists, art critics, art historians, and cognitive psychologists have asserted that visual artists perceive the world differently than nonartists and that these perceptual abilities are the product of knowledge of techniques for working in an artistic medium. In support of these claims, Kozbelt (2001) found that artists outperform nonartists in visual analysis tasks and that these perceptual advantages are statistically correlated with drawing skill. We propose a model to explain these results that is derived from a diagnostic framework (...) for object recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize and reproduce stimulus features sufficient for adequate artistic production in a medium, and that these schemata become encoded as motor plans as artists develop technical proficiency in a medium. We hypothesize that artists' perceptual advantages can therefore, be explained by the role spatial schemata and motor plans play in selective attention. (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo, tentar-se-á reconstruir e defender a noção de “especificidade média” que se refere ao cinema. Começar-se-á por discutir a ontologia de um certo tipo de exibição visual, geralmente encontrada em conexão com uma vasta gama de obras cinematográficas. Argumentar-se-á que estas exibições têm uma natureza essencial ou real. Obras construídas em torno de tais exibições estão aptas a manifestar certas qualidades e poderes peculiares. Assim, o “meio de cinema” consiste em parte, num tipo particular de meio veicular e, (...) de várias propriedades nem sempre manifestas distintas dele. Ao discutir-se o conceito de “meio”, considera-se também um sentido em que esta noção é negligenciada, a saber, que as competências e habilidades pessoais operam uma mediação entre a concepção de uma exibição e a sua produção. Prosseguir-se-á, argumentando, que apesar dos defeitos da “especificidade média”, proveniente de uma versão da teoria clássica do cinema, o cinema como uma forma de arte ou corpo de obras de arte, é ou tem um “meio especial” dotado de distintas propriedades artísticas. Palavras-chave : essencialismo, medium specificity, medium, obra, ontologia do cinema, valor artísticoIn this paper, I try to reconstruct and defend the notion of medium specificity as it relates to cinema. I begin by discussing the ontology of a certain kind of visual display commonly found in connection with a vast range of candidate cinematic works. These displays, I argue, have an essential or real nature. Works constructed around such displays are apt to manifest certain qualities and powers peculiar to displays of that kind. Thus cinema’s medium consists in part of a particular type of vehicular medium and various not always manifested properties distinctive to it. In discussing the concept of medium, I also consider a neglected sense of this term, namely, personal abilities and skills that mediate between one’s designing a certain display and one’s producing a matching object or result. I go on to argue that, despite the defects of classic film theory’s version of medium specificity, it is true that cinema, as artform or body of artworks, is or has a special medium endowed with distinctive artistic properties. Keywords : artistic value, essentialism, medium specificity, medium, ontology of cinema, work. (shrink)

Nguyen offers a number of profound insights about the nature and value of games. Games are works of art, according to Nguyen, because they offer players aesthetic experiences. Game designers aim to...

Résumé On aimerait voir un miroir dans Contact de Markus Raetz, mais il s’agit d’une photographie dans une photographie. En montrant comment l’artiste parvient à tirer profit de l’ambiguïté perceptive entre reflet et photographie, c’est-à-dire entre différents médiums, ce texte essaie de clarifier la complexité des niveaux de représentation mis en jeu.

In The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy, Smith argues that Western Metaphysics has indeed come to what Heidegger describes as ¿an end.¿ That is hardly to say philosophy as such is over or soon to disappear; rather, its purpose as a medium of cultural change and as a generator of history has run its course. He thus calls for a New Philosophy, conceptualized by the artist-philosopher who ¿makes¿ or ¿poeticizes¿ New Philosophy, spanning literary and theoretical discourses and operating across art (...) in all its forms and across culture in all its locations. To this end, Smith proposes the establishment of schools and social networks that advance the training and development of artist-philosophers, as well as global digital networks that are themselves designed toward this ¿ever-becoming community.¿. (shrink)

In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato launches an extensive critique of art, claiming that it can have no legitimate role within the well-ordered state. While his reasons are multifac- eted, Plato’s primary objection to art rests on its status as a mere shadow of a shadow. Such shadows inevitably lead the human mind away from the Good, rather than toward it. How- ever, after voicing his many objections, Plato concedes that if art “has any arguments to show it should (...) have a place in a well-governed city, [he] would gladly welcome it back.” Over two millennia later, the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev implicitly responded to this challenge in his Lectures on Godmanhood (1881). Solov’ev cited the phenomenon of art as additional proof in favor of his model of the metaphysical foundations of reality. According to Solov’ev, art is not three steps removed from ultimate reality; rather, an artist creates true art only when he has experienced a vision of the univer- sal and substantial ideas that stand over and above particular things, and then conveys them to the viewer directly, via the artistic medium. Hence, the artist is able to sidestep the in- termediate shadow and produce something that is more than a shadow—a clear reflection of that higher reality. If Solov’ev is correct, the artist should enjoy the elevated status of sage, per- haps even philosopher-king, rather than face exile from Plato’s republic, because the artist both knows the Good and guides the less enlightened toward it. After a brief sketch of the metaphysical grounds for Plato’s critique of art, I provide an analysis of Solov’ev’s ontology, as represented in his Lectures on Godmanhood. Next, I describe Solov’ev’s concept of the three-fold mission of art and its relationship to human nature, drawing both from the Lectures and from The Universal Meaning of Art (1890). Finally, in the last section, I demonstrate how the afore-mentioned account comprises Solov’ev’s robust and successful response to Plato’s challenge, from within a platonic framework. (shrink)

Nombreux sont les artistes qui préfèrent aujourd’hui « faire le mur », c’est-à-dire sortir des lieux traditionnels de création et de monstration de l’œuvre d’art pour s’exposer à ciel ouvert. Parmi eux, certains choisissent précisément d’explorer le mur, de le travailler comme un support, de lui faire raconter des histoires, mais aussi de l’ébranler, de le percer pour tenter d’abattre – au moins symboliquement – les frontières qu’il représente.Many artists today prefer to break out of the traditional confines of creating (...) and showing works of art , to bring what they do out in the open. Some of them have even chosen to explore the idea of walls, working on walls as a medium, telling stories through them, but also attacking or piercing them as a way of breaking down – at least symbolically – the barriers they represent. (shrink)

The catalogue raisonné compiled by art scholars holds information about an artist’s work such as a painting’s image, medium, provenance, and title. The catalogue raisonné as a tangible asset suffers from the challenges of art authentication and impermanence. As the catalogue raisonné is born digital, the impermanence challenge abates, but the authentication challenge persists. With the popularity of artificial intelligence and its deep learning architectures of computer vision, we propose to address the authentication challenge by creating a new artefact (...) for the digital catalogue raisonné: a digital classification model. This digital classification model will help art scholars with new artwork claims via a tool that authenticates a proposed artwork with an artist. We create this tool by training a machine learning model with 90 artists having at least 150 artworks and achieve an accuracy of 87.31%. We use the ResNet Convolutional Neural Network to improve accuracy and number of artist classes over state-of-the-art artist classification experiments using the WikiArt database. We address inconsistencies in the way scholars approach artist classification by providing a consistent method to recreate our dataset and providing a consistent method to calculate performance metrics based on imbalanced data. (shrink)

Modern Thai art and its historical development are not a symbol of modernism restricted to preconceived Western notion. But modern Thai art has its own genealogy whose complexity and system of meaning signify an expression of an ethical need to embody the denseness, structure and complexity of moral experience. Believing in this conviction causes Modern Thai artists to dig deep into materiality of their medium to find forms combining of matter or signs of solid substance. Accordingly, it becomes a (...) yearning process of heroic aspiration to secure Thai artists’ identity, and, somehow, the identity and ethical structure of the nation. Therefore works of art in Thailand have been produced not for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, but for moralistic contemplation within very established institutional domains. In turn, Thai contemporary artistic movement after 1990s has been inclined to suggest some emerging alternative of creative competency quite differently from artistic progress in the prior periods. This creates a political dialogue that can be critically understood in terms of the process of cultural hybridity that gives rise to something different, something new, transitional and unrecognizable – a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation taking place - in a third space. This kind of space is politically practical because it is a productive space of the construction of culture as different, in the spirit of alteration or otherness embedded in everyday idioms of artistic practices in various fashions. From this perspective, artistic practices in this period become a new terrain of practice as a site of contestation. Furthermore, in my study, the research methodology will encourage epistemological overlapping terrains for interrogating that of foundational dualism, which implicitly underpins the study of the social constitution of reality rigidly bounded on cultural identities of Thai nation state. (shrink)

As a conceptual approach in art practice, the female body has represented both a cultural barrier and a source of inspiration throughout art history. The adoption of the female body as an art theme is prevalent across many different artistic movements, using varying conceptual approaches. Women struggle against paradigms of inferiority to this day, though their individual cultural identity varies according to their society’s beliefs and customs – for example, many contemporary Middle Eastern cultures and customs are based on (...) a patriarchal past, when men wielded power over women. Women all over the world experience subjugation to varying degrees in the fields of employment, education, sexuality and reproductive choice. The female body in Middle Eastern societies is a red line that artists are not allowed to cross. Though many Middle Eastern civilizations have dealt freely with the female body, as can be seen in the paintings and sculptures of ancient Egypt, many social and religious factors made the female body taboo in most Middle Eastern cultures. However, on close scrutiny of modern art history in Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, we can identify outstandingly courageous female artists who succeeded in breaking the rules. They chose to express themselves through their own own form of art as an expression of freedom. They chose to use their own bodies as an art medium, which made them pioneers in their countries, and many female artists followed their example. Media art has flourished in Arab countries since the 1990s, especially in Egypt. Many of these female artists distinguished themselves as pioneers, aligning themselves with new art forms and challenging the prevailing stereotypical notion of the female artist at that time. This new mode of female self-expression and identity has developed over time and remains an ongoing process in the twenty-first century. This article considers how Middle Eastern female media artists have struggled to transform stereotypes of women by using their own bodies as an artistic element, and how they have expressed the concept of freedom through their self-body image. (shrink)

The essay focuses on Jeff Wall’s theoretical writings and artistic productions. The inquiry on the photograph’s medium has been re-enacted in the late 1970s and 1980s by the use of the large scale and the “tableau-form”; in Wall’s work the large scale of the images, coupled with the light box, stimulates at the same time a new relationship with the beholder’s gaze and the possibility of a historical dialogue with other media, like painting and cinema. By the analysis (...) of photographs like Mimic and A view from an Apartment the interplay between document and fiction, capture of everyday and mise en scène appears at the core of Wall’s research and a main subject in contemporary photography. (shrink)

W artykule staram się dowieść, że fotografia artystyczna, za sprawą technologii wytwarzania „mieniących się, syntetycznych wizerunków” (K. Linker, On Artificiality), może stać się medium sztuki ze społecznością, tworzonej wraz z osobami systemowo pozbawianymi widoczności w sferze publicznej. Posługując się metodą analizy ikonograficznej, opisuję wybrane fotografie portretowe Krzysztofa Marchlaka prezentujące wizerunki osób należących do społeczności LGBTQ w Polsce. W konkluzji nawiązuję do wykonanej przez artystę wielkoformatowej fotograficznej panoramy Paradiso, którą interpretuję jako zaangażowany społecznie, „mieniący się, syntetyczny wizerunek” sztucznego raju dla (...) wygnanych z królestwa binarnych opozycji płciowych. Artificial Paradises for the Expelled. Krzysztof Marchlak’s Art Photography as a Medium for Performing Queer Identities In the article, I try to demonstrate that artistic photography which involves the use of technology of creating “shimmering, synthetic appearances” (K. Linker, “On Artificiality”) can become a medium for community art projects developed with people who are systemically excluded from view in the public sphere. Applying the method of iconographic analysis, I describe selected portrait photographs by Krzysztof Marchlak that feature images of people who belong to the Polish LGBTQ community. I draw in conclusion upon the artist’s large-format photographic panorama Paradiso, which I interpret as a socially engaged, “shimmering, synthetic appearance” of an artificial paradise for people expelled from the kingdom of binary gender oppositions. (shrink)

The subject matter of the article is focused on the senses in contemporary art. The author tries to find universal (or all-embracing) theory of senses aesthetics, which is totally new experience in contemporary art. Very important place in this article takes also body, which is undestand, especially by the artist, as a storage medium. Because body is as phenomenological presence.

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming stimuli are processed not only visually, but multimodally, with all senses, and moreover affectively. The classical binding of a sensory organ to a medium, on whose delimitation (...) the common understanding of multimodality is based, is thus abolished. Can arguments for this assumption be found? Building on the research of cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer and his successors, the two American philosophers Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois, and supported by research from the life sciences in which, in parallel, the arts also play an important role in understanding image formation, as in the work of Heinz Werner and, following on from this, in the more recent research of the child psychologist Daniel N. Stern in collaboration with mirror neuron research by the group of neuroscientists around Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, justifications for this will be provided. What the multimodal processing of film images is concretely based on will finally be made clear by means of an exemplary analysis of a video film by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. It aims to prove, that the prerequisites for the thesis can only lie in the fact, that both the modes of perception (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory) as well as the medially conditioned modes of image formation are based on non-discursive, formal-abstract structures that are also processed affectively. At the same time, the analysis thus shows how the selection and composition of the vital experienced forms can provide information about the socio-culturally shaped self-image of the producer and the viewer. (shrink)

The thematic structure of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel ‘Netochka Nezvanova‘ is revealed in the article through the system of leitmotifs rising to elementary semantic oppositions. The topical opposition of high and low is traced throughout the semantics of space. The periphery of the story - the estate of a landowner, a music-lover, and its sacral centre - the ’sunny’ home of Prince H. in St. Petersburg are brought together by the main character’s lifelong way. In Yegor Efimov’s biography, this is predetermined (...) in the same way as the initiation of a fairytale hero is predestined. It should be emphasized that the unique temporal structure of ‘Netochka Nezvanova‘ is analyzed in this aspect for the first time. Like many other Dostoyevsky’s works, this particular story displays signs of ‘inoculations‘ from different poetic systems and other texts which form a complicated system of intertextual connections. The leading motif of the story belongs to the circle of the basic mythopoetic topic: Man’s temptation by Satan. The demon’s intrusion into Efimov’s life is especially well traced in his friendship with the Italian conductor and in inheriting the latter’s violin. The history of the violin is accompanied by the marginal demonic background created by the stable mythologem - ‘the Satan’s violin‘. Within the borders of mythopoetic concept of music, an artist is a medium, a person who has the power to influence other people in the name of good or evil by supernatural forces. In this respect, the life story of Efremov the violinist can be compared to the adventures of a mythological ‘cultural hero‘ presented as a non-stop chain of events: meeting a magical sorcerer, receiving a magic weapon from him as a gift and the ensuing sequence of dreadful ordeals. Yegor Efimov’s life story is shown in the article against the background of the mythopoetic concept of music, as Man’s temptation by Satan, and in the historical and cultural context, as shattering a romantic myth about ‘a demonic artist‘. (shrink)

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked debates (...) between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Terry Comito NOTES ON PANOFSKY, CASSIRER, AND THE "MEDIUM OF THE MOVIES" The modesty of my title is not feigned. Panofsky's essay on "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures"1 is more often quoted than understood, and much of it proves upon examination to be curiously elusive. The notes and hypotheses offered here are tentative ones, meant only to point us in the direction of answers to (...) two questions. How might Panofsky's well-known formulation ("the medium of the movies is physical reality as such") most usefully be construed?—useful for us as viewers and then perhaps as critics of movies. And what might he plausibly be supposed to have intended? It is to be hoped that these two points are not impossibly remote from one another. In a recent discussion of "Fact and Fiction in Literature," Roger Shattuck takes Panofsky's essay as an extreme instance of a "belief in the basically documentary nature of film." According to Shattuck, Panofsky supposes that a "film grows naturally out of material things," that it is generated spontaneously, without the intervention of authorial consciousness, from the "undifferentiated reality" before which a camera needs only to be set in motion. Now this is a familiar enough parody of "realist" theories of cinema. But it would be a curious position for anyone really to assert, and particularly curious for a writer so committed as Panofsky to idealist aesthetics. There is, to be sure, a puzzle about the way such an aesthetic might take account of an art that is said somehow to "do justice" to a materialistic interpretation of the world (p. 31). (We would presumably want to know if the justice in question is distributive or commutative: rendering unto Caesar or robbing Peter to pay Paul?) But does a disciple of Cassirer really need to be lectured at about the priority of the whole to the parts, or to be informed that what we call "reality" is constituted in the act of perception? There 229 230Philosophy and Literature are confusions enough in Shattuck's essay to suggest that he is not our best guide over an admittedly strenuous terrain. He informs his readers that Panofsky (and apparently Bazin and Kracauer too) "anticipate " the views of "many structuralists and semioticians," as if there were not a fundamental difference between the autonomy of écriture and the "animistic" view of physical reality Shattuck attributes to Panofsky and his followers. He then introduces a distinction between documentary and fiction films that makes Panofsky the prophet of Warhol, Wiseman, and South American snuff-films, when in fact he talks about Disney, the Marx Brothers, and the derivation of movies from comic strips and dime novels. All this is worth bringing up because Shattuck does raise some crucial issues, if only by so noticeably fudging them. Like most of us who have responded to Panofsky's essay, he has chiefly in mind the assertion that "the medium of the movies is physical reality as such" (p. 31). He wants to construe this as saying that movies "document" or certify the world of external objects and thereby encourage certain sorts of naivete: the belief that we are secure in our knowledge of the world "out there," and that the world really is "out there," independent of our hypotheses and untainted by our uncomfortable consciousness. That movies have often fueled some such nostalgia for the world seems undeniable, but the question elided in Shattuck's discussion is the critical one. To what extent and in what ways does a statement about the "medium" of the movies commit us to a position as to their proper content, or to a specific social program, or to a particular metaphysical understanding of the world? Shattuck cuts through these knotty matters rather than unraveling them. He talks as if Panofsky claims that physical reality as such is the subject matter of movies—which is where Warhol and cinéma vérité come in, as the inheritors of the tradition of Balzac. But this is not what Panofsky says, and it does not accurately describe the parameters of his taste. He objects to "artistic prestylization" in the manner of Caligari, and he thinks... (shrink)

Open the box -- The museum effect -- Art or artifact -- Public inquiry -- Framing the frame -- Curator/creator -- On the inside -- Without walls.

Self-portrait photography presents an elucidatory range of cases for investigating the relationship between automatism and artistic agency in photography— a relationship that is seen as a problem in the philosophy of art. I discuss self-portraits by photographers who examine and portray their own identities as artists working in the medium of photography. I argue that the automatism inherent in the production of a photograph has made it possible for artists to extend the tradition of self-portraiture in a way (...) that is radically different from previous visual arts. In Section I, I explain why self-portraiture offers a way to address the apparent conflict between automatism and agency that is debated in the philosophy of art. In Section II, I explain why mirrors play an important function in the production of a traditional self-portrait. In Sections III and IV, I discuss how photographers may create self-portraits with and without the use of mirrors to show how photography offers unique and important new forms of self-portraiture. (shrink)

Recent interdisciplinary research in visual stylometry employs digital image analysis algorithms to study the image features and statistics that underwrite our experience of artworks. This research brings psychologists, computer scientists, and art historians together to explore the formal image qualities that define artistic style. We introduce the field of visual stylometry, discuss it's implications for our understanding of both the nature of categories of art and the role artistic style plays in our engagement with artworks. We then discuss (...) the results of our research employing entropy analyses and discrete tonal analyses to classify paintings by school (Impressionism/Hudson River School) and medium/technique (Wyeth/egg-tempura/watercolor). (shrink)

When the news of the invention of the daguerreotype left the halls of the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, it fell on the ears of an eager and receptive public, spellbound by the miracle of such an invention. The rapid popularization of the daguerreotype, and subsequently, of less time-consuming photographic processes, forced critics and artists alike to vehemently defend a definition of art that either categorically excluded the new medium or open-mindedly included it within the ranks of a (...) modern or industrialized art. If one maintained, as many did, that the nature and essence of art/literature can be clearly defined and that this definition must be grounded in tradition, coming to terms with what photography was and where it rightfully belonged required either a staunch reaffirmation of one's beliefs about aesthetics or a reassessment of those beliefs. In either case, photography functioned as a disruptive element that did not cause but contributed to an (already existing) artistic movement in which the integrity and solidity of aesthetic definitions and orthodoxies were being questioned and tested. In the minds of those apprehensive and suspicious of the new medium, industrialization, as well as political and social change, had already begun to sound the death knell for art as it had traditionally been conceived. If art/literature had become contaminated by industry, technological advancement and democratic principles, the conservative French nineteenth-century thinker saw it as his duty to save the former from certain destruction. “Saving” art/literature required a fundamental reinforcement of the belief in the closure and soundness of aesthetic definitions whose truth tradition had supposedly guaranteed. Uncovering the presuppositions behind aesthetic definitions that claim to speak in the name of tradition, self-evident truths, and even the nature of man is an endeavor worth pursuing because this manner of thinking leads to a kind of tyranny that has as its goal the suppression of questions, critical inquiry and thus, independent thinking. This study seeks to examine a small part of French aesthetic theory during a period in which change, instability and revolution became almost commonplace. The reactions of conservative artists and critics to post 1840s literary and artistic practices will be scrutinized in order to unveil the deep-seated fears and beliefs that found conservative backlashes to that which is referred to as “new” or “progressive.”. (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope and significance (...) of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dialogic and the Aesthetic:Some Reflections on Theatre as a Learning MediumAnthony Jackson (bio)A Doll's House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night's Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.— George Bernard Shaw, "The Problem Play"1People have tried for centuries to use (...) drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. The only thing dramatic form is good for is telling a story.—David Mamet, A Whore's Profession2These two assertions, some 100 years apart, were of course meant to be contentious—but they do point to one of the recurring questions about the role that theatrical art plays in modern Western culture and nicely encapsulate the contrasting claims made by practitioners and critics alike for the "work in the world" that drama can do. On the one hand, it is argued that what is conventionally thought of as great dramatic art—while it may be imaginatively rich, aesthetically compelling, and "timeless" in its appeal—will not achieve the social impact that plays such as A Doll's House have done. Such plays have a different function. They can be directly useful to us in the "real world" beyond the theatre walls, perhaps capable of influencing that world or at least influencing the way we think about and operate in the world—but they may not, consequently, have much shelf life. A Doll's House, of course, obstinately refuses to leave both shelf and stage but in this respect may be an exception that proves the rule; the vast majority of "interventionist" dramas rarely outlive their historical moment. (A play such as Spirochete, a [End Page 104] living newspaper written in 1938 in Chicago with the aim of heightening public awareness of the widespread—but barely discussed—problem of syphilis and of the cures available, undoubtedly did much effective work in the world but remains of and for its time.3 )On the other hand, playwright David Mamet casts buckets of cold water over the whole notion of "useful" dramatic art. Let us not delude ourselves, he argues, into thinking drama is good for anything else than telling a story—the value of good dramatic storytelling is important enough as it is. It serves the art form—and possibly those we wish to influence—badly if we insist on trying to change the world using drama as our lever. A genuine work of art, it is often said, cannot be didactic or "instrumental." The novel, play, or poem that sets out to convey information or to preach a message risks surrendering those very qualities we usually value in art—complexity, multilayered meanings, richness of imagination. Jonathan Levy, in his A Theatre of the Imagination, argues that "the impulse to create theatre for children is the impulse to give a gift, without strings. It is this impulse... we should... call upon when we find ourselves in the theatre tempted to teach."4 Further, "when art is used to teach, either the teaching or the art must suffer."5 The implication is clearly that teaching and dramatic art make awkward bedfellows. It has to be one or the other, not both. The late, much missed, Lowell Swortzell took a not dissimilar line in his provocative essay on theatre-in-education, "Trying to like TIE,"6 and many practitioners of children's and young people's theatre have likewise resisted having their work categorized as educational or in any way curriculum driven. The work must have its own justification, as art, as storytelling, offering young people an experience that may complement but that is fundamentally different from anything else they get in school. Even Augusto Boal has at times appeared to reinforce the dichotomy. Arguing for a theatre that can serve the immediate needs of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged, he has negotiated a challenging and productive path through the artistic and socially responsive implications of... (shrink)

For Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg, flatness–more specifically, “re-created flatness,” a term Greenberg adopted after hearing it used in the painter’s important 1938– 39 lectures–became a key term in their accounts of pictorial meaning. In this paper, I articulate what is significant about that idea and draw out its implications for understanding what Hofmann meant by artistic expression. Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of re-created flatness, and its pictorial realization, implies or entails a certain view of expression: namely, (...) that what is expressed by an artwork is the artist’s meaning (in contradistinction to the arbitrary meanings that may be imputed to her work by a viewer). This paper has three principle objectives. First, I overview Hofmann’s unpublished writings and lectures on aesthetics. So far, the critical analysis and evaluation of these materials have had little visibility in modernist studies. I aim not only to contribute a more specific account of Hofmann’s concepts as they were introduced through his program of aesthetic education but also to situate them in a wider intellectual and critical context. Second, I interpret the significance of those ideas for modernist criticism by focusing especially on the concept of re-created flatness as it appears in the writings of both Hofmann and Greenberg. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that Hofmann’s closely associated notions of flatness, depth, and the picture plane are deeply implicated in the issue of modernist painting’s autonomy, especially as formulated by Greenberg. (shrink)

We discuss how analysis of contemporary artworks has shaped philosophical theories about the concept of art, the ontology of art, and artistic media. The rapid expansion, during the contemporary period, of the kinds of things that can count as artworks has prompted a shift toward procedural definitions, which focus on how artworks are selected, and away from definitions that focus exclusively on artworks’ features or effects. Some contemporary artworks challenge the traditional art–ontological dichotomy between physical particulars and repeatable entities (...) whose occurrences are physical particulars. And nontraditional techniques and materials employed in contemporary art violate the boundaries of conventional media, prompting a rethinking of what artistic medium might be. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Elaborating the Performance Theory Structure and Focus Heuristics and the Individuation of Artworks Work‐Constitution and Modality on the Performance Theory Performances, Actions, and Doings.

Este trabajo defenderá la universalidad de la metáfora en arte (Arthur Danto), contra quienes piensan (Davidson, Carrol, Vilar) que en él la atribución de propiedades expresivas es literal y no metafórica. Se defiende la tesis de que la metáfora artística es como un símbolo tensivo que apunta a significados (epífora) y al mismo tiempo crea presencia (diáfora). Gracias a ambos elementos el arte crea presencia, crea realidad o transfigura lo usual y le otorga súbitas y asombrosas posibilidades de presencia, a (...) las cuales se corresponde no sólo con los sentidos, sino también con el afecto, el entendimiento y la imaginación. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable (...) about us. Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term “cinematic” principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are (...) right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut’s claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesis. (shrink)

The Art Experience: An Introduction to Philosophy and the Arts takes readers on an engaging and accessible journey that explores a series of fundamental questions about the nature of art and aesthetic value. Three of these questions serve as the major sections for the book's 12 chapters: What makes something a work of art? How should we experience art in order to get the most out of it? And once we understand art, how should we evaluate whether it is good (...) or bad? Philosophical theory is illustrated with concrete examples: the paintings of Frida Kahlo, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the masks of the Nso people, and many others. Classic questions are balanced with cutting-edge challenges, such as Linda Nochlin's work on the exclusion of women from the artistic canon. The Art Experience presupposes no prior knowledge of philosophy or art, and it will be of interest to any reader seeking an accessible and engaging introduction to this field. Along the way, readers learn how philosophical theories can affect our real-world experiences with painting, music, theater, and many more art forms. Key Features Accessible for any college student and assumes no knowledge of philosophy, art theory, or any artistic medium Organizes topics conceptually, rather than historically, allowing students to more easily grasp the core issues themselves rather than tracing their historical evolution Offers readers a large number of contemporary examples and a consistent focus on the way theory can affect people's real-world experiences with art Explores questions about bias - for example, whether the artistic canon has excluded some groups unfairly and whether definitions of art are Western-biased. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive book-length introduction to the philosophy of Western music that fully integrates consideration of popular music and hybrid musical forms, especially song. Its author, Andrew Kania, begins by asking whether Bob Dylan should even have been eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature, given that he is a musician. This motivates a discussion of music as an artistic medium, and what philosophy has to contribute to our thinking about music. Chapters 2-5 investigate the most (...) commonly defended sources of musical value: its emotional power, its form, and specifically musical features (such as pitch, rhythm, and harmony). In chapters 6-9, Kania explores issues arising from different musical practices, particularly work-performance (with a focus on classical music), improvisation (with a focus on jazz), and recording (with a focus on rock and pop). Chapter 10 examines the intersection of music and morality. The book ends with a consideration of what, ultimately, music is. (shrink)

Stand-up specials seem to resemble news reporting and documentary film in that they appear prima facie to be mere documentation of an event designed to give viewers the sense of what happened at a place at a time. Closer examination, however, throws doubt upon this transparency claim and it is argued that filmic realism is not the proper lens through which to understand stand-up specials, that they represent a more artistic medium in which the director of the special (...) needs to be seen as an artist along with the comedian. (shrink)

Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts, or language. Immaterial argues that, despite these unruly appearances, making rules is a key part of what many contemporary artists do when they make their works, and these rules can explain disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based (...) media art, and participatory art. -/- Sherri Irvin shows how rules are now an artistic medium: they are part of the work's structure and shape what it expresses. Rules are meaningful in themselves and help to activate the meanings of non-art materials and found objects, so audiences need to know about the rules to get the most out of their art experiences. Loss of information about the rules, like loss of a chunk of marble, can seriously damage the work, and preserving rules as well as objects is reshaping how museums maintain their collections. Where rules collide with real-world circumstances, they may be broken maliciously, mistakenly, or for good reasons, threatening the work's meanings and sometimes its very existence. -/- Should we celebrate the prominence of rules in contemporary art? Irvin argues that, while rules aren't always used well, they can be used to create distinctive meanings and provide powerful immersive experiences not achievable through any other means. (shrink)

This book offers, for the first time in aesthetics, a comprehensive account of aestheticism of the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century as a philosophical theory of its own right. Taking philosophical and art-historical viewpoints, this cross-disciplinary book presents aestheticism as the foundational movement of modernist aesthetics of the 20<SUP>th</SUP> century. Emerging in the writings of the foremost aestheticists - Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, James Whistler, and their formalist successors such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg - aestheticism offers a uniquely synthetic (...) definition of art. It captures the artwork’s relations between form and content, art’s independent ontology and autonomy, art’s internal completeness, criticism, immunity to recruitment, the uniqueness of each medium, and musicality, as well as the logical-theoretical affiliation of art for art’s sake to epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language.<BR> Those are used by Michalle Gal to formulate a definition of art in terms of a theory of Deep Formalism, setting aestheticism, which aspires to preserve the artistic medium, as a critique of the current linguistic-conceptual aesthetics that developed after the linguistic turn of aesthetics. (shrink)

This essay develops a critical interpretation of Gadamer’s account of Renaissance painting. My point of departure is a brief reference in Truth and Method to Leon Battista Alberti, the Italian Renaissance humanist who developed an influential mathematical theory of perspective in painting. Through an explication of Gadamer’s critique of Alberti and of perspective generally, I argue that what is ultimately at stake in Gadamer’s confrontation with Alberti is Gadamer’s opposition to relativism and subjectivism and his downgrading of the importance of (...) the artistic medium for evaluating the truth-claim of an artwork. Against the theory of perspective, Gadamer contends that artworks make substantive claims to truth to which we interpretatively respond. By emphasizing this theme, our discussion resonates with contemporary “hermeneutical realism.”. (shrink)