Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse ...discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects.
Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world-in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor conceives of the vegetation of the earth as a green cloth that drapes the barren earth. Long popular in patristic literature Il mantello verde della terra ...is a poetical image that ponders the providential greening of the earth on the third day of the Creation. Borrowing from the vocabulary of weaving it epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Rachel Carson invoked the phrase to draw attention to environmental damage done to earth's "brilliant robe." Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made "living nature" an object of renewed interest. The essays gathered in this volume explore the expanding technologies and cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, and the role of painting in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the visual arts of the 16th-century and after.
Written from the perspective of a practising artist, this book proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who ...may define what art really is. Jelinek contends that while there are objects called 'art' in museums from deep into human history and from around the globe - from Hans Sloane's collection, which became the foundation of the British Museum, to Alfred Barr's inclusion of 'primitive art' within the walls of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art - only those that have been made with the knowledge and discipline of art should rightly be termed as such. Policing the definition of art in this way is not to entrench it as an elitist occupation, but in order to focus on its liberal democratic potential. Between Discipline and a Hard Place describes the value of art outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations yet without resorting to a range of stereotypical and ultimately instrumentalist political or social goods, such as social inclusion or education. A wider argument is also made for disciplinarity, as Jelinek discusses the great potential as well as the pitfalls of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary working, particularly with the so-called 'creative' arts. A passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world.
Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching ...position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly enquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. While Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary, the so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and the book pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. The Vienna School was well known for its methodological innovations and this book analyzes its contributions in this area. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history, in particular the way in which art historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.
This book traces the influence of the changing political environment on Czech art, criticism, history, and theory between 1895 and 1939, looking beyond the avant-garde to the peripheries of modern ...art. The period is marked by radical political changes, the formation of national and regional identities, and the rise of modernism in Central Europe – specifically, the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the new democratic state of Czechoslovakia. Marta Filipová studies the way in which narratives of modern art were formed in a constant negotiation and dialogue between an effort to be international and a desire to remain authentically local.
How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide ...range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce.
Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud.
Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.
Social works Jackson, Shannon
2011., 2011, 20110228, 2011-02-28
eBook
‘a game-changer, a must-read for scholars, students and artists alike’ – Tom Finkelpearl
At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and ...civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making.
Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.
1. Performance, Aesthetics, and Support 2. Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art 3. High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles 4. Staged Management: Theatricality and Institutional Critique 5. Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll 6. Welfare Melancholia: The Public Works of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset 7. Unfederated Theatre: Paul Chan Waiting in New Orleans
'Social Works takes an interdisciplinary look at the forms, goals, and histories of innovative social practice in contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson presents a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to examine the fields for performative and visual art studies.' – Public Art Review, 2011, Issue 45
‘Shannon Jackson offers vivid close readings of art and performance … and she considers social issues relating to welfare, sanitation, urban planning, and globalisation, and how they coincide with class, gender, race, and – especially – labour…This will be a useful, enriching, and stimulating book for artists, students, and academics across art, performance, and social theory.’ – Jen Harvie, Contemporary Theatre Review
'Throughout the various studies that comprise Social Works , Jackson demonstrates the critical mobility across psychoanalysis, feminist, queer, and critical race theory needed to produce interpretations that trouble the very grounds of what constitutes art, life, and the public.' – Jennifer Cayer, e-misférica
'Jackson presents an informed and critical exploration of the 'social turn' in contemporary art, and overall, what is offered here is a thorough re-visioning of how the social phenomena of theatre and performance might be thought about and understood...This brilliant book asks us to think about art and performance as forms of human welfare, performatively creating and sustaining systems of social support, and working in ways that secure the maintenance of life.' – Jenny Hughes, New Theatre Quarterly
'Shannon Jackson's superb new book is, in a very challenging way, about vocabulary. Bypassing–even eschewing–language sometime dissed as "jargon," Jackson forces readers to think and think again about basic terms such as "performance," "social practice," "art," "politics," and "public"...Jackson's book is an invitation to consume art promiscuously but to choose words as if the future of the world depended upon them." – Dorothy Chansky, TDR: The Drama Review
'This is a subtle, nuanced and socially committed book that should be widely read.' – Stephen Bottoms, Theatre Research International
'Amidst the upheaval of the 'social turn', Social Works is a pivotal landmark. As we attempt to conceive of 'the aesthetic' and 'the social' together in performance and across the arts, Jackson's articulation of what she calls the "support" of a performance, that is, the real social, economic, and even logistical conditions that allow it to come to be, is a great contribution to the debate. In her distinctive voice, Jackson offers pertinent and noteworthy examples to unfold a sophisticated framework for understanding the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the social turn. She 'explores the social aspirations of socially engaged projects less as the extra-aesthetic milieu that legitimates or compromises the aesthetic act and more as the unraveling of the frame that would cast "the social" as "extra"' (16). This stance subtly rewrites the grounding of performance studies, and Jackson's far-reaching book is thus a vital reference at this moment of transition.' – James Andrew Wilson, PhD Candidate, University of Warwick
'Jackson's phenomenal book shifts the discussion from taste to ethnography in her critical examination of the intersection of social art, performance and theater. Not only a must read for those interested in the intersections of art and social change, but perhaps more importantly, for those searching for a calibrated compass in the age of vast interdisciplinary art production.' Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time
' Social Works is a thrilling encounter: a politically important and intellectually innovative book. Shannon Jackson's exploration of the social work that underpins and enables the making of art is wonderfully judged. She draws out the ways in which art, politics and the public realm are intimately interwoven. The book is itself a vital and generous piece of social work.' John Clarke, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University
' Social Works is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of art at the intersection of performance and social practice. Shannon Jackson combines impeccable research and rigorous critical thinking with a lucid, approachable writing style. I have found this book invaluable in my work as both a curator and a critic.' Andy Horowitz, Founder, Culturebot.org
Shannon Jackson is the director of the Arts Research Center at University of California at Berkeley where she is also Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her award-winning previous publications include Professing Performance (2004) and Lines of Activity (2000).
An eye-opening look at collecting and investing in today's art market Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional ...boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Art is no longer simply made, but packaged, sold, and branded. In Art of the Deal, Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it's headed. In a new postscript, Horowitz reflects on the market's continued ascent as well as its most urgent challenges.
