Search

This article establishes the intellectual origins and underpinnings of the early modern soldier‐scholar in order to better understand the military humanist tradition within which Sir Walter Ralegh's writings on naval warfare and logistics were conceived and composed. By locating Ralegh within this tradition, the article provides a new critical framework for examining his dual identification with both the military and scholarly spheres. After discussing how the soldier‐scholar figure is indebted to the early modern intellectualisation of the art of war as an object of humanist discourse, this article examines how Ralegh adopts this figure as a means to seek preferment at court, beginning in the mid‐1590s following his fall from royal favour. Focusing on three distinct groups of naval writings, it argues that Ralegh positioned himself as an expert in the art of war by sea as a means of effacing differences in social status between himself and his contemporaries at court. It discusses his relationship with contemporary soldier‐scholars—including Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland—and demonstrates how Ralegh's expertise in naval matters combined personal experience, first‐hand information from well‐travelled mariners and extensive reading in classical and early modern military science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Ozioma Onuzulike's exhibition, "Strings the Length of Our Palm's Seal," at the ChertLüdde Gallery in Berlin, showcasing his textile works made from palm kernel shells and ceramic beads. Onuzulike, a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, draws inspiration from the Nsukka Art School's Natural Synthesis ideology, influenced by El Anatsui. The exhibition features beaded dress imagery, such as the Extra-Large-Sized Jumper and Agbada, reflecting Nigerian clothing styles and social issues. Onuzulike's artistry explores the historical and cultural significance of palm kernel shells and clay beads, highlighting the complexities of African identity and political commentary. [Extracted from the article]

Neutron tomography is gaining popularity particularly in cultural heritage research, for non-destructively analysing the inner structure of bulk metal artefacts, such as bronzes, but the induced temporary decay radiation is often considered as a drawback. However, this delayed gamma-emission can be put to good use: by performing gamma spectroscopy after neutron tomography, the interior elemental composition of artefacts can be obtained "for free". Inspired by this, we propose a ray-tracing approach to non-invasively quantify both interior geometry and elemental composition using only a single neutron tomography experiment. This strategy aligns well with both the aim for efficient use of neutron beam time and the expectation from curators and conservators for minimal neutron irradiation. Here, we outline the core principle of this method, demonstrate the extent of its quantification capability on bulk objects of known composition by fusing neutron tomography and delayed-gamma spectroscopy data sets. We also showcase its practical application on an ancient solid-cast Indonesian bronze statuette, by which we gain insights into how the pristine inner bronze segregated into a different composition than the surrounding shell. Similarly, the method allows us to quantify the composition of a hidden offering in the statuette that consecrates the bronze for worship purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the meanings and values of Lin Tianmiao's (born 1961) The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995) through an analysis of its materialities. Lin's Thread Winding has received much attention in feminist discourse, which tends to draw attention to the symbolic manifestations embedded in the act of winding, and in textiles and domestic objects—techniques and materials often associated with "women's work" within certain Western feminist critiques of women's art. This paper moves beyond the gendered lens of interpreting Lin's art, which has built on symbolic and metaphorical readings of the underlying visual representations, and instead turn to investigate how her work can be understood from the perspective of its discursive materialities, through which the art objects produce material signs (phenomenological effects) that indicate its previous process of art making. Drawing upon new materialist theories and the notion of affect, this paper understands the materialities of Lin's work as dynamic phenomena, emerging from ongoing intertwining relationships between human and nonhuman agencies. It examines how Lin's work constitutes a series of inquisitive investigations into multiple processes of making, and how affective qualities and critical knowledge can materialize in and through this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of authorship in the age of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) suggests a taxonomic system that places art objects along a spectrum in terms of authorship: from pure human creation, which draws directly from the interior world of affect, emotions and ideas, through to co-evolved works created with tools and collective production and finally to works that are largely devoid of human involvement. Human and machine production can be distinguished in terms of motivation, with human production being driven by consciousness and the processing of subjective experience and machinic production being driven by algorithms and the processing of data. However, the expansion of AI entangles the artist in ever more complex webs of production and dissemination, whereby the boundaries between the work of the artist and the work of the networked technologies are increasingly distributed and obscured. From this perspective, AI-generated works are not solely the products of an independent machinic agency but operate in the middle of the spectrum of authorship between human and machine, as they are the consequences of a highly distributed model of production that sit across the algorithms and the underlying information systems and data that support them and the artists who both contribute and extract value. This highly distributed state further transforms the role of the artist from the creator of objects containing aesthetic and conceptual potential to the translator and curator of such objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) is a self-report scale for measuring individual differences in the strength of responses to art objects and events. Its 14 items sort into three subscales: aesthetic appreciation (AA), intense aesthetic experience (IAE), and creative behaviour. The present research evaluated the dimensionality of the AReA using tools from network psychometrics, particularly bootstrap exploratory graph analysis. Using a sample of English-speaking adults (n = 1071), the network analyses closely replicated the number and item composition of the AReA subscales, but one of the items—a cross-loaded item proposed to be in both the AA and IAE subscales—was not replicated. Using the bootstrap sampling distributions, we suggest item assignments that avoid awkward dual-loadings and provide a simpler dimensional structure. Taken together, the results reveal clear strengths of the AReA and illustrate how emerging network tools can illuminate and guide psychometric decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider the movement of fossils into art commercial spaces as a process of artification underpinned by the deep object associations that art spaces foster. We combine observational data gathering at art and fossil fairs, dealerships, and auctions with snapshot analysis of the online market for Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, contextualized by interviews with palaeontologists and fossil dealers, to understand the increasing appearance of fossils within art commercial spaces. We believe that the placement of fossils within the art market desirescape, so within a network of alluring, provocative, affective art objects, allows the fossils to transform into what consumers would consider art. The fossils then gain the social associations that artworks have for these consumers. We believe that art and fossil consumers are not simply drawn to individual objects of desire, but to the myriad associations those objects have with other objects and the deep meanings those associations overlay. Those associations and the network they form can, in turn, transform the objects within it. When a fossil is artified, it can be desired like art, and can command art prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preserved in the Castle Museum at Sondershausen in central Germany is a bronze taking the form of a rotund, kneeling man. The object, nearly 22.5 inches tall and cast in a single piece, is known today as the 'Püsterich'. Since its archaeological discovery in the 1540s, it has proven to be a subject of intellectual debate: numerous authors have sought to understand either its iconography or, on the basis of its hollow shape and the two openings in its head, its function. The resulting studies have been surprisingly varied in their claims. With a method of approach rooted in 'object studies', this article explores both of the aforementioned aspects as well as form-function relations. Starting with a basic art-historical analysis of the bronze—thus far lacking in the scholarship—the article recognizes the work as having been produced in Hildesheim between c. 1220 and 1250, a context in which it can be related closely to the philosophical concerns of the prominent theologian Albertus Magnus. In its function as a 'sufflator' (hearth-blower) and its depiction of a 'pygmeus', the 'Püsterich', along with seven other related figures, can be understood as a 'Wissensobjekt', an object or bearer of knowledge. With and through them, viewers/users negotiated complex problems about the nature of living beings; specifically, the bronze thematized the question of what distinguished human beings from animals: in Albertus's thought, the mastering of science and art. This new understanding of the 'Püsterich' allows us to recognize its special position at the origins of 'philosophical anthropology' and the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Specula is the property of SPECULA UCV and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Curated by the artist Barbara Jones (1912–1978) for the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1951, Blackeyes and Lemonade was an exhibition of popular art or, what Jones defined as, "the things people make for themselves, or that are manufactured in their taste." The exhibits, which included a tiled fireplace in the shape of an Airedale dog, a giant anthropomorphic lemon, pub beer pulls, advertising posters, and industrially manufactured confectionary, posed a challenge to a codified and class-based conception of taste, fine art, and high culture that was prevalent in the post-war British museum. Through an analysis of the production and reception of Blackeyes and Lemonade, this paper charts the intellectual and practical battles Jones had to engage in to defend her selection and interpretation of objects, while simultaneously defining an unfamiliar branch of esthetic impulse and attempting to redirect what she called the "museum eye." Finally, the paper explores the role of the temporary exhibition in re-opening discussions about taste, class, and gender in the museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND Licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences / Uluslararasi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper outlines the inception, process, and key findings of five creative arts workshop held with 28 students in 2022 at Newcastle University. Participants engaged in crafting exercises and semi-structured discussions about sexual ethics grounded in lived experience. Sexual consent and novel models of sexual ethics were discussed, as well as an approach called a pleasure and care-centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness. Using an iterative form of thematic analysis, four core themes were identified: namely, culture and ethnocentrism, gendered sexual scripts/sexual-gendered scripts, heteronormativity, and pleasure. Analysis of the art objects also yielded findings related to anger, gendered norms, communication, and obligation. This project examined how university students felt about consent as the dominant model of sexual ethics and explored other possibilities using discourse and crafting to engage with lived experience. This article aims to capture these findings while also placing the workshops and its findings in methodological and socio-cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a survey on the territory of the Eklizi-Burun cult complex, a repeatedly densely folded fragment of a silver sheet was discovered. When unfolded during the restoration process, it turned out to be part of an art object depicting the mask of Medusa Gorgon. The size and shape of the item suggest its purpose as part of Roman military equipment (presumably part of the umbo or a knee guard). The stylistic features of the image give grounds to attribute it to the late Roman period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Radical Stitch: Art Gallery of Hamilton, February 11–August 27, 2023" is an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada, celebrating 37 artists across Turtle Island through beadwork. The show explores the relational network of artists and the sharing of cultural knowledge through beadwork as a form of storytelling. The exhibition, currently at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, showcases diverse perspectives and histories, confronting difficult pasts while highlighting the generosity and reciprocity embedded in beadwork as a language of shared experiences." [Extracted from the article]

This paper has two main aims. The first is to examine our normative relations to artworks and cultural artefacts threatened by damage or destruction. The second aim is to develop an argument for the notion of aesthetic obligation, offering an alternative model of explanation of our normative relations to artworks and cultural artefacts which relies neither exclusively on the object of appreciation ('object-oriented approach') nor on the appreciating subject ('subject-oriented approach'). Instead, an aesthetic obligation is held to be directed primarily towards the community which appreciates the object on the grounds of its aesthetic value. That which unites an aesthetic community is the practice of valuing an object for its aesthetic character. The notion of aesthetic obligation thus relies both on the community of subjects which holds an object in high aesthetic regard and that same object's aesthetic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the restoration of art and artifacts there are three salient types of value to consider: relic, aesthetic, and practical. Relic value includes an object's age, aura, originality, authenticity, and epistemic value. Aesthetic value is connected to how an object looks, sounds, or tastes. Practical value involves whether a thing can be used as designed—whether a book can be read, a building occupied, a car driven. I argue that while these are all legitimate values, it is impossible for a restorer to maximize them all. I conclude that restoration inexorably involves aesthetic choices; there is no supreme value to be maximized and we should be pluralists about the right balance of values. Restoration is like baking a cake; there are many wrong ways to do it, but there are many right ways as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the discovery of 'bismuth white' on three late eighteenth-century portrait miniatures in the Victoria and Albert Museum collections, painted by renowned English artist George Engleheart. Metallic bismuth and bismuth-containing minerals have been known for centuries and were used on various types of artistic production, from German Wismutmalerei to medieval manuscripts and Renaissance paintings. However, until now they had never been documented on portrait miniatures, despite documentary evidence that suggests their use. The Raman analysis of the three miniatures shows that bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl, corresponding to the mineral bismoclite) is present, and XRF data prove that this material was used as a white pigment in its own right. This work is a pilot study: it represents the first step in the rediscovery of bismuth white as an artist's pigment, and hopes to provide encouragement to other institutions to look deeper in their collections and map out the use of a relatively rare white material which until now had not been detected or documented in fine art objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abramtsevo and Talashkino are well known for their handicraft workshops that participated in the revival of Russian folk arts known as kustarnichestvo at the turn of the last century. Typically examined in terms of its stylistic progenitors or as a manifestation of Russia's nationalist politics, kustarnichestvo can also offer unique insights into how craftspeople and consumers related to their natural and built environments. This article examines the materiality of kustar art objects from two perspectives: first, it turns to forests and woodlands as a source of natural resources and ornamental inspiration; then it tackles narratives about how the resulting neo‐Russian style interiors produced a distinctive kind of affect in their beholders. By showing how human subjects understood themselves to be enmeshed in natural and affective ecologies at the fin de siècle, it argues that a movement thoroughly grounded in materialist concerns paradoxically gave rise to a new understanding of the perceiving subject's affective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to summarize the Kantian philosophy of visual aesthetics, realize the logical discrimination between plastic aesthetics and the philosophy of aesthetics, the distinction between art object and artwork, and the essentialization of the value significance of the artwork exemplified in a relevant case study: the painting "Boots" by Vincent Van Gogh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

René Magritte once said "... the function of art is to make poetry visible, to render thought visible". The poetry emerged on his canvases by meticulous, aesthetically engaging depiction of objects and scenes replete with surprise and apparent perceptual self-contradiction. His 1933 masterpiece, La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), is one of his most philosophical works. We see a room with a painting on an easel that appears to paradoxically reveal exactly what it occludes: a pastoral scene outside the room. Magritte had a sophisticated understanding of perception as representation in the brain, and he discussed this theme explicitly. This article examines in detail visual cues in La Condition Humaine that elicit an alternation between salient yet mutually exclusive percepts, transparency vs opacity, of the same object. The conflicting percepts are experienced as surreal, drawing us into the heart of the problem: the nature of representation (in art and in the brain), a meditation on the localization of thought, while beckoning us to ponder the nature of reality and the 'mystery of the ordinary'. The painting also illustrates the power of subtle painterly gesture, i.e., when small details act as 'perceptual amplifiers', inducing a strong effect on both our perceptual and cognitive understanding of scene elements across a large region of visual space. Finally, examination of how the competing percepts are established, and the emergence of some perceptuo-cognitive features provide clues about the visual system's scene processing hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nachrichten aus der Chemie is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Artists' archives, typically a legacy trove rather than a site for public engagement, are not expected to encompass art. However, since the mid-twentieth century, factors like the 'dematerialisation of art', defiance against conventional art categorisations, and the prioritisation of the creative process over its outcomes, have all blurred the lines between artworks and their documentation. Consequently, a significant portion of art produced during the 1960s and 1970s still resides in archives, distributed in art objects and documents. By examining the archives of Ecart, an artistic collective that operated within the broader Fluxus network in 1970s Switzerland, this study proposes activation as an alternative strategy for caring for and securing the continuation of such art, which is often found scattered across various archival holdings. Ultimately, the research suggests activation as a way of expanding conservation beyond the exclusive domain of trained conservators, transforming it into a collective responsibility shared by diverse archive stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changes to art on artefacts attributed to females in the Late Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1100–500 BC) from a gender critical, feminist perspective. Traditionally, Scandinavian research has focussed on the art of male artefacts, which is believed to represent a cosmological narrative, whilst female art has been considered devoid of cosmological motifs – concomitantly, it is often assumed that prominent social standing was reserved males. Through analytical discussion, the paper shows how the same motifs as are considered cosmological in male objects can be found on female objects, too, in compositions diverging from the male use, suggesting a gender differentiated use of art and association to cosmology. Through a gender theoretical lens, the paper explores what the social use of the art on these objects may suggest regarding identity and power relations in society, linking up with a reconfiguration of female identity at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an interpretation of the earliest conceptual novel by the famous Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin "The Queue" (1985). The authors of the article have implemented a new approach to the text of a modern conceptual novelist. If traditionally V. Sorokin's novel was perceived by critics mainly from the side of the originality of its form, with the actualization of the author's appeal to the pictorial art objects of conceptual artists (I. Kabakov, V. Pivovarov, D. Prigov et al.), then in this article a different research perspective is justified -- the need to look at the Sorokin text as a creative realization of a capacious speech metaphor, as the embodiment of the image of a "language monster" -- the hydro-like essence of a "living" queue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical YOLOv4 object detector transcends some famous object detectors in speed and accuracy. However, despite its superior performance, it still has some limitations such as the insufficient for extracting the feature. Therefore, we propose an improved YOLOv4 method for object detection in this paper. Specifically, we introduce a dilated coordinate attention module for improving the accuracy of object detection, which combine the dilated convolutional neural network with coordinate attention. At the same time, the multi-scale training strategy is also introduced to enhance the performance of object detection via using the training data with different scales. Experiments on PASCAL VOC2007 and VOC2012 datasets demonstrate that our proposed improved YOLOv4 object detector is superior to other state of the art object detection detector. Specially, its performance is better than the traditional YOLOv4, which is 1.84% and 1.91% higher on the mean average precision (mAP) for the two datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with current approaches to collecting born-digital objects in museums of art and design and reflects on the analysis of two case studies concerned with the respective acquisitions of a virtual reality artwork and a mobile app. The authors point to their non-standard preservation requirements and their unconventional objecthood to advocate for the value of adopting an experimental attitude to collecting. The case studies invite us to reconsider experimentation within the context of sensitive dialogic processes with creators and users who are unfamiliar with the conventions of museum collecting. Hence, the boundaries of experimentations are developed in relation to existing policies, organisational structures and practices, and defined by the stakes of multiple actors. To conclude, the authors argue that collecting institutions should prioritise building capacity and understanding needs and requirements for this emergent type of object, and embrace uncertainty over the imperative of long-term preservation in its fullest sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a sustained engagement with The Precarious Life of the Parol, an installation art exhibition by the Filipinx artist Diane Williams, this essay theorizes "brown gathering": a quotidian practice of archiving that mobilizes the kinship networks of minoritarian subjects as an affective and circulatory infrastructure of collecting, preserving, and (re)signifying the objects of brown life. Brown gathering simultaneously attests to the intimacies of state violence and the practices of minoritarian subjects. In Parol, named after a Filipinx Christmas ornament of Spanish and native origin, Williams turns toward this curatorial practice of making art with trash objects as a way to reckon with the archival absences of Philippine history. This investigation of Williams's pieces, all made from trash objects that her family donated to her, concerns three categories: skeletal frames (wood and wire), used to explore archives of excess and mess; plastics, used to speak about the temporality of diaspora; and discarded food containers (SPAM cans and sauce mixes), used to theorize the politics of the brown body. These objects, like the brown subjects that signify them, are testaments to the ongoing plunder of empire and to what empire jettisons around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanian art market occupies a relatively modest place in the international context, but it has registered a significant growth in the last decades, attracting more and more attention on the global stage. Like most Eastern European countries, former communist states, Romania is an emerging art market, currently having a small volume of transactions on the world art market. At the moment, most sales of modern art in Romania are made through auction houses, with Artmark the authoritative leader, while contemporary art is mainly sold through galleries. However, the volume and value of transactions remain modest compared to the large international auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's. This paper examines the market dynamics, analyzing the activity of art galleries, auction houses, publications and art magazines, what are the quotes of Romanian artists, and other aspects, such as art fairs or data related to the trends of the Romanian art market good, because opportunities exist, including for a young market like the one in Romania. Events such as Art Safari, MoBU, Bucharest Contemporary Art Biennale and Cluj International Ceramics Biennale, etc. contributes to positioning the Romanian art market on the international map, attracting collectors and art critics from all over the world. The perspectives of the Romanian art market are particularly aimed at the function of art as an investment alternative, as there are still many heritage or contemporary art objects at affordable prices for the beginning of a collection, but also for older collectors or those people with solid financial funds who are looking for an alternative to secure savings. The paper concludes that the Romanian art market has the potential to develop and expand significantly in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antiques Roadshow Events are held in historic locations across the United Kingdom. On site, experts evaluate objects brought in by attendees, who are often cast as passive recipients, while edited highlights make up the long‐running BBC TV program. Through Collaborative Event Ethnography at one Roadshow Event we show how object stories are navigated through "value talk" between attendees and experts in front of live audiences. Value is not a measurement but a dimension of the thing and its context. Stories and money are both integral in understanding worth, and final valuations are only partially shaped by given expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of graffiti created by famous artists on the walls of buildings and structures damaged during hostilities in Kyiv and its suburbs, the article analyzes and summarizes the factors influencing the lifespan of street artworks. Special conditions for dismantling graffiti and changing the exposure are considered. Examples of measures taken to preserve art objects are given. The study provides recommendations for additional protection of building structures, which are the basis of murals, taking into account their condition and degree of destruction. The authors provide photographic materials and results from some of the most common objects. Also provided are constructive schemes for strengthening the building elements or their fragments and options for technological solutions for protection, preservation and further dismantling. The article also includes materials from already implemented projects: applications of street art, which were saved using these other methods and techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors focused on an important aspect of the preservation and restoration industries -- authentication of works of art, details and elements of architecture, as well as the importance of proving the dating of architectural objects and works of art. This issue has always been relevant for Ukraine, as well as for other countries, and it became even more relevant during the post-war reconstruction when 863 objects of cultural heritage were destroyed and damaged in the period from 24.02.2022 to 25.11.2023. The existing experience of the "Ukrrestavratsiia" corporation in the field of authentication and dating of architectural monuments, decorative elements, and works of art was analysed. The procedure for establishing the dating and authenticity of works of art is described in specific examples [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]