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This edited volume discusses images that bleed, speak, cry, move, and behave in ways we usually attribute to living creatures.Living images have been the object of devotion as well as targets of destruction, and they have been marginalised in both culture and cultural studies for their ambivalence as well as their transgressive nature. But what is it that makes images the loci of such powerful properties? The present volume is an attempt to recuperate the living image, draw it from the margins, and re-illuminate its importance for cultural history. The title of this book reflects the ambition of the contributions to navigate between the Middle Ages of the past and the Middle Ages of the present. Our aim is to provide new theoretical reflections and methodologies concerning the study of material agency and “living images” both historically and today. The chapters include close examination of surviving objects and archival research, as well as theoretical reflections, and span chronologically and geographically across Europe from North to South, medieval to modern.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, material culture, theatre studies, and religious history.

How our image of the Renaissance's most famous artist is a modern mythLeonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, Stephen J. Campbell shows how this invented Leonardo has invited speculation from figures ranging from art dealers and curators to scholars, scientists, and biographers, many of whom have filled in the gaps of what can be known of Leonardo's life with claims to decode secrets, reveal mysteries of a vanished past, or discover lost masterpieces of spectacular value.In this original and provocative book, Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo's words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. By investigating the politics and cultural tensions of the era as well as the most recent scholarship on Leonardo's contemporaries, workshop, and writings, Campbell places Leonardo back into the milieu that shaped him and was shaped by him. He shows that it is in the gaps and contradictions of what we know of Leonardo's life that a less familiar and far more historically significant figure appears.

This edited volume explores the notion of “artifice” in modern visual culture, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, in countries around the globe.Artifice has been regarded as a primarily Western phenomenon, playing as it does a central role in European art theory since the Renaissance. This volume proposes that artifice is better understood as a transcultural artistic phenomenon and requires far broader conceptualization across international contexts. It acquaints readers with works of art, visual modes of communication, and concepts originating in France, Germany, the United States, Japan, and China, and includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, film, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) objects. Contributors demonstrate how practices of artifice function as both symbol and form, in parallel and divergent ways, in multiple cultural settings.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and material culture.

How does the art market choose its winners, thereby also deciding what millions of visitors to galleries and museums will view, year after year? Whereas art historical writing and contemporary commentary tend to highlight the efforts of specific artists, this book illustrates how money and marketing, in combination with general trends, play decisive roles in shaping the art world and in propelling specific artists and artworks to positions of prominence.Today, perhaps more than ever before, the high-profile art world is primarily shaped by buyers and those who cater to buyers. The actual artists, although most visible to the public, tend to play a secondary role. The time seems particularly ripe for transparency about how the art world works, given the growth in the art market, media attention on—and popular interest in—high-priced art, and controversy surrounding public funding for art and the value of art for contemporary society. With a combination of marketplace observations, marketing insights, and relevant research findings, this book contributes to increased transparency while providing thought-provoking digressions and anecdotes along the way.Money and Marketing in the Art World offers an accessible analysis of the art market for scholars and graduate students across arts marketing and management, as well as for those more broadly interested in art and business.

Two centuries after Napoleon Bonaparte's death, this edited volume brings together a diverse group of historians, art historians, and museum professionals to critically examine the enduring power of visual and material culture in the making of Napoleonic memory. While most discussions surrounding the legendary figure explore his impact on legislative, political, or military reform, this innovative volume explores the global dimensions of the trade in Napoleonic collectibles, art, and relics over time.Representing new avenues of research and scholarship, Napoleonic Objects and their Afterlives investigates the material objects and cultural forms that Napoleon inspired through a range of themes. These include art collecting, the circulation and display of objects, political and imperial symbolism, and the flexibility and ambiguity of Napoleon's enduring legacy. The essays examine how and why, despite his contentious role in contemporary memory, Napoleon continues to escape much historical and popular censure. They explore the ways people have connected with the idea of him: on stage and screen; in museums and galleries; and most intimately of all, by gathering items said to have belonged to him, right down to his toothbrush and locks of his hair.Napoleonic items can be official or personal, serious or comical, luxury or disposable, yet little work has been done to bring together these diverse cultural histories into conversation with one another. With its broad, multi-disciplinary approach, including perspectives from art history, film studies, cultural history, and museum curation, the book provides a deep critical insight into the cult of personality surrounding Napoleon and its effect on our understanding of celebrity culture today and in the future. Includes an additional foreword by Napoleon's biographer, Ruth Scurr, author of In Gardens and Shadows (2021).

This is the first book of its kind to examine the development of the confessional subject in video art and demonstrate how it can provide a vital platform for navigating the politics of self, subjectivity, and resistance in society. In doing so, it reframes video art – the most ubiquitous and yet most understudied art form of recent decades – as an urgent socio-political tool that is increasingly popular among contemporary artists as a means of exploring a broad range of social issues, from politics and identity, to the body and technologies of self-representation.Analysing a diverse selection of case studies from the 1960s up to the present day, covering the work of Yoko Ono, Gillian Wearing, Ryan Trecartin, Tracey Emin, Anatasia Klose, and Heath Franco, among others, the book brings together theory and practice to look afresh at contemporary video art through a Foucauldian lens. It also brings the analysis of video art up to date by showing how social media and digital self representation has informed and further politicized time-based art practices.Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity shows how forms of confessional discourse not only play an important function in the construction of subjectivity but also open spaces for personal resistance and agency within contemporary video art. As a result, it offers researchers of contemporary art practice, and media and cultural studies, an updated framework through which to view this constantly-evolving genre and a deeper understanding of wider contemporary video practices.

What do Persian robes of honour, 20th-century still-life painting, fur garments, and 18th-century porcelain all have in common? Prized, possessed and modelled, they highlight the deep connections we share with cultural objects. Establishing new connections between people and things via artistic media and material culture, this highly interdisciplinary volume brings together both established and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, material culture, museum and heritage studies and literary studies to investigate the intersection of the personal with the material. Raising vital questions of cultural identity, belonging and selfhood, Material Selves is the first book of its kind to consider the relationship between people and things across transcultural and transhistorical contexts. It employs innovative methodologies across ten chapters and critically expands on current models for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and things by tracing the central role objects have played in the construction, creation and performance of identity throughout history.Structured around four key sections exploring biography and narrative; adornment and ornament; reclamation and intervention; and subjects and objects, the volume presents a global selection of case studies that explore, amongst other things, Margaret Olley's enduring fame, the significance of the Khil'a in Safavid Persia and early modern Europe, and 17th-century French painter Charles LeBrun's royal portraiture. Fusing these with contemporary theories of identity, the contributors provide analyses informed by posthumanism, the environmental humanities, race and gender. At the same time, they confront vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, and highlight the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. In doing so, the book illuminates a wide range of cultural and chronological settings whilst giving close attention to the mobility of people and things between, across, and through time and place.

In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp's canonization has more to do with his patron's donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp's work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry's collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.

How can artists (and others) who find themselves in positions of privilege think differently about the way they do what they do in order to create the conditions for better, more just relations to flourish? Finding an answer to that question is at the heart of this book. After critiquing the relationship between contemporary art, race and privilege the author brings together First Nation and feminist philosophies of relationality, the game of string figuring, and her own history as an artist to propose an alternate methodology that puts relation at the centre of practice. She introduces the multivalent concept of “tacking”—a movement at an oblique angle to prevailing winds—in order to traverse the waters of contemporary art to challenge power and create a more just future.

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New Yorker. The complete last essays of acclaimed writer Peter Schjeldahl, the great New Yorker art critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist.'Sensitive and moving. Schjeldahl wrote until the end. We can be grateful for that because we have this book.'(Dwight Garner, New York Times)Foreword by Steve Martin • Introduction by Jarrett Earnest When the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl published his widely read autobiographical essay “The Art of Dying” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and his oncologist had given him six months to live, but his experimental treatment was showing some improvement. “These extra months,” he wrote, “are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.” And he did. The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 begins with that essay and collects all 46 pieces that he wrote for the magazine before his death in October 2022. These last works express Schjeldahl's hard-won reflections on art and life, against the backdrop of an intensely anxious period in America, spanning the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the 2020 presidential election, and the war in Ukraine. Schjeldahl, who was the leading art writer of his generation, wrote with generosity and openness about the art world during these tempestuous three years.

This book presents a detailed analysis of digital media as it is currently being used by visual artists. It places these works into a theoretical framework that is useful for research in fields such as Media Studies, Studio Art, and Art and Design Education. The primary goal is to emphasize the multidisciplinary aspects of digital visual art, and to propose a field of study that is unique to this type of art. Digital Visual Art Education combines theories of temporality and multilinearity from media studies, and visual culture studies from art education, into a dialogue with social theories such as feminist new materialism and critical race theory. In doing so, the social and cultural aspects of digital visual art is better understood. This book is for art, design, and media educators interested in surveying digital visual art as it is currently being produced and disseminated, looking to the numerous influences that have brought it into being, and speculating as to where it might lead for future researchers, artists, and designers.

An acclaimed sociologist's exploration of the connections among performances in life, art, and politics In The Performer, Richard Sennett explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics, and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of'rememory'—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

How can performance create and transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space. Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of'placeness'. Offering multiple perspectives on space and place, this book investigates the connections between space and the construction of social and cultural narratives. It focuses on the multiple ways performative actions produce space, including theatre, installations, site-specific work, visual arts and digital performance. Combining interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance, architecture and digital media studies, this study builds on a clear theoretical framework that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Lev Manovich and Slavoj Žižek. It offers themed sections comprising theory, studies of practice and interviews with practitioners. Case studies include site-specific work by Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus, Barcelona, Spain, the Prague Quadrennial, community engagement in Praça Roosevelt in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Campo de la Cebada in Madrid, Spain, and digital spaces created by artists in India and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

What graffiti says about contemporary society, and why it demands our urgent attention as a form of civic expression.What is graffiti—vandalism, ornament, art? What if, rather than any of those things, we thought of graffiti as a monument? How would that change our understanding of graffiti, and, in turn, our understanding of monument? In Monumental Graffiti, curator and anthropologist Rafael Schacter focuses on the material, communicative, and contextual aspects of these two forms of material culture to provide a timely perspective on public art, citizenship, and the city today. He applies monument as a lens to understand graffiti and graffiti as a lens to comprehend monument, challenging us to consider what the appropriate monument for our contemporary world could be.Monumental Graffiti unpacks today's iconoclastic moment, showing us why graffiti demands our urgent attention as a form of expression that challenges power structures by questioning whose voices are included in—and whose are excluded from—public space. Written from twenty years of embedded research on graffiti, the book includes works from graffiti writers such as 10Foot, Delta, Egs, Honet, Mosa, Petro, Revok, and Wombat, alongside those of artists such as Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Klara Liden, Gordon Matta-Clark, William Pope.L, Cy Twombly, and many more.Richly illustrated, this study of graffiti as monument and monument as graffiti is as fascinating as it is ethnographically expansive.

Visual Arts and Human Flourishing brings together thoughtful and innovative thinkers from various visual arts fields such as art history, architecture, public art, and museums, to examine visual arts'relationship to flourishing, well-being, and happiness from the ancient world to the present day. From the poetic musings of exiled Cuban artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, to the practical utopianism of Kulapat Yantrassast as he tries to rescue architecture from the coldness of Modernism; from the musings of Steven Fine about the decorative arts in ancient synagogues in creating community and meaning, to Faya Causey's analysis of the role of amber in celebrations and rituals over the millennia, and throughout the many other chapters of the book as a whole, the contributors examine how visual arts have promoted expansive expressions of an ever more flourishing and thriving humanity. The essays in this volume, part of The Humanities and Human Flourishing series, demonstrate how the process of thinking, writing, creating, and general curiosity about visual art can play a vital role in human flourishing.

This study concentrates on the discourses around animal death in arts and the ways they changed over time.Chapter topics span from religious symbolism to natural history cabinets, from hunting laws to animal rights, from economic history to formalist views on art. In other words, the book asks why artists have represented animal death in visual culture, maintaining that the practice has, through the whole era, been a crucial part of the understanding of our relation to the world and our identity as humans. This is the first truly integrative book-length examination of the depiction of dead animals in Western art.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, animal studies, and cultural history.

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment.It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture.In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY NPR, TIME, AND THE ECONOMIST“Get the Picture is one of the funniest books I've read... Brilliant.” —The Washington Post “A gripping and often hilarious investigation into the art world.... Bosker goes full Tom Wolfe.” —TIME “Funny, whip-smart, and gorgeously written, Get the Picture will forever transform the way you see.... I loved every word.” —Suleika Jaouad, New York Times bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms The New York Times bestselling author of Cork Dork takes readers on another fascinating, hilarious, and revelatory journey—this time burrowing deep inside the secretive world of art and artistsAn award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker's existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn't look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.In Get the Picture, Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly-naked performance artist, and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram, and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art's role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.

Based on the eponymous viral Twitter account, Museum Bums, a celebration of classical art, history, and shapely derrières, encourages readers to learn something new while still managing to have a chuckle.What do Hieronymus Bosch, the Roman cult of Antinous, and the peach emoji all have in common? But of course, butts, of course! Divided into six categories of keisters, this humorous history book takes you on a whirlwind tour of the finest rear ends in museums around the world—from the lusciously rendered bottoms of Renaissance painting to the abstract curves of contemporary art. Heritage scholars and art educators Mark Small and Jack Shoulder pair illuminating social commentary, historical context, and lively captions with captivating depictions of tasteful—and sometimes cheeky—bums in art.Including an angel slyly copping a feel in a sixteenth-century triptych, a twenty-five thousand-year-old bodacious Venus, and Cezanne's dreamy booty-ful bathers, this assortment of artistic behinds is both a celebration and study of the bounty of beautiful bums and their everlasting impressions. Museum Bums invites readers to admire, appreciate, and have a good laugh, all while learning a bit about art and history—a perfect gift for anyone who likes fine arts, museums, and butts. LIGHTHEARTED AND EDUCATIONAL: There are not many classical art books that walk the line of lighthearted humor. A book like Museum Bums will fill the hole in the market for books that are both artistically educational and entertaining!POPULAR TWITTER BY KNOWLEDGEABLE AUTHORS: Heritage scholars and art educators Mark Small and Jack Shoulder run the popular Twitter @MuseumBums and have channeled this playful approach to art history and education into an expanded book! BEAUTIFUL, HIGH-QUALITY, AFFORDABLE EXPLORATION: With the feel of a fine art book, Museum Bums is a gorgeous book that just begs to be displayed in your home. And with humorous content and an affordable price point, it's also a perfect gift for friends and family.Perfect for:Art history buffsArt loversArtistsArt teachersFans of Men to Avoid in Art and Life and other humor/gift books sold at museum stores

This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.

Kreativ-künstlerische Methoden schaffen Räume für Formen des Wissens, (Ver-)Lernens, Erinnerns und Handelns, die dominante und verräumlichte Machtverhältnisse hinterfragen. Kunst ist dabei nicht nur ein methodisches Werkzeug und Forschung kein bloßes Kunstprojekt: Stattdessen bringt die Schnittstelle dazwischen multiskalare Fragen und Antworten auf aktuelle gesellschaftliche Prozesse hervor, die sich im Begriff artographies treffen. Die Beitragenden schreiben u.a. zu Sounds, Zines, Figurentheater, Skulptur, Film, Malen sowie Pantomime - und zeigen so neben den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen kreativ-künstlerischer Praktiken auch deren Beitrag zu einer machtkritischen und raumbezogenen Forschung und Lehre auf.

We are currently riders of the information storm. AI fascinates us, images mesmerize us, data defines us, algorithms remember us, news bombards us, devices connect us, isolation saddens us. Deeply embedded in digital technology, we are the very first inhabitants of life in the quantum zone. The Quantum Revolution is about life today – its entanglements, creativity, politics, and artistic vision. Arthur Kroker and David Cook explore a new way of thinking drawn directly from the quantum imaginary itself. They explain the quantum revolution as everyday life, where technology moves fast, and where, under cover of the digital devices that connect us, the most sophisticated concepts of technology and science originating in mathematics, astrophysics, and biogenetics have swiftly flooded human consciousness, shaped social behavior, and crafted individual identity. The book discusses the concept of the quantum zone as a new way of understanding digital culture, and presents stories about art, technology, and society, as well as a series of reflections on art as a gateway to understanding the quantum imaginary. Richly illustrated with sixty images of critically engaged photos and artwork, The Quantum Revolution privileges a new way of understanding and seeing politics, society, and culture through the lens of the duality that is the essence of the quantum imaginary.

Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather-as Sophia Giovannitti argues here-acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author's own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.

Es ineluctable afirmar que la interacción entre arte, artista, sociedad y contexto cultural ha evolucionado a lo largo de los siglos conformando distintas relaciones y variadas formas de entenderlas,A partir de este hecho, nace la pregunta nuclear que da forma a la presente publicación: ¿cuál es el papel del arte y de los artistas en el contexto cultural y social actual? Dicho interrogante, que ha sido y es el epicentro de innumerables debates y reflexiones a lo largo de la historia, es también objeto de profundos análisis y discursos que tienen como fin comprender la praxis del arte en los entornos educativos,

Expanding on a groundbreaking framework, this revised edition connects activist art education with current campaigns for social justice. Nearly a decade after Social Justice Art, innovative arts educator Marit Dewhurst returns with a new edition offering further guidance for developing meaningful, justice-centered art programming. Reflecting on a growing interest in the field and its place within larger movements that uses creative strategies to drive social change, Dewhurst brings new research to bear on her interviews with educators, artists, and students to suggest clear, actionable approaches to facilitating the collaborative process of creating art for social change. In Social Justice Art Education, Dewhurst examines how to teach art-making to address systems of injustice, how to talk about the process, and the role of activist art projects not only in school classrooms but also within museum education, afterschool education, and other youth programming. In a new chapter, she introduces essential steps that prepare educators to engage in this work: recognizing power differentials, identifying community strengths, and nurturing relationships. Through real-world examples, Dewhurst highlights three key learning processes—connecting, questioning, and transforming—and frames a critical arts pedagogy that incorporates collaboration, inquiry-based discussion, and changemaking into arts curricula. This invigorating work provides common language and concrete support for educators and others who want to expand and refine their practices, empowering students through liberatory education that aims to inspire social change.

What happens when beauty intersects with horror? In her newest nonfiction collection, Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through the making and viewing of art, we are—for better or for worse—changed.

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox.

Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand, art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos, reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis, shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand, art's complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world, question and challenge the order of things, and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being – to make new worlds. This collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises – including the climate emergency, global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic – and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices, oriented from the perspective of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Art making has always responded to the world; the essays in this collection explore how artists are adapting to a world in crisis. The contributions to this book are arranged in four sections: artistic responses; critical reflections, new curatorial approaches and the art school reimagined. Alongside the written chapters, three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions. The primary market for the book will be scholars and upper-level students of art and curating at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Specifically, the book will appeal to the burgeoning field of study around socially engaged art. Beyond the academic and student market, it will appeal to practicing artists and curators, especially those engaged in social practice and community-based art.

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora.In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others'specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith.The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

Pandemics and other catastrophic events have been the stimulus not only for inventions and discoveries in science, but also in literary modes of understanding the world. The latter were forged as “apocalyptic visions” of the world warning humans of extinction unless they changed their ways. Not only stories, but art works, painted on murals and canvas, tell the same kind of apocalyptic narrative, imploring humans to change their ways. This book is about the meaning and impact that such apocalyptic visions, ancient and contemporary, have had on human history. It is based on the premise that pandemics have changed the world socially, politically, and culturally. The main claim put forward is that pandemics have always been instrumental in introducing new creative forms of culture, from prose fiction to current-day memetic humor, through which people come to grips with the drastic changes that pandemics bring about. The cultural forms that served this purpose do not disappear but remain intrinsic in the overall cultural-historical paradigm of humanity.

Positioning cultural democracy in a historical context and in a context of adjacent movements such as the creative commons, open source movement, and maker movement, this book goes back to first principles and asks what personhood means in the twenty-first century, what cultural democracy means, why we should want it, and how we can work towards it. In this new book, the author provides a timely untangling of the various historical meanings of the term and explores the various ways in which it has been co-opted, suggesting that it has a strength that we should open up to examination with a view to reinvigorating it. Just as importantly, the book situates cultural democracy within the wider framework of progressive political and social movements, and of the impact of new digital information and communication technologies. To those unfamiliar with the term, it introduces cultural democracy through related concepts such as digital cultural politics, participatory democracy, and digital citizenship. Providing a much-needed theoretical take on the growing interest in cultural democracy, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the arts as well as practitioners and policy makers. It combines theory and practice with a view to inciting both thought and action.

Monumental cares rethinks monument debates, site specificity and art activism in light of problems that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as war, migration and the climate crisis. The book shows how artists address these issues, from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to postcards, graffiti and re-enactment. A multidirectional theory of site does justice to specific places but also to how far-away audiences see them. What emerges is a new ethics of care in public art, combined with a passionate engagement with reality harking back to the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Familiar questions can be answered anew: what to do with monuments, particularly when they are the products of terror and require removal, modification or recontextualisation? And can art address the monumental concerns of our present?

Se incluyen diversas miradas a la migración en la región, tanto desde la perspectiva de los artistas que se estudia y las particulares circunstancias de cada país, así como la postura de los autores provenientes de México, Cuba, Colombia y España.

L'univers Matrix continue à définir la mythologie de la cyberculture. Les figures de cette série acquièrent une plus grande fascination à mesure que les ordinateurs connectés gagnent du terrain, que les algorithmes se mettent à l'œuvre dans tous les aspects de nos vies. L'expérience humaine et nos interactions sociales sont devenues de plus en plus matricesques.

Near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) created three colossal candelabra mainly from fragments of sculpture excavated near the Villa Hadriana in Tivoli, two of which are now in the Ashmolean Museum, and one in the Louvre. Although they were among the most sought-after and prestigious of his works, and fetched enormous prices during Piranesi's life, they suffered a steep decline in appreciation from the 1820s onwards, and even today they are among the least studied of his works. Piranesi's Candelabra and the Presence of the Past uncovers the intense investment, by artists, patrons, collectors, and the public around the start of the nineteenth century in objects that made Graeco-Roman Antiquity present again. Caroline van Eck's study examines how objects make their makers or viewers feel that they are again in the presence of Antiquity, that not only Antiquity has revived, but that classical statues become alive under their gaze. what it takes to make such objects, and what it costs to own them; and about the ramifications of such intense if not excessive attachments to artefacts. This book considers the three candelabra in depth, providing the biography of these objects, from the excavation of the Roman fragments to their entry into private and public collection. Van Eck considers the context that Piranesi gave them by including them in his Vasi, Candelabri e Cippi (1778), to rethink the processes that led to the development of neoclassicism from the perspective of the objects and objectscapes that came into being in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century.

This book offers a fresh perspective on Michelangelo's well-known masterpiece, the Vatican Pietà, by tracing the shifting meaning of the work of art over time.Lisa M. Rafanelli chronicles the object history of the Vatican Pietà and the active role played by its many reproductions. The sculpture has been on continuous view for over 500 years, during which time its cultural, theological, and artistic significance has shifted. Equally important is the fact that over its long life it has been relocated numerous times and has also been reproduced in images and objects produced both during Michelangelo's lifetime and long after, described here as artistic progeny: large-scale, unique sculpted variants, smaller-scale statuettes, plaster and bronze casts, and engraved prints.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, early modern studies, religion, Christianity, and theology.