Search

Computational modeling of artwork meaning is complex and difficult. This is because art interpretation is multidimensional and highly subjective. This paper experimentally investigated the degree to which a state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), a popular Machine Learning approach, can correctly distinguish modern conceptual art work into the galleries devised by art curators. Two hypotheses were proposed to state that the DCNN model uses Exhibited Properties for classification, like shape and color, but not Non-Exhibited Properties, such as historical context and artist intention. The two hypotheses were experimentally validated using a methodology designed for this purpose. VGG-11 DCNN pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and discriminatively fine-tuned was trained on handcrafted datasets designed from real-world conceptual photography galleries. Experimental results supported the two hypotheses showing that the DCNN model ignores Non-Exhibited Properties and uses only Exhibited Properties for artwork classification. This work points to current DCNN limitations, which should be addressed by future DNN models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits participatory art as a distinct but underexplored practice of interest for human geography's contemporary work on art and aesthetics. It suggests that participatory art needs a conceptual, critical, and interdisciplinary grounding in human geography to advance the expanding relationship between participatory art practice and theory, aesthetics, and geography. Through three analytical themes – politics, publics, and space – the paper argues for an interdisciplinary approach to participatory art that draws across art theory, participatory praxis, and geography. The paper concludes around geography's suitability to critically explore the ethical and aesthetic relations created by participatory art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of generative AI, particularly prompt-based models, and its embedding in many social domains and practices has revived the notion of co-creation and distributed agency already familiar in art practice and theory. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its central notion of agency, this article explores the extent to which the collaboration between the artist and AI represents a new form of co-creation and distributed agency. It compares AI art with artistic movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, which also challenged the notion of the autonomous artist and her agency by incorporating randomness on the one hand and rule-based systems on the other. In contrast, artistic practice with AI can be described as an iterative process of creative feedback loops, oscillating between order and disorder, (calculated) randomness and calculation, enabling a very specific kind of self-reflection and entanglement with the alienation of one's own perspective. Furthermore, this article argues that most artistic projects that explore and work with AI are, in their own specific way, a demonstration of hybridity and entanglement, as well as the distribution of agency between the human and the non-human, and can thus be described as a network phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In art-historical terms, a self-portrait in assistenza refers to an artist having inserted their own likeness into a larger work. In Renaissance-era art, more than 90 examples have been identified, famously including Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi (c. 1478/1483). There, Botticelli glances out from the painting, making direct eye contact with the viewer, a feature that appears in other self-portraits of the type. In ancient Egypt, it was not commonly accepted that an artist would lay claim to it, especially when the work's scale imposed diversification of tasks to be performed or teamwork organized on a workshop basis. This article will present evidence discovered in the Chapel of Hatshepsut in her temple at Deir el-Bahari that can be interpreted as a self-portrait in assistenza and indicates that Djehuty, Overseer of the Treasury under Hatshepsut, took the lead role there. If this identification is valid, the room's decoration gains an additional layer of meaning and may be "read" in terms of Djehuty's message, comparable to Botticelli gazing out from his Adoration of the Magi. This ancient Egyptian case will illustrate how that artist-designer, in interweaving subtle indicators of his involvement in the work, expresses awareness both of his intellectual skills and of his pride in creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative practice research has been a prolific and promising marriage of arts and academia, and it has produced a great number of quality work from across disciplines. Still, seen as a bit of an eccentric entity by more traditional research communities, which often leads to a slight confusion or misunderstanding of what it stands for and how it’s to be managed.Questions that keep coming back are: what exactly is creative practice research, where does the new contribution to knowledge happen, what is the relation between theory and practice, what if there is no tangible output to speak of at all, and how to demonstrate academic rigour are just some of many questions that keep coming back.This provocation proposes to consider creative practice research as a form of conceptual art. As such, it responds to the clear necessity to use creative practice (in any shape or form) as a response to the pursuit of knowledge and clearly defined ideas. This paper will explore the implications of this proposal and how it might lead to a slightly alternative consideration for creative practice research and its value in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1970s, a drive towards the diversification of mediums available to artists led to artists working across numerous mediums not usually associated with visual art. While some came to work with sound as a central focus in their practice, most used sound as a medium to be employed in particular artworks for conceptual purposes. The paper is focused on five audio and sound exhibitions presented in New York City between 1978 and 1984. These large group exhibitions were held in alternative art spaces and not-for-profit art galleries and have received little critical attention beyond reviews published in local newspapers and art magazines. As such, these exhibitions have all but disappeared from the history of sound in art and from art history in general. I will argue that this cluster of group shows signal to an emergent practice that was moving past the post-medium condition and conceptual art towards the postmodernism of the 1980s. These exhibitions point to an understanding of sound as a medium of visual art that is at odds with contemporary scholarship in the sonic arts, which favours a music-based understanding of approaches to sound within the art gallery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Apotheke is the property of Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina 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.)

The article is devoted to the consideration of cultural narratives in works of art as a reflection of the nature of Ukrainian-Russian relations. The purpose of the article is to analyse the cultural narratives presented in works of art during the war, from the perspective of studying Ukrainian-Russian relations. The research methodology includes a qualitative analysis of works of art created during the war, using methods of content analysis and semiotic analysis. The research used the method of narrative analysis to reveal subjective ideas about the given problem. The presented factual information is analysed in the explicit content of the narrative. Content-oriented analysis is aimed at clarifying the implicit content: meaning and significance, manifestations of certain motives, features of the formulation of the narrative, its meaningful changes. Formal analysis consists in clarifying the structure of narratives, the sequence of changes, their relationship with the temporal axis, complexity and interconnectedness; feelings and images reflected in works of art. Semiotic analysis is used to study works of art, the meanings embedded in them in view of the change in the socio-political situation (from annexation to full-scale invasion). Scientific novelty. Its use, along with the traditional one, creates a new path for the development of conceptual art, which is now relevant, since it allows not only to restore one's identity on the basis of ancient cultural traditions, but also to form a new awareness of oneself in the world space. Conclusions. As a result of the study, it was found that the pro-Russian narratives that existed in the cultural space of Ukraine before 2014 have disappeared, and pro-Ukrainian ones are being promoted more actively, which indicates an awareness of their identity and a desire for national independence. A rather dramatic change can be traced in relation to Russian culture, which is recognised as imposed from the outside and implanted over the centuries by force. Subsequent research involves systematisation and analysis of modern symbolism that arose during a full-scale war and evokes lasting associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research showed that art could improve organizations through a kind of importation of artistic skills related to creativity and uncertainty management. Three critics have emerged to contest such artistic interventions in organizations: technical criticism, highlighting practical difficulties of the process; representational criticism which relies on social representations of art; conceptual criticism, which shows unbridgeable differences between art and management. This article explores contemporary art as a potential answer to these critics. Contemporary art gives up esthetic matters and does not need any know-how: everyone can practice it (technical answer). This post-esthetic art appears rather as a professional method than transcendental inspiration (representational answer). The difficult transition between these representations contributes to a greater creativity (conceptual answer). Switching to the paradigm of contemporary art shows the importance of the translation process between art and management, which should be placed at the heart of arts-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined how local artisans and mathematics teachers think the Akan traditional art might help senior high school students learn geometry. The Akan people live in Ashanti Region of Ghana. The study targeted experienced mathematics teachers and Akan traditional art experts. Seven experienced mathematics teachers and three craftsmen were chosen using purposive sampling. We conducted interviews with participants using a semi-structured guide to collect detailed data. The data was thematically analysed. The analysis revealed four themes; demonstrating how teachers use students' experiences to build new knowledge and help them apply it to new situations. We conclude that geometry is linked to the Akan culture and encourage instructors to adjust school geometry accordingly and also encourage ethnomathematics research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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 article discusses the artwork and philosophy of Jennifer Mary Ord (1948-2024), an outlier artist who lived and worked in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) for most of her life, and whose conceptual art has not received any previous critical attention. Examining Ord’s work through the lens of two articles she published in the South African Journal of Art History, as well as some of her work that was recently exhibited at the Bird Street Gallery, Nelson Mandela University, I argue that Ord was a highly sophisticated and playful poststructuralist visual artist, whose work was intended to deconstruct the foundational tenets of European philosophy, which she viewed as central to colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to analyze V. Sorokin's conceptualist novel "Marina's Thirtieth Love" (1984), to identify the features of its genre-structural constructions, to trace the connection of genre features of the "Soviet novel" with the tradition of Socialist realism literature and its deconstructions in the practice of conceptual art of the 1970s--80s. The paper identifies the target settings of the conceptual novelist Sorokin to overcome the principles and techniques of Soviet socialist realist art and to establish discrediting perspectives of perception of social and ideologically stable "concepts" that developed in the post-October period. It is established that the imitation base in Sorokin's "Marina's Thirtieth Love" was the socalled "production novel", a thematic subspecies of prose of socialist realism. [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]

The purpose of the work is to analyze the early texts of Timur Kibirov and determine his involvement in the group "Moscow romantic conceptualism" (B. Groys). The article shows that personal friendship with D. A. Prigov, L. Rubinstein, D. Novikov, M. Eisenberg and other conceptualists and soc-artists does not make Kibirov a conceptualist in the exact sense of the word. It is demonstrated that already in the early poems Kibirov overcomes the limited framework of conceptual art, following the path of perception of the tradition of Russian classical literature, inheriting its best examples. During the analysis, the sentimental components of Kibirov's early poetry are shown using the example of the poem "A Message to L. S. Rubinstein" (1989). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Faculty of Letters / Edebiyat Fakultesi Dergisi is the property of Hacettepe University Faculty of Letters 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.)

(MIS)ARCHIVE is an ongoing project to question and explore the potential of archives, collections, and museums as meaningful artistic and pedagogical spaces. Sometimes it appears that institutions like archives are perceived as being mundane and innocuous, resulting in them being overlooked. Those who do pay attention to them seem to offer two conflicting narratives regarding archives: on the one hand, they are seen as public places where objective truths and collective histories can be found, while on the other hand, they are considered exclusive spaces that are used to shape a view of the past that reflects position and power. The lack of questioning and attention given to spaces like archives is one way that injustices and inequities can be perpetuated over time. The author, an artist and educator, takes up the topic of the archive through a series of artistic and pedagogical gestures. Centering on the actions of (mis)interpretation, (mis)representation, and (mis)use, the author provokes others to engage with archives as sites of knowledge and learning, to question and examine the practices of collecting and preserving, and consider what these sites offer educationally, artistically, and politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the recent involvement of contemporary art in the field of museology, my article aims to point out the revolutionary role that conceptual art played in the understanding of heritage. This article argues that conceptual art crucially advanced the critical redefinition of the nature, value, display, role, and agency of the heritage object. Due to the specific understanding of the “object” and the institutional critique discourse it established, conceptual art significantly furthered the development of new methodologies in museological practice since the beginning of the twentieth century. Although new museology gradually involved contemporary art, a theory of its specific modus operandi in this context and – as will be argued – the particular contribution of conceptual art have not been systematically pursued so far. This article will demonstrate how the involvement of conceptual, performative, and multi-disciplinary artistic practices as well as display strategies have contributed to the elaboration of innovatory, critical, de-colonial, and inclusive methods of heritage transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decolonial scholars call for fashion definitions and perspectives from all cultures, and this article responds to these requests. Numerous theories and positions have inspired and shaped this conceptual model, including valuable insight from First Nations scholars who have explored fashion theories that integrate First Nations philosophies and ontologies. This First Nations fashion, art and style conceptual model explores the practice and outlines the themes of Culture, Expression, and Self-determination. First Nations fashion, art and style, as a term, acknowledges the holistic practice and industry, which includes fashion design, style, and the intersection of art via textiles and garments. The Cultural element within the model explores the continuation of cultural practice through design and dress and how it can contribute to cultural well-being. The Expression element describes contemporary cultural and intersectional identity forms through traditional and modern garments. The Self-determination component explores the autonomy of First Nations fashion practices and how First Nations people self-determine their fashion brands via cultural, financial, and environmental sustainability. This article concludes with recommendations for further theoretical and empirical research on First Nations fashion, art and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the second book of poetry by Katarína Kucbelová (b. 1979) Šport ([Sport] 2006). The collection portrays the world as an ongoing process which transforms everything -- living and inanimate, abstract and concrete. The processual character of the world in Sport focuses specifically on the body. The reading outlined in the article handles processuality in connection with themes, motifs, and philosophy of life, deriving the essential points of thinking about corporeality from phenomenology. Since Kucbelová's poetry often refers to the principles of visual and conceptual art, a similar interpretive procedure can be applied to the reading of her writing: her poems connote various spheres of life and in the creative process, she combines these into a more or less unified thought world. Interpretive directions thus variously rely on the idea of processuality and develop it: these encompass such areas as conceptual art, phenomenology, meditation, biology, or somatic aesthetics. Broadly, these insights can be applied to the author's first three books of poetry, which can be laboriously described as a processual trilogy, since they all manifest an approach to various spheres of life as processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chris Kraus is often read as a chronicler of women artists' experience: their frustrated desires, stifled creativity and stolen labour. But while these are the struggles that her protagonists face, the novel sets such struggles within the pressing context of American Empire's expansion and reorganisation in the post-Vietnam era. The juxtaposition between these levels is what generates the drama of Kraus' work. Foregrounding these juxtapositions, this article situates Kraus' novels within a longer tradition of feminist conceptual artists like Martha Rosler who took the labour and domination of predominantly white middle-class housewives as a standpoint from which to attempt to understand the expansion of US-backed global capitalism. Specifically, the article draws on the concept of 'countertopographies' developed by feminist geographer Cindi Katz to argue that Rosler and Kraus' work offers a form of 'countertopographic aesthetics'. That is, they both turn to the sphere of the reproductive as a site from which to map the uneven effects of global capitalism, while also foregrounding their own uneasy relationship with the imperialist project of mapping itself, by drawing attention to the ideological practices and limits of their very mappings. To illustrate this claim, the article concludes by turning to a partially buried event in Kraus' Summer of Hate (2012): the 1983 Clifton-Morenci Copper Strike, a crucial but often overlooked flashpoint in the roll-out of neoliberalism. This eighteen-month strike was fought by a largely Mexican-American workforce, and the Women's Auxiliary, who joined a long history of working-class housewives like the Housewives' Committee of Siglo X in Bolivia in becoming strike leaders. I argue that the strike is both crucial to the conjecture that Kraus' narrative traces, and also illuminating of the limit point of the protagonists' politics and the form of mapping that is possible from such a perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

Much has been written on the intertwined histories of art and money, from trompe-l'œil depictions of banknotes to so-called money art to the elements of trust and authenticity undergirding these arenas. Yet, what happens when an artwork representing paper money is inserted into the financial system itself? What mechanisms of monetary production and regulation are activated and revealed? In the 1980s and 1990s, artist JSG Boggs realized Boggs Bills — representations of banknotes that pulled the financial system and the laws regulating money into art, and likewise, pulled art into the machinery of finance and its governance. Alongside the more widely discussed modes of creative engagement such as intervention, culture jamming, and semiotic disobedience, I propose the term contrast agent to discuss the operations of Boggs Bills within the systems of art and law. This conceptualisation allows for a consideration of the laboratory-like mapping of the vectors of exchange performed by Boggs Bills as they weave through various bureaucratic systems. These works of art were injected into and circulated through different arenas of exchange, animating the bureaucracy that both constructs and regulates money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INCANTATIONS is a collection of sixteen visual and sonic experiments centred around the idea of score as spell. The project was curated and produced for The Witch Institute in 2021 by Brandon Hocura and Naomi Okabe, who together run the record label Séance Centre. Pairing a visual/test-based artist with a musician/composer, they commissioned original works in which a spell (visual score) was interpreted and manifested in sound. The contributing artists include Felicia Atkinson (Belgium), bill bissett (Canada), adrienne maree brown (USA), Scott Gailey (Canada), C.R. Gillespie (Canada), Beverly Glenn-Copeland (Canada), David Horvitz (USA), Benjamin Kilchofer (Switzerland), Idris Rahman (UK), Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh (Canada), Gavilan Rayna Russom (USA), Tomoko Sauvage (Japan/France), Dani Spinosa (Canada), Mona Steinwidder/Museum Of No Art (Germany), Yu Su (China/Canada), Andrew Zukerman (Canada). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual Art or Conceptualism began by prioritizing the idea behind the work, rejecting modernist aesthetics and challenging the definition of art then gradually took into account the criticism of social and political issues in the world. Conceptual Art emerged in the second half of the 1960s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Shortly after the emergence of Conceptual Art in the world, Iranian artists, with different perspectives and goals, also took steps to approach this movement. The purpose of this article is to analyze and examine the efforts of Iranian artists from the first sparks to present state of Conceptual Art in contemporary Iranian art. This research is organized by qualitative and descriptive-analytical method and aimed at answering the following questions: Based on the characteristics of Conceptual Art in the world, which exhibitions can be considered as the origin of the emergence and stabilization of this movement in Iran? And what are the unique characteristics of Conceptual Art in Iran? In order to answer these questions, this article first discussed the history and characteristics of Conceptual Art in the world; The characteristics of Conceptual Art include the rejection of traditional and modern views on aesthetics, emphasis on the priority of the idea over the technique, the use of new media, critical thinking towards the definition of art as well as social, political and cultural issues, the usage of repetitive patterns and serial order and the use of verbal expressions and language in art. Then, the history of Conceptual Art in Iran is examined and four exhibitions that are among the first exhibitions that were held under the title of Conceptual Art in Iran, including Blue, Gonj and Gostreh 1 and 2 and the First Exhibition of the Iranian Conceptual Art was analyzed and investigated by inductive method. In the end, it was concluded that although in the first three exhibitions, the artists tried to use new experiences and, in some cases, new media, but the modernist point of view dominated many aspects of their works. Also, their activities were stopped after an initial attempt and were even forgotten by the group members. While the works of the First Exhibition of the Iranian Conceptual Art were very similar to the characteristics of Conceptual Art in the world and due to the continuation of holding similar exhibitions in the following years, it has caused the emergence of an influential movement on contemporary Iranian art. The most important characteristics of Conceptual Art in Iran is that this movement did not pay much attention to the criticism of art and its definition, unlike its characteristics in the early days in United Kingdom and the United States. Rather, Conceptual Art in Iran has prioritized cultural, political and social issues, as well as individual and collective human concerns in the form of tradition, religion, memory and nostalgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Douglas Huebler is most well-known for his photo-conceptualist works, this article explores how the artist innovatively employed another medium: the limited-edition print. While early chroniclers of Conceptual art often emphasized the artworks' resistance to being bought and sold, I argue that Huebler created limited editions intended specifically for the collector's market, using the medium as a conceptual tool to reshape the relationship between artist and collector. The structure of the limited edition both prompted Huebler to conceive of art collecting as a collective endeavor, with each owner of the edition a node in an interconnected network, and endowed the artist with the ability to authorize impressions as authentic and inauthentic. In a moment when works of art were increasingly treated as financial assets, the limited-edition print provided Huebler with a vehicle for questioning the nature of ownership, authorship, and value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the conventional art historical genealogy, artists associated with the Pictures Generation would find their conceptual adversary in Neo-Expressionism. The twinned issues of authorship and individual expression were key to this antagonism. While artists such as Julian Schnabel purportedly embraced the idea that painterly marks were unmediated expressive registrations, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, according to critics associated with the journal October, aimed to deconstruct the very means of representation. As this discourse advanced in the 1980s, a remarkably similar debate began brewing in regard to AIDS imagery. While photographers including Nicholas Nixon produced harrowing depictions of AIDS patients designed to express the epidemic's deleterious effects, activist organizations virulently opposed this strategy, opting for a political rhetoric centered on text-based graphics that pointed to the epidemic's structural roots and representational distortions. Robert Blanchon, the subject of this article, created a curious synthesis of these otherwise opposed methodologies, matrixing sexuality, death, and their idiosyncratic expressions through the formal language of Conceptual art. His work approaches what Isabelle Graw calls "conceptual expression," using what Benjamin Buchloh famously called the "aesthetic of administration" to analyze AIDS and the sexual freedom it displaced. In addition to introducing the work of this underdiscussed artist, this article frames Blanchon's practice as a prompt to reconsider the prevailing divide within a certain art historical lineage between "critical" art and subjective expression to make room for a framework that accounts for artists' porous movement between analytic and more personalized approaches to activist artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Chinese video artist Zhang Peili's latex-glove-themed paintings and conceptual art from the 1980s. It argues that they are an important intervention into post-socialist China's politicized discussions on art's role in society. Building on Mel Chen's discussion of animacy hierarchies as sociopolitical constructs, the article reads Zhang's latex gloves as animate—transgressing boundaries of "aliveness" between humans and objects. It locates Zhang and his art collective, "Pond" Society, amid mid-1980s discourses on art's emotional contagiousness, highlighting that the Chinese art establishment's insistence on Realism and on the Maoist art methodology of "immersion into life" (shenru shenghuo) reflected anxieties about "healthy" art making that could promote national progress. Zhang's series of X? glove paintings from 1986 onward represent strategic promotions of his medical conceptualization of art. Zhang was infected during the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A epidemic, and his subsequent glove-themed work called for an embrace of viral life. The figure of the glove was also central to Zhang's first two video works, including Document on Hygiene No. 3, which signals a shift away from the insistence that art should reinforce the artist's authority. Instead, Document uses the gloved hand to reflect on where, in a society obsessed with purity and in an art world obsessed with radicalism, we might fundamentally locate agency. This article shows that the history of contemporary Chinese art cannot be understood without considering artists' responses to, and contributions in shaping, the deeply politicized notion of hygiene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study tested changes in modern/contemporary art valuation among students ages 6–15. Participants rated abstract paintings and conceptual works (and two control categories—traditional Western figurative paintings and everyday objects) on the dimensions of liking and art classification. As we hypothesized, modern/contemporary art was valued lower than traditional paintings. In addition, conceptual works were assessed lower than everyday objects. The relationship between the students' age and the evaluation of contemporary art depended on the genre. Liking and art classification of conceptual works decreased linearly with increasing age. In turn, the relationship between the students' age and abstract paintings' ratings (on both dimensions) was curvilinear because in younger students, ratings increased with age, and in older students, they decreased. Summing up, considered modern/contemporary art genres pose a challenge to students who, without special preparation, do not appreciate their value, even in the older grades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]