Toward an international art library: the growth of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, 1979-2002

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Allen

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is one of four programs of the J. Paul Getty Trust, an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts, all of which reside at the Getty Center situated high on a beautiful hilltop in Brentwood, California. (The other programs of the Getty Trust are the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Grant Program.) From the beginning it was understood that the GRI would develop a research program in the discipline of art history and more generally the humanities, and that a library would support its work. Since its founding the GRI has, in fact, developed a major library as one of its programs alongside those for scholars, publications, exhibitions and a multitude of lectures, workshops and symposia for scholars, students and the general public. What is now known as the Research Library at the GRI has grown to be a significant resource and this article focuses on its history, the building that houses it, its collections and databases, and access to them all.

Author(s):  
Dana Arnold

Art history encompasses the study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and the other visual arts. Art History: A Very Short Introduction considers the issues, debates, and artefacts that make up art history. It explores the emergence of social histories of art and, using a wide range of images, it discusses key aspects of the discipline including how we write about, present, read, and look at art, and the impact this has on our understanding of art history. This second edition includes a new chapter on global art histories, considering how the traditional emphasis on periods and styles in art originated in Western art and can obscure other critical approaches and artwork from non-Western cultures.


Author(s):  
Richard Neer

What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for an artifact or a work of art to be visible as such? At some level the answer is simple: the lights must be on. Quickly, however, the issues become more complex and turn out to vary from discipline to discipline. Not everything is visible at every time, which means that not every research program can see the same things. Material conditions are certainly important, but so are perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. Archaeology is, among other things, the science of making things visible. It does so by digging them out of the ground; what time has hidden, the archaeologist reveals. The discipline is, as a result, keenly attuned to the material conditions under which such visibility becomes possible. Those conditions can be institutional, practical, and technological—funding, permits, and tools, be they picks and shovels or ground penetrating radar. But the conditions that archaeology investigates can also be historical, in the sense that, even in the distant past, visibility was neither uniform nor given. Historical agents, no less than time, may do the work of concealment: burying things, hiding them, rendering them variously obscure. It follows that archaeologists excavate more than artifacts. Equally, they excavate the conditions of each artifact’s potential visibility: the material conditions under which entities in a past world could be conspicuous and obtrusive, or recede into an unremarkable background. In short, they excavate relations no less than things—hence, by extension, a potential stratification in who saw what and at what time. Art history, on the other hand, tends to take visibility for granted. Integral to the discipline is a vast infrastructure of imaging and autopsy, from ArtSTOR to high-quality printing to travel grants—all committed to what Michael Fried has called “the primordial convention” that pictures and sculptures are meant to be beheld. This commitment exceeds the requirements of empirical research: even the most thorough technical documentation and the most meticulous description will, by broad consensus, be no substitute for seeing the object with one’s own eyes.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-72
Author(s):  
Sjoerd van Tuinen

In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo's figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo's preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically Mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs.


Author(s):  
OLga Rogaleva

Specialized news broadcasting is of particular interest and it needs to be studied. The subject of the article is the content-thematic and stylistic features of news and information-analytical programs on the Kultura (Сulture) TV channel. The research is based on the method of content analysis, linguistic methods of analysis. As a result, the content and thematic features of information broadcasting in the field of culture have been revealed. The topics of the TV channel programs are diverse; they include such types of art as theater, music, literature, visual arts, cinema, etc. By topic and modality, news stories are divided into news itself, news announcements, and news retrospectives. «News of Culture with Vladislav Flyarkovsky», as constants of information and analytical television, retaines emphasis on the presenter’s strong authorial position, depth of topic coverage, a desire to comment on a phenomenon or event, to assess it, and reveal it from all sides. The communicative and stylistic design of the final program is conditioned, on the one hand, by the format of news broadcasting, on the other hand, by the theme (in the speech of journalists the vocabulary of art history, culturolog- ical and philosophical discourses prevail; restraint, intimacy, emphasizing the importance of cultural facts is combined with analyticism, emotional and evaluative nature of information presentation). The revealed features make it possible to talk about a special television format such as symbiosis of cultural and educational journalism, and information journalism.


2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Caduff ◽  
Sabina Gebhardt Fink ◽  
Florian Keller ◽  
Steffen Schmidt

Intermedialität wird hier systematisch an Musik, Literatur, visuelle Kunst und Film dargestellt. Den Anfang machen allgemeine Überlegungen zu Materialität und Medium in diesen verschiedenen Künsten. Im Weiteren werden unter dem Aspekt ›Bimedialität‹ verschiedene Beispiele vorgestellt, die jeweils aus zwei Medien bestehen (z.B. Musikfilm, das Lied oder Schriftbilder). Dabei folgen wir der Frage, ob und wie jeweils eines der beiden Medien eine Vorrangstellung bekommt. Der abschließende Teil behandelt „intermediale Bezüge in Monomedialität“. Hier geht es um monomediale Darstellungen, denen aber eine Beschäftigung mit einem anderen Medium vorangegangen ist. Das ist etwa dann der Fall, wenn ein Schriftsteller über ein Bild schreibt, ohne daß dieses (im Text) zu sehen ist. In this article, we offer a systematic description of intermedia relations across music, literature, the visual arts, and film. Beginning with some general reflections on materiality and medium in these diverse fields of art, we then offer various examples consisting of two media (e.g. music film, song, images in writing). We pursue the question if, and how, one of the two media may take priority over the other. In our conclusion, we deal with „intermedia relations in monomediality“. This section focuses on artistic representations made in one medium, but based on reflections on another medium. For instance, this is the case when a novelist writes about a picture without having this picture reprinted in the text.


Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.


Perception ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (12) ◽  
pp. 1419-1436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Locher ◽  
Sharon Gray ◽  
Calvin Nodine

Two experiments were performed to examine how the subjective balance of a painting is created by its structural features and to determine if balance influences the way people look at paintings. Stimuli consisted of sixteen reproductions of twentieth-century paintings varying in artistic style and a reconstructed less-balanced version of each. Participants in experiment 1 determined the location of the balance center of each composition, assigned ‘weights’ to the pictorial features which contributed to the location of the balance center, and rated the picture for balance. It was found that design and museum professionals and individuals untrained in the visual arts were in good agreement as to the structural framework underlying the balance organization of a painting. For all participants, disruption of the balanced organizations of the original compositions led to reliable shifts in the location of the perceived balance centers of the originals compared with their less-balanced perturbations. Additionally, it was observed that particular features as such were not the origin of the balance phenomenon; rather, judgments concerning the balance structure and its center were dependent on the global integration of information across a wide area of the display field, but especially from its central region. Last, the subtle changes in balance structure between versions resulted in lower ratings of balance being assigned to the less-balanced perturbations by the design professionals only; the other two participant groups evaluated overall balance of the versions as comparable. In experiment 2, eye movements of a different group of untrained individuals were recorded as they performed similar tasks on the art stimuli. It was found that disruption of the balance structure of the original representational but not abstract compositions resulted in different regions of the original and perturbed versions being visually explored. Findings of both experiments are related to theoretical notions of balance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Fol Leymarie ◽  
Prashant Aparajeya

In this article we explore the practical use of medialness informed by perception studies as a representation and processing layer for describing a class of works of visual art. Our focus is towards the description of 2D objects in visual art, such as found in drawings, paintings, calligraphy, graffiti writing, where approximate boundaries or lines delimit regions associated to recognizable objects or their constitutive parts. We motivate this exploration on the one hand by considering how ideas emerging from the visual arts, cartoon animation and general drawing practice point towards the likely importance of medialness in guiding the interaction of the traditionally trained artist with the artifact. On the other hand, we also consider recent studies and results in cognitive science which point in similar directions in emphasizing the likely importance of medialness, an extension of the abstract mathematical representation known as ‘medial axis’ or ‘Voronoi graphs’, as a core feature used by humans in perceiving shapes in static or dynamic scenarios. We illustrate the use of medialness in computations performed with finished artworks as well as artworks in the process of being created, modified, or evolved through iterations. Such computations may be used to guide an artificial arm in duplicating the human creative performance or used to study in greater depth the finished artworks. Our implementations represent a prototyping of such applications of computing to art analysis and creation and remain exploratory. Our method also provides a possible framework to compare similar artworks or to study iterations in the process of producing a final preferred depiction, as selected by the artist.


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