Art History: A Very Short Introduction

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.

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):  
Stephen H. Lehman

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.


2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Muñoz ◽  
Eva Anduiza

Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents’ predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.


Gesture ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Streeck

In “Depicting by gestures” (Gesture, 8 (3)), I have explored the methods by which hand gestures depict the world. Here I explore how gestures themselves are depicted. Many paintings and sculptures show human bodies in motion or showcase traces of body movements, including gestures of the hand. The issue is how the artists succeeded in depicting or insinuating movement in media that are inherently still, and how such arrested gestures function in pictures of social life so that these are perceived as “legible interactions” (Gombrich). By scrutinizing the changing logic of representation of embodied communication in the visual arts, gesture researchers can gain insights into the relationships between movement, form, meaning, and context, and recontextualize their own analytic methodologies within the broader discourse in the humanities on human behavior and its interpretation (Streeck, 2003).
 In the following, I examine a number of characteristic attempts, made during different periods of Western art-history, to solve this problem: in Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic art; in some medieval illuminations; in the early and late Renaissance; and in the 20th century styles of “écriture automatique” and Abstract Expressionism. Each of the strategies involved is predicated on three types of analysis: of ways in which body motion communicates meaning, of visual perception, and of the nature of pictorial representation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mu-En Chen

<p>Cosmopolitan consumers generally refer to individuals who are open and unbiased towards foreign products and identify as citizens of the world. Despite growing relevance of understanding consumer cosmopolitanism (COS) in today’s changing international landscape, both the construct itself is still not that well understood and operationalized, as well as its social and psychographic antecedent. In terms of culture studies, recent culture studies within the IB discipline continue to debate over the appropriate definitions of culture, as well as its conceptualization, operationalization, and especially measurement. This research aims to explore the impact of personal cultural orientations (PCOs), as individual-level culture value concepts, on COS, as well as the potential moderating role of product involvement (e.g., high- vs low-involvement products). Young-adult consumers in Taiwan and New Zealand were chosen to provide a contrast between a typical Western, Anglo-Saxon-based perspective and a typical Eastern, Asian, Confucian-based cultural context.  Overall, this study could not fully support PCOs as having a significant impact on COS, nor product involvement as a moderator. However, COS could not be tested as a second-order reflective latent construct as originally intended in the seminal paper by Riefler et al. (2012). Compared to Riefler et al. (2012)’s paper, differences can be observed in the sampling where Riefler et al. (2012) sampled respondents aged 19 to 93 years (mean=46.6). This suggests that young adults a generational cohort hold significantly different perspectives and dispositions to other generations and the overall population. This finding aligns with recent IB literature in looking for smaller ‘containers’ of culture.  Of the three PCOs tested, two displayed significant effects to COS in both country samples, but only to one dimension of the COS construct (Open-mindedness) and not the other (Diversity appreciation). Hence it is highly likely the PCOs tested in this study have significant effects on COS, if only COS could be operationalized as originally intended as discussed above. This points towards potential issues in appropriateness of the scales used for studies on young adults, as both the PCO and COS scales were developed on a wide range (age diverse) of respondents.  This study also showed that within-country differences appear to be smaller than across-country differences. This is not consistent with previous cross-cultural research in the IB literature, which suggest cultural values differ significantly at the individual level due to differences in individuals’ experiences. Again, such research was done on more diverse respondent populations, not a specific demographic cohort with distinct social experiences. This finding has implications for the general assumption that within-country differences are considerably larger than across-country differences, when it comes to cultural value studies. Thus, when focusing on a specific demographic generational cohort, it seems that even when it comes to representatives from two very diverse cultural backgrounds, one grounded in a more Western and Protestant-based cultural context with more independent identity construal and the other in a more Eastern and Confucian-based cultural context with more interdependent identity construal, my evidence shows grater tendency towards a generational archetype understanding of young adults.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-156
Author(s):  
Rafee H. Askandar ◽  
Nasim Ebrahimi

Probiotics are viable microorganisms that, if adequately administered, confer great benefits to the host for the prevention or treatment of a wide range of human diseases, including recurrent respiratory tract infection (RRTI), cystic fibrosis, allergies, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). One of the current problems is that the overuse of antibiotics during respiratory tract infection has led to increased resistance to them, which has been demonstrated in numerous examinations that specific lactic acid bacteria (LAB), one of the key probiotics, against bacterial and viral infections of the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, have a protective effect. On the other hand, changes in the gastrointestinal and respiratory microbiomes, especially lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, lead to an increase in allergies and asthma and a balance in the microbiome may improve symptoms. Probiotics are able to increase the number and activity of leukocytes, neutrophils, and NK cells. They can also increase IL-10 expression and decrease the expression of inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-8. In addition, they maintain high levels of IgA and produce bacteriocin and ruterin that have antimicrobial activity. Without identifying the specific properties of the probiotic strains and identifying the precise mechanism of their action, probiotic treatment would only be a large hypothesis because the therapeutic and clinical outcomes are different. On the other hand, metagenomics have provided information on how the microbiome interacts with host physiology, leading to new therapeutic targets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Mehdi Ommati ◽  
Mohammad Reza Arabnezhad ◽  
Omid Farshad ◽  
Akram Jamshidzadeh ◽  
Hossein Niknahad ◽  
...  

Lithium (Li+) is prescribed against a wide range of neurological disorders. Besides its excellent therapeutic properties, there are several adverse effects associated with Li+. The impact of Li+ on renal function and diabetes insipidus is the most common adverse effect of this drug. On the other hand, infertility and decreased libido is another complication associated with Li+. It has been found that sperm indices of functionality, as well as libido, is significantly reduced in Li+-treated men. These adverse effects might lead to drug incompliance and the cessation of drug therapy. Hence, the main aims of the current study were to illustrate the mechanisms of adverse effects of Li+ on the testis tissue, spermatogenesis process, and hormonal changes in two experimental models. In the in vitro experiments, Leydig cells (LCs) were isolated from healthy mice, cultured, and exposed to increasing concentrations of Li+ (0, 10, 50, and 100 ppm). In the in vivo section of the current study, mice were treated with Li+ (0, 10, 50, and 100 ppm, in drinking water) for five consecutive weeks. Testis and sperm samples were collected and assessed. A significant sign of cytotoxicity (LDH release and MTT assay), along with disrupted testosterone biosynthesis, impaired mitochondrial indices (ATP level and mitochondrial depolarization), and increased biomarkers of oxidative stress were detected in LCs exposed to Li+. On the other hand, a significant increase in serum and testis Li+ levels were detected in drug-treated mice. Moreover, ROS formation, LPO, protein carbonylation, and increased oxidized glutathione (GSSG) were detected in both testis tissue and sperm specimens of Li+-treated mice. Several sperm anomalies were also detected in Li+-treated animals. On the other hand, sperm mitochondrial indices (mitochondrial dehydrogenases activity and ATP levels) were significantly decreased in drug-treated groups where mitochondrial depolarization was increased dose-dependently. Altogether, these data mention oxidative stress and mitochondrial impairment as pivotal mechanisms involved in Li+-induced reproductive toxicity. Therefore, based on our previous publications in this area, therapeutic options, including compounds with high antioxidant properties that target these points might find a clinical value in ameliorating Li+-induced adverse effects on the male reproductive system.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna-Marie White

<p>The production of taonga is a sovereign Māori tradition closely guarded in contemporary Māori society. Many Contemporary Māori Artists observe taonga principles in their work though these qualities are stifled within the New Zealand art system. In the 1990s these subjects were fiercely debated resulting in Contemporary Māori Art being defined differently to the ancestral tradition of taonga. This debate created a rupture, which disturbs the practice of Māori art and is a major concern in the emerging practice of Māori art history. Reviving earlier arguments for Contemporary Māori Art to be defined according to the principles of taonga, this thesis applies the concept of ‘contemporary taonga’ to the art works of Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura), to argue that taonga production is active in contemporary Māori life and offers a new method to reconcile Māori art histories.  The practice of Kaupapa Māori research and theory enlivened the taonga principles of Brett Graham’s art works. Intensive accounts of two art works, produced a decade apart, reveal ‘contemporary taonga’ to be a collaborative process involving recognition and instrumentalisation by authoritative Māori viewers. Kahukura (1996), produced in response to the debates was, however, overwhelmed by competing interests of the time. Āniwaniwa (2006) undertook an arduous journey—to the centre of the Western art world in order to be shown within the artist’s tribal rohe—where Ngāti Koroki Kahukura kaumātua recognised Graham as a tohunga. Iwi leaders also employed Āniwaniwa in their Treaty of Waitangi claims process, functionalising the art work as taonga to support the advancement of their people. Āniwaniwa then left New Zealand to play a role in the formalisation of an international indigenous art network.   As a type for contemporary taonga, Āniwaniwa is an expansive model to introduce this concept to contemporary art discourse. The impact of this concept is yet to be realised though immediately reconciles long-standing issues in Māori art. ‘Contemporary taonga’ has the potential to radically reconcieve, and reorganise, Contemporary Māori Art practice and history according to the practice of ancestral Māori traditions and determined by the authority and agency of Māori people.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Freiberg ◽  
Pinchas Fine ◽  
Michael Borisover ◽  
Shahar Baram

&lt;p&gt;Contradictory data exists on the impact of biosolids incorporation on ortho-phosphate (IP) binding to arid and semi-arid Mediterranean soils. We used two mature organic amendments (OA) with low IP solubility to study the effect of OAs addition on the IP adsorption parameters of Mediterranean soils. Seven soils, encompassing a wide range of mechanical, chemical and mineralogical properties, were mixed with a biosolids compost (DSC) at 9:1 ratio (w/w dry weight basis). The soils and mixtures were either incubated for seven years under constant temperature (30&amp;#8451;) and moisture content (80% of 30&amp;#160;kPa tension) or were unincubated. IP adsorption parameters were also measured in not-incubated soil DSC mixtures at 97:3 ratio. In all the soils, DSC addition significantly increased the IP adsorption capacities (by Langmuir's model) from 126 to 397 mg&amp;#160;IP kg&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt; in the soils to 254 through 669 mg&amp;#160;IP kg&lt;sup&gt;-1 &lt;/sup&gt;in the soil-DSC-mixtures. The increased capacities were accompanied by a significant decrease in the adsorption affinities, from values of 0.12 to 1.02 L kg&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt; in the soils to 0.05 and 0.25 L kg&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt; in the mixtures. Biosolids addition at 97:3 ratio had a similar effect on the IP adsorption parameters as the 9:1 ratio. These two IP adsorption parameters continued to change along the incubation. The other OA tested was a municipal solid waste compost (MSWC), which was mixed with two montmorillonitic soils at 97:3 ratio (soil:OA), one with high lime and low Al/Fe-oxides contents and the other with low lime and high Al/Fe-oxides content. OA addition increased the IP adsorption capacity in the lime-rich soil, while it did not affect the other. Overall, our results show that the solid matrix of the two OA's used by us embodied IP adsorption sites, most likely through metal bridging with Ca&lt;sup&gt;2+&lt;/sup&gt;, which increases the total adsorption capacity of the soil-OA mixture. Concomitantly, DOM from the OAs competes with IP on adsorption sites reducing the soil's adsorption capacity. The magnitude of each one of these two processes depends on the soil and the added OA characteristic and will determine the overall change in the soil's capability to retain IP after biosolids incorporation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;


Author(s):  
Dana Arnold

Are the practices of Western art history appropriate for the study of art from cultures outside its geographical boundaries and conventional timeframe? The bias in this interpretation of the subject opens up the questions of the importance of the canon in art history and how we view non-figurative, primitive, and naive art. ‘A global art history?’ considers a range of different examples of artistic practice from around the world, including the sculpture of the Dogon people of Mali and the calligraphy of Wu Zhen, who was active during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). It also discusses what is meant by the ‘primitive’ arts of Oceania, Africa, and North and South America.


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