When Art isn’t Real

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Shortland ◽  
Patrick Degryse

The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute. The authors of this book have decades of experience in this field, working on a range of objects dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. They present seven of the most famous cases from the Getty Kouros to the Turin Shroud – some of which are still contested, and examine how a few words from a connoisseur or scientist can make a virtually valueless object worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Purchase

Social practices, whether described as socially-engaged, participatory or community-based, share the potential to transform audience members into active participants in an artwork or project. However, the purpose of this public engagement is sometimes in conflict with the private experience of the viewer, constructing a complex relationship between audience, artist and gallery. Beginning by contextualizing the historic position of the audience in relation to the arts, the present article uses this as grounding to unpick elements of the dynamic which exist today. ‘The audience’ investigates the reported social benefits of engaging in the arts, questioning how evidence of these positive effects is reported and judged. This article exemplifies Marcelo Sánchez-Camus’ work with patients in palliative care and Spacemakers’ community-based projects as artworks intended to instigate positive social change. Further, ‘The artist’ explores the relationship between those facilitating these projects and their audience. By breaking down the term ‘audience’ into viewers, participants, collaborators and co-authors, one can use levels of agency to segment those involved and the differing experiences of their involvement. Petra Bauer’s long-term collaborative work with SCOT PEP is used to demonstrate how a group’s agency and stakes within an artwork can be enhanced by building relationships on equal terms. Finally, ‘The gallery’, uses the high-profile examples of Tate Group and Venice Biennale to demonstrate how the more powerful entities in the art world can misrepresent engagement and participation as quantitative markers of success or accessibility. This article ultimately aims to question what motivates the production of social practice and how these entities are important in constituting a successful process and outcome, for audience, artist and institute.


2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-495
Author(s):  
Peter Stoneley

The spread of modernist painting in the early-twentieth-century United States was met with cries of "degeneracy" and "homosexual conspiracy." This essay explores the claims and counter-claims. Above all, Stoneley argues that the battles reflected larger shifts in art-world authority, with the museums and the "museum professional" emerging as controlling forces.


Author(s):  
Georgina Colby

Reflecting in 1990 on her early adult years immersed in the New York art world, Acker remembered ‘being taught that it’s not an art work’s content, surface content, that matters, but the process of making art. That only process matters.’1 Attention to the manuscript practice and compositional processes of Acker’s works, alongside the question of experimental practice and meaning, brings to light the new forms of creative practice that Acker’s works embody. This book opened with Acker’s declaration ‘FORM HAS MEANING’ and the importance of the imbrication of form with content to modernist and late modernist experimental writers. Acker’s experimental practices – exercises in writing asystematically, collage, topological intertextuality, montage, ekphrasis, and literary calisthenics – reveal a body of compositional strategies that continue to uphold this distinctive feature of early twentieth-century experiment and preserve the radical force of her writings....


Author(s):  
Kate Nichols ◽  
Sarah Victoria Turner

This introductory chapter explores and establishes the Sydenham Crystal Palace in relation to existing scholarship on the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydenham Palace combined education, entertainment and commerce, and spans both nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We resituate it as an important location within the London art world and establish the broader connections it had with rival ventures such as the South Kensington Museum and the numerous international exhibitions in the period. We set out the new possibilities for the analysis of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and material cultures opened up by this unique venue, problematising the periodisation of art works and attitudes into discretely ‘Victorian’ and ‘Edwardian’ categories.


2020 ◽  
pp. 538-555
Author(s):  
Martin Conboy

The Sunday newspaper is an often-neglected success story of the twentieth century news media landscape. The popularity and profitability of Sunday papers grew throughout the century to establish themselves as flagships of cultural and commercial trends and an essential complement to most national daily productions. On account of their production cycle, Sunday newspapers were always able to do things that the daily press with its punishing routines and pressure of deadlines were never able to achieve. Mapped onto the characteristic social class and politically stratified perspectives of British and Irish newspaper reading publics, the Sunday newspaper became a prominent vehicle for the experiments in layout and content after the full computerization of newspapers in the mid-1980s; lifestyle, commentary, colour photography all were pioneered in this format. The range of geographical variants of the Sunday newspaper are also considered from the regional Sunday Sun published in Newcastle from 1919 to the Irish Sunday Independent and Scottish Sunday Post to the migration of English titles across Britain into Ireland with increasing national specialization in their content and appeal. The chapter also considers the varying reasons for the failure of high-profile Sunday papers such as the Sunday Correspondent and the News of the World.


Author(s):  
Bernard Hoose

Within at least some branches of Christianity, the term ‘charity’ has been used to mean the love mandated by Jesus. In recent theological writings, however, there has been a tendency to replace it with the Greek word agapē. There has been some disagreement in the twentieth century concerning the precise nature and functioning of Christian love, a major catalyst for debate having been Anders Nygren’s book Agapē and Eros (1930–6). Numerous scholars have complained that charity does not have a high profile nowadays and have noted that, in common parlance, the word usually has the meaning of benevolence or beneficence. Some attempts have been made to place greater emphasis on Christian love and relationships within Christian ethics. Of some interest in this regard is the notion of an ethic of care, which is not confined to Christian circles but has been the subject of some debate in recent times.


Author(s):  
Anson W. Mackay ◽  
Rebecca Lee ◽  
James M. Russell

Abstract Rwenzori Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, has experienced rapid glacier loss since the beginning of the twentieth century, yet there has been little investigation of aquatic biodiversity change in the park. This study presents a paleolimnological analysis from Lake Mahoma (2990 m asl), which is situated in the bamboo-forest transition zone. Diatom and organic geochemistry data from a 39-cm-long sediment core with a basal age of c. 1715 CE were compared with new analyses of previously published data from Lakes Bujuku (3891 m asl) and Lower Kitandara (3989 m asl), in the alpine zone. Comparisons were made to determine if aquatic ecosystem changes exhibited similar inter-lake patterns over the past ~ 150 years of climate warming and glacial recession, or if only local change was apparent. The diatom flora of Lake Mahoma is acidophilous, dominated by Aulacoseira ikapoënsis since at least the mid eighteenth century. In recent decades, the obligate nitrogen-heterotroph Nitzschia palea increased in importance, concurrent with declining δ15Norg values. We suggest that these late twentieth century changes were linked to regional warming and increased thermal stratification of Lake Mahoma. Regional comparisons of the Rwenzori lakes were done using existing organic geochemistry records (total organic carbon, C/N and δ13Corg) and through diatom compositional turnover analyses, and categorisation of species into one of four diatom growth morphology traits, or guilds: tychoplanktonic, high-profile, low-profile and motile. Over the past 150 years, all three lakes showed unidirectional, compositional diatom turnover, indicating that deterministic processes had affected diatom communities. Declining turnover at each site is broadly mirrored by an increase in tychoplanktonic taxa, along with concomitant declines in high-profile diatoms at Lake Mahoma, and low-profile diatoms at Lake Bujuku, and at least for the past 60 years, at Lower Kitandara. The interplay between diatom guilds at all sites is mainly a consequence of competition for available resources. Sediment organic carbon at all sites comes from both autochthonous and allochthonous sources, the relative abundances of which are influenced by the time elapsed since lakes had glaciers in their catchment.


2017 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
DUNCAN BELL

Read throughout the world, H. G. Wells was one of the most famous political thinkers of the early twentieth century. During the first half of the 1900s, he elaborated a bold and idiosyncratic cosmopolitan socialist vision. In this article, I offer a new reading of Wells's political thought. I argue that he developed a distinctivepragmatistphilosophical orientation, which he synthesized with his commitments to Darwinian evolutionary theory. His pragmatism had four main components: a nominalist metaphysics; a verificationist theory of truth; a Jamesian “will to believe”; and a conception of philosophy as an intellectual exercise dedicated to improving practice. His political thought was shaped by this philosophical orientation. Wells, I contend, was the most high-profile pragmatist political thinker of the opening decades of the twentieth century. Acknowledging this necessitates a re-evaluation of both Wells and the history of pragmatism.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-293
Author(s):  
John Young

AbstractWhile summits are well served in the literature on diplomacy, the focus tends to be on specific, high-profile occasions such as Munich and Yalta or on the broad experience of multilateral conferences. Such approaches may obscure the full range of summits that were taking place by the later twentieth century. By focusing on a four-year period in the experience of a particular leader, this article provides a case study of summitry, which might serve as the basis for comparisons with other countries and time periods. It draws out the frequency, type and geographical range of summits experienced by Edward Heath as British premier and, in doing so, also raises issues about how types of summits are defined, the relationship between bilateral and multilateral meetings and the way that summitry has evolved as a diplomatic practice. In particular it emerges that summits were frequent and ofen perfunctory affairs, sometimes held as a simple courtesy to leaders who were passing through London. In this sense the British experience may have been unusual, but it is also evident from the number of Heath's interlocutors and the multilateral conferences that he attended that summits had become an integral part of political life for world leaders in the jet age.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Samuel O’Connor Perks ◽  
Rajesh Heynickx ◽  
Stéphane Symons

Abstract The art collector and educator, Dominique de Menil (1908–1997) has mostly been remembered as a pragmatic orchestrator of high-profile commissions in the art world. However, little attention has been paid to her role as a thinker. This article seeks to address that lacuna in the literature by attending to an overlooked source in the Menil archives, de Menil’s notebooks, which were written between 1974 and 1994. By analysing de Menil’s use of metaphor in the notebooks, we place them within the trajectory of de Menil’s intellectual development stemming back to her 1936 article: ‘Pour l’unité du monde chrétien’. The first part situates the metaphors which de Menil employed in the notebooks from the 1970s in the intellectual context of her inception of these figures of speech in Montmartre, Paris in 1936. The second part unpacks a central metaphor which grounds de Menil’s conception of tradition. The third part compares de Menil’s art historiography vis-à-vis other models which sought to reinvigorate the avant-garde art scene via pre-modern sources. The Coda critically assesses de Menil’s art historiography against other prevalent views on the relation between pre-modern and modern works of art.


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