scholarly journals Transcending utility? The gendered conflicts of a contemporary creative identification

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Taylor ◽  
Marie Paludan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Therapeutic Utility ◽  
Psychology Of Creativity

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have been described as an age of creativity in affluent Western societies because of the increased popularity of the visual arts and the expansion of the global sector of the creative and cultural industries (CCI). The psychology of creativity has contributed new conceptualisations of creativity and creative processes, challenging associations that derive from the elite arts. This article investigates the implications of these changes for the gendering of creativity and creative practice. It asks if contemporary reconceptualisations of creativity open new possibilities for women to identify as creative practitioners. The article presents a critical discursive study of interviews with UK women maker-artists. The analysis shows how the women emphasise the practical applications or utility of their creative practice. A claim of utility can function to justify the practice. In addition, a claim of therapeutic utility, for others and for the artist herself, potentially addresses the neoliberal priority that people take responsibility for their personal well-being. However, the justification of utility contrasts with the creative vocation associated with the masculine elite artist who pursues “art for art’s sake”. The justification can therefore be seen to undermine the women’s creative identifications, reinstating the conventionally masculine status of creativity and the arts.

Mystics, Shamans, and Visionary Arts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Multiple Time ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cave Paintings ◽  
Art For Art's Sake

Diverse theories and cases are associated with artistic expression attributed to mystical experience. To showcase variety as well as underlying commonalties, the intersecting experiences of mystics, shamans, and visionary arts builds on understanding shamanic altered consciousness in multiple time periods, attunement to nature manifest through art and sacred sites, and modernist impulses beginning in the 20th century. Cases range from prehistoric cave paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux to contemporary shamanic rituals of Siberia, from oracles, amphitheaters, and firewalking in Ancient Greece to the calendrical mysteries of Egypt, Stonehenge, Crete, and Mesoamerica. The cosmology-saturated paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and the mystical mountains of Nicholas Roerich can be productively juxtaposed, since these artists created resonating movements of global followers. For deeper analysis, insights of artists, including poets and epic singers, into their creative processes can be combined with analytical literature on spirituality and visionary arts. Focus on roots of shamanic consciousness and on cases selected from cultural anthropology and art history shifts analysis away from famous examples of religious art within organized religions. Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Zoroastrian mystical traditions should be celebrated, but not at the expense of fluid and open-minded definitions of spirituality in the arts. This shifted gaze enables some conventional distinctions to be dissolved, for example, that between “art for art’s sake” and art that may result in individual and communal healing. In some interactive contexts of mystical artistic expression, distinctions between artists and their perceivers may also dissolve. In sum, mysticism and art are “eye of the beholder” phenomena. Experiences of mystics, shamans, and artists can be viewed as having significant interconnections without overgeneralizing about mysticism, shamanism, or the arts.

scholarly journals Art and science: Chalk and cheese

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 13-14
Author(s):  
Lewis Wolpert
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Industrial Management ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
The Arts

The enthusiasm to bring the arts and science closer together, even to emphasize similarities, is rather peculiar, as they are so very different. They are not two cultures, as pronounced by C.P. Snow, but both are aspects of a common culture that includes industrial management, engineering, banking, architecture, economics, politics and sport. Yet the journal Nature has recently devoted 30 of its much sought after pages to just this link. I remain puzzled, even bemused, at the continuing efforts to show that art -- particularly the visual arts -- is very similar to science, both in content and in the creative processes involved.

scholarly journals Creativity through mindfulness: The Arts and Wellbeing in Education (AWE) professional learning programme

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Southern
Keyword(s):  
Professional Learning ◽  
Arts Education ◽  
Well Being ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Education Professional ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Definition Of

This article uses findings from a case study of an arts/education professional learning programme in Wales to construct a definition of creativity that reflects on and contributes to debates around the concept, and its value within education. The programme Arts and Wellbeing in Education (AWE) focused on supporting school teachers’ well-being through creative practice. The research comprised a participatory methodology that sought to explore the circulating discourse around the key concepts of creativity and well-being in order to identify how the team leading the programme conceptualized the value of creativity, and how this was enacted. The findings point to a notion of creativity that is an inclusive, carnival experience that may improve well-being through mindful approaches to creative practice.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Gerak Tari Baris Tunggal dalam Fotografi Ekspresi Menggunakan Teknik Strobo Light

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Bagus Candra Yana*
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Multiple Images ◽  
Strobe Light ◽  
Creative Idea ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Art Photography ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

Dance  photography  is  a  photo  shoot  on a  dance  movement  which  has  a  characteristic as  it  shows  on  a  particular  movement  with unique costumes. The arts of dance photography specifically describes through a specific thematic effect  with  an  aesthetic  and  creative  oncoming. Based on the photographer experience to capture the  light  together  with  his  aesthetic  expression on  movement  photography,  he  finally  presented the  visual  arts  on  Baris  Tunggal  Dance  in  art photography expressions using strobe light. Basically,  the  creative  works  focused on  the  dancer  movements  and  transformed  into photography  expression  which  blended  with aesthetic  and  creative  idea  (ideational)  also  the technical photo shoot capability (technical) of the photographer. The photo shoots technique chosen through a variety of consideration which oriented on practical implementations possibilities, resulting photographs  in  freeze,  blurred,  and  multiple-images  as  art  photography.  The  art  photograph includes  extrinsic  and  intrinsic  aesthetic  values through photo presentation. With the presence of this photography art works it was not only present Gerak Tari Baris Tunggal dalam Fotografi Ekspresi Menggunakan Teknik Strobo Light in the form of mere documentation but it was the art photography expression on creative and aesthetic level. Keywords:  movements,  Baris  Tunggal  Dance, photography expression, strobo-light * Dosen ISI Denpasar

The Poetry and Music of Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
School Leaver ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Poetry And Music

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.

scholarly journals Urban Regeneration: From the Arts `Feel Good' Factor to the Cultural Economy: A Case Study of Hoxton, London

Urban Studies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1041-1061 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy C. Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Post Industrial

This paper seeks to examine critically the role of culture in the continued development, or regeneration, of `post-industrial' cities. First, it is critical of instrumental conceptions of culture with regard to urban regeneration. Secondly, it is critical of the adequacy of the conceptual framework of the `post-industrial city' (and the `service sector') as a basis for the understanding and explanation of the rise of cultural industries in cities. The paper is based upon a case study of the transformation of a classic, and in policy debates a seminal, `cultural quarter': Hoxton Square, North London. Hoxton, and many areas like it, are commonly presented as derelict parts of cities which many claim have, through a magical injection of culture, been transformed into dynamic destinations. The paper suggests a more complex and multifaceted causality based upon a robust concept of the cultural industries as industry rather than as consumption.

Developing Craft in the Ballet Class

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-157
Author(s):  
Susie Crow
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Embodied Learning ◽  
Sports Science ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
Attitudes And Perceptions

The ballet class is a complex pedagogical phenomenon in which an embodied tradition is transmitted in practice from one generation to the next, shaping not just the dancing but the attitudes and perceptions of dancers throughout their careers. This paper emerges from observations and experience of recent and current ballet class practice, and theoretical investigations into embodied learning in the arts. It outlines the influential role of large hegemonic institutions in shaping how ballet is currently taught and learned; and the effect of this on the class's evolving relation to ballet's repertoire of old and emerging dances as artworks. It notes the increasing importation into ballet pedagogy of thinking rooted in sports science, engendering the notion of the dancer as athlete; and of historic attitudes which downplay the agency of the dancer. I propose an alternative model for understanding the nature of learning in the ballet class, relating it to what Donald Schön calls ‘deviant traditions of education for practice’ in other performing and visual arts ( Schön 1987 p16). I look at the dancer's absorption via the class of ballet's danse d’école, its core technique of academic dance content. I suggest how this process might more constructively be understood through the lens of craft learning and the development of craftsmanship via apprenticeship, the dancer learning alongside the teacher as experienced artist practitioner who models behaviours that foster creativity.

Comments on the special issue

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-212
Author(s):  
Paul McGhee
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Sense Of Humor ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
The Brain

Abstract This article includes comments on each contributing author’s article in this special issue of Humor. The articles represent an assessment of McGhee’s research, work on practical applications or influence in the following areas: 1) the development of children’s humor, 2) construction and validation of the Sense of Humor Scale (SHS), 3) usefulness of specific subscales of the SHS, including “playfulness” and “laughing at yourself,” 4) development and evaluation of the 7 Humor Habits Program—a training program for learning to use humor to cope with stress, 5) humor’s impact on physical health and emotional well being, 6) impact on the field of nursing, and 7) humor and the brain. McGhee provides here his response to each contributed article.

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