Contested Ideas About Art, Culture, and Tradition

2017 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
General Public ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interpretative Approach ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Hans Georg Gadamer

Modern art theories have only broadened our understanding what art can be and in this book I also introduce quite a few ideas to illustrate how contemporary art is being interpreted by such diverse groups as the art establishment, politicians and the general public. If the social critique or message conveyed by an art piece appears banal or too simple it changes into boring propaganda and can easily turn against the original political objectives. It is far better create art that defies definitions and continues to raise questions, art that remains interesting and will be interpreted and re-interpreted in markedly different ways. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong in enjoying aesthetic beauty of art when the art provides joy, happiness and good feelings. Next there is a discussion on John Dewey's idea of art being a window to another culture and to the minds of people and after that about the hermeneutics and interpretative approach of Hans-Georg Gadamer and what they tell about culture and the incomplete and prejudiced understanding of everyone.

scholarly journals Translation from Artistic Language (the New Delimitation of Art)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasiya Bulatova ◽  
Svetlana Melnikova
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
General Public ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediation Technique ◽  
Communicative Act

The aim of the article is to delimitate the art zone for our current era. The problematic relationship between the general public and contemporary art is well known and often discussed. The viewers often find it difficult to relate to contemporary artworks or even to understand why they are considered art. We are searching for the appropriate forms to support the viewers in the quest to improve perception of contemporary art by the public. Among the new approaches, we highlight the conception of contemporary art as based not only the category of beauty, but also the communicative act which can translate important social sense(s). This point of view we have found in conceptions of J. Dickey, A. Danto and E. Oryol. To help an ordinary art consumer discover the social sense, we suggest using facilitative discussion technique designed by American teachers A. Hausen and F. Yenawain, and the mediation technique practiced by the UIBSI (Yekaterinburg). Keywords: contemporary art, communication, message, mediation, excursion, facilitative discussion

The Basic Paradigm Shift in Contemporary Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art History ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Social Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference

The difference between modern and contemporary art, which in the present enters the names of art museums, is based on the notions formed in art theory and art history: whereas modern art is tied to aesthetics, artistic autonomy, author, and the concept of stable and finished artwork, the more fluid and conceptual contemporary art foregrounds the links of the art with the social, politics, economy, everyday life, science, and media. This chapter aims to explore media-shaped contemporary art projects in terms of art services that are algorithmic, cognitive, and conceptual. The service presupposes a problem, a challenge, or an order to be solved or carried out. The artist as a service performer is always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not with the manufacturing of a finished object.

Feminism and Social Critique in Syrian Contemporary Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Charlotte Bank
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
First Century ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

This chapter examines artworks by young Syrian artists produced during the first decade of the twenty–first–century. Seeking to distance themselves from what they perceived as outdated aesthetics, seen in the work of their teachers in the art school and the work exhibited at the official, state–sponsored artistic events, the young generation of artists began experimenting with artistic techniques and media that were new to the country, also searching for new ways to interact with society and advocate for social and eventually political change in the country. They addressed a wide range of issues related to the contemporary Syrian society and made a critique of the social and political status quo. Critical examinations of gender norms presented an important aspect of their critical art production, as they regarded the issues of gender as an important part of their wider project of re–thinking art as a means for social and political change.

Industry and Intelligence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Gillick
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Nuclear Physics ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art’s engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

scholarly journals Being-with: Access to Relation, Participation, and Togetherness in Contemporary Art

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Valberg
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Relational Practices ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specific Setting

Being-with is an artistically based research project aimed at applying and studying participatory and relational practices within the arts as well as addressing the esthetical and ethical questions that such practices generate. The participants in Being-with – researchers and artists as well as children, parents, grandparents, siblings and other residents in the small town of Høvåg in Norway – gathered weekly for half a year to experience how aesthetic production may interact with social space and vice versa. The article reflects on what consequences such interaction may have for the conception of art, and its arenas and agendas … when we consider art not only as a reflection of our lives, but also as an agent shaping our lives and changing the social surroundings we are part of. The article relates discourses of aesthetics penned by continental philosophers over the last 50 years to a specific setting in a Nordic contemporary art practice.

scholarly journals Today in Guangzhou, Tomorrow in Hong Kong? A Comparative Study of the Language Situation in Two Cities

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-232
Author(s):  
Barry Sautman ◽  
Xinyi Xie
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
General Public ◽  
Language Attitudes ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
And Migration

Many in Hong Kong voice concerns about the fate of Cantonese, including nativists (“localists”) and the general public. Guangzhou is seen as a harbinger of diminishing Cantonese in Hong Kong. News and commentaries paint a gloomy picture of Cantonese in Guangzhou. Yet rarely do we read about surveys on the range of Cantonese use and identity in Guangzhou. Neither do we see analyses on how the social context differences between Hong Kong and Guangzhou may have contributed to the two cities’ unique language situations. Our study delineates the Guangzhou and Hong Kong language situations, comparing mother tongues, ordinary languages, and language attitudes. Cantonese is unrivalled in Hong Kong and remains vital in Guangzhou. We put the two cities’ different use frequency and proficiency of Cantonese and Putonghua (“Mandarin”) in the sociocultural context of motivation and migration. We conclude that some claims of diminishing Cantonese are unsupported. We also address how likely it is that Cantonese will diminish or even be replaced in Hong Kong.

Italian-Jewish Patrons of Modern Art in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Museums

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.

Private Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Caroline Pollentier
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Micro Power

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s private writings as ethical and political technologies of privacy. In the light of Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-writing, Woolf’s notebooks, letters, and diaries are read as various ‘techniques of living’ rehearsing an elusive tension between immediacy and self-consciousness. The chapter considers in turn the archival impulse of her notebooks, the pragmatics of intimacy at work in her letters, and the aesthetics of daily life outlined in her diaries. Through these daily ‘notes’, Woolf configured various acts of self-making ranging from social critique to psychological immunity. She was also keenly aware of the extent to which her daily ‘scribbling’ or ‘scratching’ was becoming increasingly entangled with new technologies of recording and communication. By relating these archaic media to the social rise of ‘the very private’ in modernity, Woolf mobilized her private writings as untimely techniques of resistance, generating founding, if vulnerable, forms of micro-power.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Insight Into

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

Youth-Led REP: Building Critical Consciousness for Social Change

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Jonathan London ◽  
Melissa Chabrán
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Research Evaluation ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Empowerment Evaluation ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
The Social

If knowledge is a form of power, then to lack knowledge is to lack power, and to build knowledge is to build power. This seemingly basic notion is at the source of diverse streams of theory and practice entitled participatory action research, community-based research, counter mapping, popular education and empowerment evaluation. It is from these historical, political and methodological headwaters that a relatively new stream of work, called youth-led action research, evaluation and planning, arises. These practices, while distinct, all represent attempts to build the power and capacity of those at the margins of society to examine, define, and ultimately shape their worlds according to their needs, visions and values. Youth-led action research, evaluation and planning expands the social critique and progressive stance towards breaking the monopolies of power/knowledge to include age-based inequities, along with (and in relationship to) inequities based on race, ethnicity, class gender, sexuality and other markers of difference.

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