Industry and Intelligence

Author(s):  
Liam Gillick

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.

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-180
Author(s):  
Rachel Gibson

The history of Central America directly impacts current events, and exploring the social, political, and economic reasons why Guatemalans and other Central Americans emigrate to the United States deepens our connections to family stories and legacies. This chapter offers a brief overview of the region....


Author(s):  
Terry Smith

As an art-critical or historical category––one that might designate a style of art, a tendency among others, or a period in the history of art––“contemporary art” is relatively recent. In art world discourse throughout the world, it appears in bursts of special usage in the 1920s and 1930s, and again during the 1960s, but it remains subsidiary to terms––such as “modern art,” “modernism,” and, after 1970, “postmodernism”––that highlight art’s close but contested relationships to social and cultural modernity. “Contemporary art” achieves a strong sense, and habitual capitalization, only in the 1980s. Subsequently, usage grew rapidly, to become ubiquitous by 2000. Contemporary art is now the undisputed name for today’s art in professional contexts and enjoys widespread resonance in public media and popular speech. Yet, its valiance for any of the usual art-critical and historical purposes remains contested and uncertain. To fill in this empty signifier by establishing the content of this category is the concern of a growing number of early-21st-century publications. This article will survey these developments in historical sequence. Although it will be shown that use of the term “contemporary art” as a referent has a two-hundred-year record, as an art-historical field, contemporary art is so recent, and in such volatile formation, that general surveys of the type now common for earlier periods in the history of art are just beginning to appear. To date, only one art-historiographical essay has been attempted. Listed within Contemporary Art Becomes a Field, this essay (“The State of Art History: Contemporary Art” (Art Bulletin 92.4 [2010]: 366–383; Smith 2010, cited under Historiography) is by the present author and forms the conceptual basis of this article. Contemporary art’s deep immersion in the art market and auction system is profiled in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Art Markets and Auction. This article does not include any of the many thousands of books, catalogues, and essays that are monographic studies of individual contemporary artists, because it would be invidious to select a small number. For similar reasons, entries on journals, websites, and blogs are omitted. A select listing of them may be found in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011; Smith 2011 cited under Surveys). Books on art movements are not to be found because contemporary art, unlike modern art, has no movements in the same art-historical sense. It consists of currents, tendencies, relationships, concerns, and interests and is the product of a complex condition in which different senses of history are coming into play. With regret, this article confines itself to publications in English, the international language of the contemporary art world. This fact obscures the importance and valiance of certain local-language publications, even though many key texts were issued simultaneously both in the local language and English, and many others have subsequently been translated. In acknowledgment of this lacuna, a subsection on Primary Documents has been included.


Author(s):  
Marina G. Volnistaya ◽  
Eka D. Korkiya ◽  
Agamali K. Mamеdov

The history of science in any of its transformations and metamorphoses is, in fact, a search for and definition of the truth. As an example, I. Kant’s famous four questions start with the question «What can I know?». Thus, the search for truth as a subject of research has been a dominating force throughout human history. Of course, sociology as a social meta-science is also involved in this topic. A simple assertion of the existence of three concepts of truth, namely accordance, agreement and advantage, does not fully answer the prerequisites of contemporary discourse. The present article analyses a new discourse on the study of truth in contemporary science. We give a brief retrospective analysis of the main fields of truth interpretation. At the same time, these directions are not just listed but linked into the general outline of contemporary epistemology. Of course, a greater bias is made towards the sciences of the social and humanitarian profile. That, however, does not exclude the necessary portion of the data of natural science research. In the article these data are not used as demonstrations, but as independent meta-scientific research. We give various examples of the complementarity of different branches of science. In particular, we show the scope and relative limitation of such concepts as correspondence theory, evolutionary epistemology, socio-humanitarian cybernetics, adaptationism and neo-adaptationism. A significant place in the article is occupied by the problem of truth in artistic creation. We also give sustainable conclusions about the polyphonicity of truth and its flickering character.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Glyn Morgan

In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.


Author(s):  
Cristian A. Harris

Lands of recent settlement refers to countries settled predominantly by European migration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand. Current scholarship on the lands of recent settlement reveals a very active agenda of comparative studies covering a broad range of areas and issues: culture, institutions, gender, ethnicity, labor, national identity, geography, ecology, environment, noneconomic factors of growth, and transnationalization and globalization. In explaining the different levels of development between lands of recent settlement and the rest of the world, traditional explanations pointed to propitious external factors and factor endowments. These explanations include the analysis of the history of the United States based on the notion of “frontier development” and the staple theory of growth. Meanwhile, recent works debate whether institutions, culture, or geography plays a crucial role. These works focus on the social, domestic, geographic, and biological elements of development, the cultural and institutional legacy of colonialism, as well as questions on gender, ethnic, and national identity. Although they do not reject the importance of foreign demand, capital, and labor in explaining the development of the lands of recent settlement, they question the adequacy of interpretations based solely on economic factors. Ultimately, the most important contribution of the study of development of lands of recent settlement is in the area of an analysis of transnational networks and globalization.


Author(s):  
A.A. Zhogolevа ◽  
◽  
E.G. Stolyarova

The article is devoted to the study of the symbols of the Mezen painting as a single system. The spinning wheel is viewed as a cosmogonic model of our ancestors, where painting is directly related to the content of the image. The object of the research is the archaic symbols of the Mezen painting. The subject is the development of ornaments and prints for decor and product design. The history of the Mezen craft (geography, origins, traditions), the artistic features of the craft (materials, technology) and the semantics of the ornament are studied. The article considers archaic ornaments of Mezeno in connection with the ancient cultures of mankind (the Neolithic era, Andronov culture, Ancient Greece, etc.) and Slavic traditional culture. The article deals with deciphering the semantics of the ornament of the Mezen spinning wheel as a reflection of the idea of the world of our ancestors. The author's development "The symbolism of the Mezen painting in contemporary art" is given, showing the possibility of using the Mezen ornament at the present stage of the development of artistic culture in art and design. The authors of the article propose to use the ornaments and symbols of Mezeno as decor and prints in modern art and design.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 03049
Author(s):  
Alla Matveeva ◽  
Roman Krasnov ◽  
Ekaterina Yalunina ◽  
Andrey Romanov

At the beginning of the XX century, bourgeois theorists of artistic culture declared dehumanization as one of the main features of the modernism art, one of the main tasks of the contemporary artists’ artwork. Getting to the scientific understanding of the complex and complicated phenomena of modern art culture, it is necessary to reveal not only the socio-economic reasons for their appearance; the philosophical prerequisites for the development of modern bourgeois art, the ideological orientation of its movements should be identified. In the article, the authors argue that modern bourgeois aesthetics objectively performs the opposite tasks: a) bourgeois art distracts artists and spectators from pressing issues of life, b) imposes ideals and tastes that are advantageous to the bourgeoisie, c) sow pessimism and disbelief in human forces. According to authors, as opposing the personality of society, bourgeois art contributes to the isolation of human from social problems, from issues and tasks of the struggle for a better future. The authors believe that the disclosure of the reactionary ideological essence for the many directions of modern bourgeois art enables a consistent Marxist aesthetic analysis of the content and form of artwork and the principles of bourgeois artists’ creativity. Naturally, the philosophical idealist teachings and aesthetic systems that make up the theoretical foundation of modern bourgeois art, embodied in its various directions not directly but indirectly. Only a Marxist analysis of artistic phenomena and techniques of artistic creation in their correlation with the creative method makes it possible to reveal the true interconnections of these phenomena and the essence of artistic techniques, makes it possible to detect and criticize scientifically based falsification ideas of bourgeois theoreticians of art.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-156
Author(s):  
Yu. Yu. Padyan ◽  

The end of the XIXth — beginning of the XXth centuries is a special period in the history of world art culture, characterized by the emergence of such trends as modernism, post-impressionism, avant-gardism, abstractionism, cubism, surrealism and many others. The motto of XXth-century art was "Art into Life". Often new trends became a response to the demand of the mass consumer. One of them was the art of performance. Appearing as a rejection of traditional practices of painting, sculpture and theater, performance organically incorporated wellknown and new approaches and technologies that caused an alternative way of working with space and time. It should be noted that historiography focuses on materials that explore the origins of performance and installation on a global scale. The most significant are the works by American, Western European and Polish authors. At the same time, the historiographic review showed a lack of a large scientific heritage of Russian artists in the field of performance: the process of forming modern art criticism, which would reflect the later history of performance than the first half of the XXth century, is still out of the researchers' sight.


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.


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