Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music

This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.

4. Presenting art history

‘Presenting art history’ considers the different ways of presenting art history, and especially the importance of the gallery or museum. It maps out the development of collections from the cabinet of curiosities to the private and corporate sponsor and collector of today and discusses the impact the amassing of objects has had on their perceived value and on the histories of art, and how writing about objects can affect their ‘value’. The emergence of the prestige building by a star architect to house art collections has become an increasingly global phenomenon, which along with ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions has had a significant impact on the presentation and understanding of art history.

Putin’s Favorite Oligarch

As Russian business emerged from collapse and mafia-style capitalism in the 2000s, the surviving oligarchs set their sights on the global market. As they entered the field of global capitalism, they learned the norms and business practices of Western capital, including corporate social responsibility. One corporation, Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, emerged as the primary corporate sponsor for Baikal environmentalism. Activists were ambivalent about the relationship, but accepted the money and donned the corporate logo. In so doing, these two generalizable power holders enacted a trade: money for virtue. Not only does such an interaction bolster the capacity of civil society, it also ensures its independence—only an independent civil sector can garner virtue and possess it in such a quantity to trade. Moreover, such a trade is superior to En+’s in-house attempt to create public will, because concern for the company’s image exceeds concern for environmental outcomes.

The Greening of Euro 2016: Fan Footage, Representational Tropes, and the Media Lionization of the Irish in France

This article considers the representation of Irish identity in the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 in France. The behavior of Irish football fans attracted considerable attention in both the domestic and international media, and they were praised for their friendliness, helpfulness, and goodwill while in France. This media lionization eventually culminated in the Irish fans being awarded (jointly with their Northern Irish neighbors) the Medal of the City of Paris in July 2016. In this article, we examine how fan footage, taken on smartphones and uploaded to the video-hosting site YouTube (mostly by Irish fans themselves), featured centrally in news coverage of the tournament and fed a wider discourse about Irish identity, which relied on longstanding representational tropes. In concluding the article, we reflect on the paratextual significance of Euro 2016 for the Irish football team’s corporate sponsor Three, and more broadly, for Ireland as a nation brand.

Visual Analytics of Twitter Conversations about Corporate Sponsors of FC Barcelona and Juventus at the 2015 UEFA Final

Until now, little research has been conducted to analyse Twitter conversations about the corporate sponsors of football clubs. The conventional and most widely used method has been to use content analysis to assess the sentiment of the tweets that were sent. However, this approach may be inadequate because sports fans may be unlikely to mention a corporate sponsor in the text they tweet. This study demonstrates the use of visual analytics to assess conversations about corporate sponsors by examining the images people tweet.