Arts & Literature: Making Art Out of History’s Tragedies—An Interview with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet and musician. Here he reflects on the violence perpetrated in Poland during the Second World War, and the dualities of the Polish experience. Is it possible for art to reckon with the darkness, free of melodrama and kitsch?

Introduction

The Introduction provides an overview of the author’s background in research on creativity and proposes that, with rare exceptions, there is an artist type, revealed by decades of scientific research on personality and creativity. Two particular questions are introduced, each followed up later in the book in more detail. One concerns whether art is therapeutic for the person making it. That is, does making art solve emotional problems? The other is whether there is any real, proved connection between art and mental illness. Are artists really more likely to be “crazy” in some particular sense, or not?

The Wageless Life of Creative Workers: Alternative Economic Practices, Commoning and Consumption Work in Cultural Labour

This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that although such studies have tended to neglect the wageless life of creative workers they have nonetheless implicitly identified a range of alternative economic activities and ‘consumption work’ practices that go beyond wages and formal contractual employment. These activities include everyday strategies for ‘getting by’, such as barter, self-provisioning, commoning, thrift and downshifting. A systematic and sustained focus on wageless life that treats work as deeply enmeshed in everyday life is needed in order to make manifest the hidden politics of contemporary post-waged creative work.

Give: Transatlantic Collaboration Through Conversation

Artistic collaborators Kate Ledger (pianist) and Ray Evanoff (composer) discuss their working process in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversation provides the model and impetus for this process, an ongoing responsive exchange in which their individual artistic identi­ties co-evolve into forms neither could individually envision, in global cir­cumstances that have acutely disrupted the normal mechanisms providing such social interaction. Artistic values, musical specifics, metaphorical frameworks, and larger references are examined, as well as the role these various elements serve in their art’s realization and evolution. Their mod­el is an adaptive, personalized framework for making art responding to an environment where the conventional explanations for doing so have been undermined.

Making Art in Math Class During the Pandemic

For many of us, the pandemic has changed how we teach and how we support students. This manuscript highlights creativity as a way to support for student mathematical and emotional well-being. It describes the positive impact that creative assignments in a mathematics content course for preservice K-8 teachers had on students during the early days of the pandemic. The story is told by the instructor and two former students in the course.

Kashmiri Crafts - A Fascination for Tourists

Kashmir has different brightening prestigious expressions and specialities which have been famous for quite a long time for their fine work and magnificence. To be sure, Kashmiri speciality items are unbelievable. Artwork is the primary wellspring of pay for the Kashmiris. Speciality work or essentially make is a kind of embellished work hand made utilizing just basic apparatuses. Things made by large-scale manufacturing or using machines are not handiwork items. The Kashmiri specialists are consistently alive to the beautiful encompassing. It communicates a reaction to the excellence around the formation of an enormous assortment of pursuing or decorating flower themes interlaced into multifaceted examples. The art items are promoted in Asia as well as in European countries. This article is to portray the significance of Kashmiri craftsmanship and artworks from hundreds of years. It additionally portrays how Kashmiris are imaginatively and customarily associated with their conventional artwork. The center on the traditional heritage is built on neighborhood uniqueness on the one hand and social tourism on the other. Kashmir could be a visitor range and can win significant income from yearly visits, although the majority of tourists head for the greatly attractive coast during the summer and winter. In Kashmir, with its freezing winter when atmospheric conditions are semi-arctic, the artisans use their time at home as inventive knowledge in making art crafts of stunning excellence. Regal support empowered these painstaking works from early occasions till these items, light in weight and wealthy in workmanship, found attraction and magnetism for tourists, locals, and abroad.

Review of “Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture” by W. Patrick McCray

Review of “Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture” by W. Patrick McCray