Huxley, the visionary, was a key figure in creating modern science education. He was also an employee and bureaucrat of the Science and Art Department most of his working life. The Department was established to organize scientific education for the working class, and many of Huxley's activities on its behalf marked him as a friend of the artisan. It will be argued here that Huxley's vision of working-class scientific education was not in the least radical (...) but reflected the middle-class views of his contemporaries in the Department. Their views, by as late as the 1890s, were little different from those of the late 1840s. Huxley's attitudes were narrowly meritocratic and in no way egalitarian. By the time the movement for technical instruction gathered momentum in the 1880s, Huxley's ideas were distinctly old-fashioned. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 3-20, February 2022. As graduate labour market conditions have become increasingly challenging, higher education institutions have intensified their focus on ‘employability’ via strategies such as work placements. Focusing on work placements in the media and creative industries, this article identifies and analyses three key discourses that animate the pedagogical literature in these sectors: work placements as facilitating a ‘smooth transition’ to the labour market; work placements as a place in (...) which inequalities in the labour market are produced; and work placements as a space for fostering resilience and adaptation to labour market precarity. The article argues that critiques of inequalities based on race, class or gender are marked by a transformative impulse that is largely absent in critiques of those based on worker precarity. This highlights a need to adopt pedagogies that similarly unnaturalise the economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism to discursively construct work in new, more socially just, ways. (shrink)

This contribution presents two perspectives: one based on AI expertise and the other on the importance of knowledge as human knowledge. The later focuses on the purpose of education by revisiting Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of Bildung as the main purpose of education. Resisting the shifting to radically pragmatic models of education, without Bildung, in recent decades, in the Global North which develops a system of disposable education that focuses on training a workforce for the market. Concerned by the production (...) of disposable knowledge and assessments, with the sole goal of achieving good grades and securing employment, we see Generative AI, as mirroring this functionalist and economist vision of society, revealing strongly the limits of this paradigm. This article first explains how automatic learning, the foundation of generative AI, works. Second, we shall discuss human deep learning, as opposed to surface learning showing how it is required to develop as a person in the Bildung perspective. Third, we highlight this first intuition that AI reveals the functioning of our societies and move beyond, with an art of questioning in philosophy. (shrink)

Siopis has always engaged in a critical and controversial way with the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Africa. For politically sensitive artists whose work has involved confronting the injustices of apartheid, the current post-apartheid situation has forced a reassessment of their practice and the terms on which they might engage with the fundamental changes which are now affecting all of South African society. Where mythologies of race and ethnicity have been strategically foregrounded in the art of any engaged (...) artist, to the exclusion of many other concerns, the demise of apartheid offers the possibility of exploring other dimensions of lived experience in South Africa. For feminists, this is potentially a very positive moment when questions of gender – so long subordinated to the structural issue of ‘race’ under apartheid – can now be explored. Penny Siopis’ work has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white middle-class women and black domestic labour during apartheid. Siopis’ work engages with how the appropriation of black women's time, lives, labour and bodies has shaped her ‘own’ history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 58-64 [Access article in PDF] Media Literacy Education in Art:Motion Expression and the New Vision of Art EducationThe Bauhaus, which established the foundation of modern design, has greatly influenced Japanese design and art education. It is a historical fact that the movement views "synthetic art" as an integration of the various fields and the integration of the art and machine technology experimentally. (...) However, the Bauhaus is not just of historical importance but continues to have an influence even in the integration of the art and electronic technology in today's "multimedia." In addition, it can be said that it is very much alive as "the digital Bauhaus" or "the electronic Bauhaus." 1 As we know, today's multimedia and the Internet give us a new life-environment, and expandthe possibility of expression in art. Therefore, current art education must examine how these new medias will be incorporated into the curriculum.In the cases of the photograph, video, or computer, an expression by the image media is added to the art course for the junior high school course of study. 2 Also in school art classes, image media was introduced, expanding the possibilities of self-expression through art. This result can be matched to the needs of the industrial world in Japan as well. As an educational practice, the content of this course of study is promising, even though someproblems must be solved, acquiring new equipment, re-educating the artteacher, and securing additional art school hours. The new content in art education can be summarized as follows:1. The motion picture (animation) which includes time and movement. Motion picture is asequence of continuous images, obviously different from the still images of painting. There are, of course, artworks that express motion or induce the viewer'seye movement. There are also kinetic artworks that do move, such as mobiles. Works of motion picture have, however, a fixed time shaft, and they are formed by the afterimage phenomenon. Thinking about the progress of time shaft is an indispensable element for the production. [End Page 58]2. The synchronism of image and sound. Because time is a factor in the visual expression, the works are compatible with music — the art of time. There is a synchronized relation between the motion picture and music. Image expression with multimedia became synthetic art, just as the Bauhaus looked for "architecture." Currently, this kind of expression transitions from art to entertainment, and permeates daily life.3. The method with interactive art work. Not only artworks of installation, but also TV games and web design have interactive construction as an indispensable interface. The aesthetic value of these visual works will be appreciated when the user starts the action by hitting a touchpad, pushing buttons, or clicking a mouse. To make this kind of artwork, one needs to consider the latent relationships between humans and work, and establish the input-output order for the method of construction.4. The problem of virtual reality. The term "virtual reality" is used by some art teachers as criticism against digital works such as computer graphics. These teachers insist that there is no reality there. One can, however, get an aesthetic feeling through sensory information, imagination, and sensitivity, even though what one sees is an illusion. The feeling of reality a picture of an apple gives, for example, may be equal to a computer graphic apple.Human imagination also creates "virtual reality" beyond reality in the myth, the novel, and so on. It can be said that this is the basis for human creativity.Furthermore, expression by image media raises the problem of a "reality" in which material experience is important to encounterthe world directly. Such an argument discusses multimedia as a tool of expression and a teaching material while reconsidering human reality.More recently, "media literacy" (ability to read and understand media) became an important point of discussion for Japanese educators. Usually, in this discussion, the critical ability to talk back to the television program is emphasized. However, through art... (shrink)

In the paper, I pose the question of how, on artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical levels, decoration and domestic handicrafts as subversive strategies enable the undermining and breakdown of class-based and patriarchal divisions into high and low, objective and subjective, public and private, masculine and feminine. I explore whether handicrafts, in accordance with feminist postulates, are transgressive, transformative, and inclusive. I link handicrafts with the feminist perspective, since, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was precisely the feminist (...) movement that initiated significant changes in the social and cultural perception of women, femininity, and gender relations. Thus I apply this perspective in the first place to the analysis of selected works of contemporary art in which handicrafts is used not only as a means of artistic expression but also as a subversive aesthetic strategy. I also demonstrate how the world of fashion transforms and aesthetizes handicrafts, whose presence in fashion makes it an area in which, in addition to imperatives and aesthetic values, social attitudes, ethical values, and world views are shaped. Finally, referring to the works of selected feminist authors (Mary Field Belenky, Mary Daly, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Donna Haraway), I show how these researchers have metaphorically interpreted handicrafts as specifically feminine ways of creating and developing knowledge. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the application of the hermeneutic approach in philosophy classes. The author proposes a technique for understand- ing a visual text, which allows one to move from the figurative perception of a work of art to the conceptual and structural level. In her study, the author describes the experience of using this technique while interpreting R. Magritte’s painting “Song of Love”. As a result of analyzing the group and individual work of students, the author comes to (...) the conclusion that the technique does not only contribute to the discovery of the subjective mean- ing of a work of art, but is effective for the process of self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this article, the authors consider the use of a “Playlist of My Life Assignment” in helping social studies (SS) and English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (TCs) conceptualize multimodal and humanizing SS and ELA curricula. The Playlist Assignment asked teacher candidates to center the music, texts, land, spaces, and places that are most important to them, and potentially relate these back to their own pedagogies as SS and ELA teachers. Taken from two qualitative studies of two teacher education courses (...) at two separate, large research universities in the U.S. Southwest, this article examines teacher candidates’ understandings of their disciplines as humanizing and multimodal, and as centered in their and their students’ communities, through the Playlist Assignment. Data included the Playlist Assignment, curated by TCs in each methods course, and TCs’ class response journals. TCs offered profound texts they carried within them throughout their lives, demonstrating (1) their multimodal disruptions of the definition of a “text” and (2) the empowering and limiting effect of life texts for humanizing curricula. This work has implications for SS and ELA teacher educators interested in supporting teacher candidates as they conceptualize multimodal and humanizing curricula with and for their future students. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:510 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Shelley Streeby Speculative Writing, Art, and World-Making in the Wake of Octavia E. Butler as Feminist Theory The late great speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler often referred to herself as a feminist. In an autobiographical note she revised frequently over the course of her lifetime, now held in the massive archive of more than 8,000 individually (...) cataloged items that comprise The Octavia E. Butler Papers (OEB) at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Butler called herself a “hermit in the middle of Los Angeles,” a pessimist when she wasn’t “careful,” and “a feminist” as well as “a Black” and “a former Baptist.”1 Throughout her published work, Butler explores intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in ways shaped by her life growing up “black, female, and working class” across town in Pasadena, California.2 The keywords “feminism” and “feminist” pop up often in her archive. In 1988, in one of dozens of notebooks Butler filled with writing, she proudly claimed to be writing “true cross-over science fiction ” that reached both science fiction and general audiences, “encompassing feminists and blacks as well,” a claim she often repeated.3 The thousands of clippings Butler kept and annotated on subjects of interest to her included many on feminism, which she organized to emphasize 1. OEB, Folder 95. The OEB collection organized by Curator Natalie Russell, who authored the finding aid. 2. OEB, Folder 3093. 3. OEB, Folder 3239, November 9, 1988. 511 Shelley Streeby Books Discussed in This Essay Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds. adrienne maree brown. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015. Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler. Edited by Janet Duckworth and Savanah Wood. Los Angeles: Clockshop, 2018. M Archive: After the End of the World. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption. Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2016. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. Alexis Lothian. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. intersections among feminist and other struggles. A 1991 piece by Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page, for instance, called “The F. Word to Watch For: Feminists,” which was written in the wake of the HillThomas hearings and speculated that the Bush administration would demonize “feminists” as a “smoke screen” for “real economic problems,” 512 Shelley Streeby was filed under “Economy.”4 Much of the archival material and fiction that Butler produced relevant to the keyword “feminism” addresses intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in right-wing projects of the neoliberal era, from the 1970s through the early 2000s. As both a pejorative epithet used by the right to demonize women who deviated from patriarchally defined gender and sex roles as well as a term she counter-valued by claiming it for herself, intersectional “feminism” was central to Butler’s speculative collecting, research, and fiction-writing. Since her untimely death in 2006, Butler’s fame continues to grow as new generations embrace her work, since it speaks to our present in powerful ways. Butler rejected narrow genre categories and was ambivalent about the term “science fiction” as a descriptor for her writing, often expressing frustration with marketing categories and wondering if they stood in the way of reaching a wider audience. The umbrella term “speculative ” is useful both for recognizing the boundary-crossing dimensions of Butler’s writing, in its defiance of narrow definitions of genre, and for describing Butler’s contributions to feminist theories of knowledge production, political leadership, and imagining the future. Since Butler’s archive at the Huntington opened to researchers in 2013... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Art of Teaching in the MuseumRika Burnham (bio) and Elliott Kai-Kee (bio)A class is studying a small painting by Rembrandt in the galleries of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum educator has been inviting the assembled visitors to look ever more closely, guiding the class toward an understanding both of the painting itselfand of our reasons for studying it. The class (...) has been anything but passive—indeed, it has been lively. The painting is The Abduction of Europa (1632), a picture that depicts in delicate detail a story from Greek mythology, the kidnapping of the Phoenician princess Europa by Zeus in the guise of a white bull. The visitors have shared their observations, speculations, ideas. As the class concludes, the museum educator asks the participants to speculate on the painting's larger meaning, to say what they think this work is, finally, about, as revealed by their long discussion. The group's experience has clearly moved beyond the telling of a single story. One participant suggests that Rembrandt's work is about the fearlessness of traveling into the unknown. Another says that it concerns the story of the soul's leaving the earthly for the heavenly realm. When the class comes to an end, people move closer to the painting and continue their discussions.In the same museum, another museum educator is also conducting a group of students through the galleries. He begins with a Roman statue of Venus, followed by an eighteenth-century French terra-cotta bust of Madame Récamier by Joseph Chinard. For each sculpture, he asks the students to focus on only one detail, the hands. The students are encouraged to observe and take note of the sculpted figures' gestures, much as if they were studying a person. Time seems to slow as perception sharpens. The educator listens patiently as the students begin to "read" the sculptures as a whole through the expressiveness of the hands. The group moves on to a mysterious portrait by Millet in which the students discuss the nature of love, and [End Page 65] then to a painting of a Russian princess by Winterhalter, in which the artifice of all the details is suddenly theatrical, dazzling, and delightful. At the end, no one wants to leave.As museum educators we teach in many kinds of programs, and teach in many ways. Every museum educator brings unique gifts to the art of teaching through works of art. The two classes described above might seem at first glance quite different. The first museum educator stays with a single work of art for the entire session, constructs her class around the observations and ideas of the students, and trusts that through their collective experience, a larger meaning will emerge. The second educator inspires his students with a feeling of confidence by guiding their observations of a single feature common to several works, and then allows a main idea to emerge. The two classes, however, are also alike in certain essential ways. In both cases, the students and the instructor are animated, concentrated, focused, and active. Their investigation is tightly focused on the works under discussion, and the group together reaches for a sense of the artworks as a whole. At the end, when the participants cluster around the works of art, still wanting to continue the experience of discovery, the instructors know that theirstudents have understood that engagement with a work of art is a beginning, not an end.The opportunities museum educators have to teach and learn are granted to us by the collections of objects in the care of the institutions in which we work, and by the students and visitors we invite to consider these objects. These artworks also impose upon us a great obligation, to bring them alive for those we lead through the galleries. For ultimately, it is our devoted attention that keeps artworks alive generation after generation.This essay is the result of our work as museum educators. It began with a casual discussion about what constitutes good teaching, and what we can do to guide ourselves and our docent colleagues toward consistent and principled teaching in our museums. We... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why this might be, and proposes that almost all philosophers have accepted the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that in (...) the early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff rejects this claim, and offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to his alternative framework are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. (shrink)

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system (...) of Britain and in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate capitalism itself. We can then see how hard capitalism makes it to take risks for the collective. Chibber’s solution is to shift people from ‘individualistic to solidaristic’ ways of thinking through lived practices, rather than the arts. This review argues, however, that by excluding the culture industry from (...) encouraging solidaristic ways of thinking, Chibber removes a crucial tool in the socialist armory: the way in which artistic representations can help us see ourselves and the world differently. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that writing is related to (...) the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not. Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable despite the influence of his writing (...) after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to culture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin. My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bauman’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quotidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and culturally significant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Place for Healing:A Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher's TaskJulia Kellman (bio)Introduction[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection. Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. (...) After the first wound the bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies. Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer; among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command. Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling to their memories of them.1Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious,"2 by its nature orients us to a particular perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography, pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors.3Our hearts, too, are embedded in such places; and in this article, through this "act of personal witness," this "inscription of a self and a description of an object" as the anthropologist and writer Ruth Benhar4 describes it, we will see how the members of an art class for people with HIV/AIDS at a local hospital have similarly become grounded in their art space and in the tiny art community that has grown up around it. Additionally, we will discover the importance of a more descriptive style of writing as means for examining the role of art in the lives of people who are ill, for their various difficult [End Page 106] situations call for particular clarity and empathy that both honors and relates the stories of their lives. It will become clear as this article proceeds that the personal engagement of a researcher/writer in such a situation is critical as well. For not only must she be open—vulnerable, as Behar suggests—to the people with whom she works as a means of spanning the chasm between a life of illness and a life of health, but she must also be sensitive to the reader's needs, for she is the reader's guide and surrogate.5 This role as guide and alter-ego demands that the researcher tell the story of other lives in a manner that enables the reader to empathetically and eagerly undertake a journey with the researcher into a world unlike her own.6Personal Engagement: The Researcher/WriterHoward Brody, doctor and medical ethicist, explains the necessity for stories of illness to be descriptive.7 He asserts that the stories in which we are most interested are not merely factual recitations; they are about what the illness means to the individual—they include how that person understands events. "It is far too simple-minded" he writes, to assume that "the writer of literature presents to us a world of fantasy that never existed whereas the author of a nonfictional pathography has some special insight into the world as it really exists, even if the relevant world is nothing but his own subjective experiences."8 He concludes "in stories of that sort (stories of the meaning of things) the line between so-called truth and fiction becomes more blurred and ceases to affect the uses we make of the stories for the deeper understanding of the human response to illness."9 Further, Brody continues, one must understand stories of sickness in order to truly develop a philosophical understanding of what it means to be ill. Such an understanding, Brody suggests, not only provides ethical guidance for health care workers and others but also will lead to improved care for patients and better education of health professionals.10 This view of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 21-40 [Access article in PDF] Unifying the Curriculum with an Art Exhibition:In the American Grain Terry Barrett This is an account of a whole-school faculty designing and teaching a five-month whole-school curriculum based on an exhibit of modern American art, In the American Grain, in a public school in the Pacific Northwest, grades 6-12. This account is a case-study of a successful (...) attempt of teachers, students, and administrators at one school, in one time and place, unifying the whole curriculum by having an art exhibit at the center of learning. The account is given through many voices, especially those of the students in the school who participated in the curriculum, and the teachers who invented it. I served the school as a faculty advisor and thus the telling is in the voice of a participant-observer but I rely heavily on the experiences of the participants and their ways of telling. The students and teachers are unabashedly enthused about what they were able to accomplish in teaching and learning, and are eager to share their experiences with other learningcommunities. This account begins with a short history of the recently founded school and an overview of its curricular mission. It proceeds with students telling about projects they did and their experiences of the curriculum, which evolved around In the American Grain; teachers talking about their experiences with the curriculum; and the founding principal's responses to the curriculum. It ends with my observations and conclusions. I hope that this account might encourage other educators to initiate their own attempts at school reform by placing the arts at the center of the curriculum. The School Vancouver School of Arts and Academics opened in September of 1996 with 525 middle and high school students (grades 6-11 with 12th grade added the following year) in a renovated building originally constructed as a high school in 1928. 2 The school has a new theater, recording studio, rehearsal rooms, and art studios. The school is dedicated to "the dual mission [End Page 21] of academic rigor and artistic excellence," with an evolving curriculum in which all areas of study (math, science, language arts, and social studies) and a full spectrum of arts disciplines (music, theater, dance, moving imagery, literature, and visual arts) are focused around artistic themes taught through interdisciplinary approaches. 3All students attend the school full-time. The mornings are devoted to "academics," subjects that are team-taught to "core groups" of students of combined grades (6-7-8, 9-10, 11-12) and the afternoons consist of three hours of arts instruction in elected classes of mixed-age students. There are four teachers for each core of about 100 students. Teaching and learning is project-based, interdisciplinary, on an art-centered school theme pre-selected for the year by the faculty. In selecting its theme for a year, the faculty follows the state of Washington's pattern for social studies concentrating one year on world history, the next on United States history, and the next on state history. The faculty also privileges an art form for the year: year one is visual arts; year two, music; year three drama; and so forth. Theme-related projects are conducted by students working individually or in small groups of two to three, and are usually teacher-suggested at the junior high level and student-initiated at the senior high level.Students enroll from all areas of the Vancouver school district and neighboring districts. 4 Students and their parents are interviewed and students are selected for the school on the basis of a demonstrated interest in the arts, not on portfolios or auditions, nor on the basis of special designations such as "gifted and talented." Most of the students are from working-class families, and most students graduating from the school go on to college.All faculty members applied to teach at the school, and all have personal interest and expertise in one or more art forms. For example, Mr... (shrink)

Aesthetic theorists often interpret and understand works of art through the social and political context that creates and inspires the work. The recent economic recessions, and the accompanying austerity measures in many European countries, provide an interesting test case for this contextual understanding. Economists debate whether or not spending on entertainment and arts drops during times of recession and austerity. Some economists assume that spending will decline in times of austerity, but others point to evidence that spending on creative arts (...) and entertainment remains steady and even increases during a recession because of the relief and escapism that the arts provide. Tax incentives and production rights are often given to filmmakers in the United States; in hopes that such projects will enliven a local economy and provide work for a local creative community. In the context of recent austerity measures in Greece and Spain, new and creative ways for members of the arts community to bring about new projects, and fund them in ways that critique political leadership, have emerged. Following Richard Wollheim’s classic aesthetic theory of “criticism as retrieval,” we should be mindful of the cultural values that are at stake in the creativity-culture market now being created. In any case, some scholars estimate that austerity measures in many countries will last until 2020, giving us ample opportunity to be even more “creative” with both financial incentives and artistic achievements. Keywords: Austerity, Cultural Economy, Creative Class, Tax Incentives, Aesthetics, Microtheatres, Entertainment. (shrink)

From the modern period until the present day, artworks have exhibited a well-known paradox: they promise a rich aesthetic experience and revolutionary qualities of innovation while simultaneously serving as a luxury commodity whose sale is directed toward a global class of oligarchs. Art's Properties proposes a new way of understanding this paradox, relating art's qualities-its properties-to its status as commercial property. In Art's Properties, esteemed art historian and theorist David Joselit argues that art's fundamental ontological property is its capacity (...) to give access to experiences of alterity--the state of being other, or different. These experiences may appear as the image of a god, or the utopian dimensions of a black square on a white ground. Joselit goes on to explore artwork's relation to infinitude. As he explains, every work of art, in its material and visual qualities, can be host to an unlimited number of events and encounters with spectators, which persist through and over time. This infinitude is curtailed as art becomes property and is made to serve as a representation. In the modern period, white artists have been presumed to manifest an unmarked, supposedly neutral national character in Europe and the United States, while artists of color are often made to stand in for the identity attributed to them. In place of this dynamic of representation, Art's Properties will advocate for privileging narration over representation. While representation is finite-one thing is put in the place of another-narration has no end; it can be multiplied to encompass the many stories an artwork might enable. In focusing on the forms of narration that an artwork can contain, this book explores art's infinite aesthetic and material alterity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Art, Artists and Pedagogy. Philosophy and the Arts in Education ed. by Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta, David R. ColeAnnette ZiegenmeyerChristopher Naughton, Gert Biesta, and David R. Cole, eds., Art, Artists and Pedagogy. Philosophy and the Arts in Education (New York: Routledge, 2018)The question about the role and purpose of the arts in education in the twenty-first century is an important issue being currently discussed in various publications.1 Despite (...) many valuable approaches about how to reflect on the challenges arts and education face today, no adequate and sustainable solution seems to have been worked out yet.In their book Art, Artists and Pedagogy, Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta and David R. Cole (editors) and other co-authors explore new ways to rethink arts education in the twenty-first century via two main philosophies in education. The first one is based on Gert Biesta’s work, The Rediscovery of Teaching, that focuses on the relation of the arts to the world and on what kind of society we may wish to envisage by using concepts such as “grown-up-ness” and “middle ground.”2 The second one is based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who provide a theoretical framework to look more deeply into the influence of state and global capital when taking decisions on how art education should develop in the future. Within their different positions, both philosophies also complement each other by sharing some relevant aspects concerning, for example, the value of arts in society. [End Page 104]Besides the editors who are leading academics in the arts, philosophy, and education, most of the co-authors are established professors and senior lecturers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA. Considering the fact that the book is intended for educators who teach the arts at different age-levels in schools and universities or for artists working in the community, it is surprising that there are not more voices of contemporary artists and teachers integrated in the publication to capture the philosophical discourse being perceived from their viewpoints. This could add an interesting counterpoint to the philosophical approaches and thus widen the perspective on the subject.The book comprises fifteen chapters which can be read either individually or sequentially. In the introductory chapter, Biesta reflects on the potential of the arts in an era of growing economization of education. Representing the exploration and transformation of our desires, the arts can thus become a positive force for the ways in which we seek to exist in the world in grown-up modes. As a consequence, Biesta suggests an “approach of resistance in how we engage with others and how we come to terms with our own desires and those of the others.”3 He sees the work of the teacher as “interruptive” in that it raises the question about which desires appear to be helpful towards existing in a grown-up way in the world.4Many articles in the book use aspects of Biesta’s philosophy as a (methodological) starting point and lens to further develop their approach. To begin with, Mary Ann Hunter reflects on Biesta’s concept of “interruption” by examining how school partnerships with artists can be valued as a necessary interruption.5 According to Hunter, the way artists act “unteacherly” presents a chance to interrupt the regulatory practices of schooling and to thus ameliorate some of the negative impacts of assessment-focused teaching. Julianne Moss and Anne-Marie Morrissey also refer to Biesta, but concentrate on issues of identity and subjectivity by showing how the teacher comes to terms with herself, her desires, and those of the students (by mitigating her own knowledge and skills with those of her class). Robyn Ewing and John Saunders focus on the concept of grown- up-ness. With reference to a drama project with children from a primary school in the context of an Australian teacher professional learning program, Ewing and Saunders show that the process of co-creating drama work with children provides an open space within teaching where “transformative learning” can be experienced. Nico de Vos focuses on another interesting aspect by bringing in the philosophical idea of bodily connectedness in... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing on limited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009 and 2010, this article analyzes how the idioms of “craft” and “handmaking” are being evoked and imagined in Detroit. Because of a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of artists, makers, and entrepreneurs flocking to the city’s industrial ruins, Detroit has reemerged in the public imaginary as a utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space waiting to be inscribed and transformed by the arrival of a new creative class. In this narrative of (...) transforming the “Motor City” into “Maker City,” the future of the not-quite-postindustrial city rests in the hands of those willing and able to do-it-themselves. While urban farming, artist collectives, hackerspaces, and business start-ups are all part of this narrative, here I focus primarily on the gendered domestic arts, craft fairs, and in particular the work of an all-female grassroots collective of makers called Handmade Detroit. Interrogating the intersections between postfeminist and post-Fordist subjectivities that emerge in and through the narratives, spaces, and practices of the “indie” crafting community in Detroit, I argue that pleasure and self-fulfillment are often exchanged for what might otherwise be felt to be unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work. Finally, this article explores how the transformative rhetoric of DIY often espouses values of pleasure, autonomy, and choice, reproducing neoliberalist rationalities and limiting the political potential of craft and community activism in Detroit. (shrink)

Frederich Engels (1820-1895) was a German businessman and political theorist renowned as one of the intellectual founders of communism. In 1842 Engels was sent to Manchester to oversee his father's textile business, and he lived in the city until 1844. This volume, first published in German in 1845, contains his classic and highly influential account of working-class life in Manchester at the height of its industrial supremacy. Engels' highly detailed descriptions of urban conditions and contrasts between the different (...) classes in Manchester were informed from both his own observations and his contacts with local labour activists and Chartists. Extensively researched and written with sympathy for the working class, this volume is one Engels' best known works and remains a vivid portrait of contemporary urban England. This volume is reissued from the English edition of 1892, which was translated by noted social activist Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (1859-1932). (shrink)

This text introduces readers to definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, presents tensions and questions in the field, and provides exercises for practice. It weaves together critical essays about arts-based research in the literary, visual, and performing arts with examples of artistic products of arts-based research (arts for scholarship's sake) that illuminate by example. Each artistic example is accompanied by a scholARTist's statement that includes reflection on how the work of art relates to the scholar's research interests and practices. (...) Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice: helps the reader understand what arts-based research is - tracing the history of the field and providing examples; includes end-of-chapter questions to engage students in practicing arts-based inquiry and to generate class discussion about the material; features a diverse range of contributors -- very established scholars in educational and social science research as well those new to the field; represents a variety of voices - scholars of color, queer and straight orientations, different ages, experience, and nationalities; and presents beautiful illustrations of visual art, data-based poems, plays, short stories, and musical scores. First-of its kind, this volume is intended as a text for arts-based inquiry, qualitative research methods in education, and related courses, and as a resource for faculty, doctoral students, and scholars across the field of social science research methods. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power has generated a large body of work in many different disciplines. Much of it has considered the paradox of the power of “each and all” or has seen pastoral power as an extension of the disciplinary gaze into welfare state policy. The political economy of the pastorate and the mutual dependence of sovereign and pastoral power, by contrast, are both relatively neglected. This article focuses on the exercise of pastoral power in a moral and (...) political economy and examines the “arts of government” through which the Catholic Church attempted to claim that pastors lived from the flock only to live for it. While there is heuristic value in Foucault’s diagram of pastoral power, in practice that power cannot be separated from class relations and political sovereignty. Empirical material is drawn from the novel attempt of Britain to govern its Quebec colony through the Catholic Church. (shrink)

The results of two experiments are analyzed to find out how artistic expertise influences visual search. Experiment I comprised survey data of 1,065 students on self-reported visual memory skills and their ability to find three targets in four images of artwork. Experiment II comprised eye movement data of 50 Visual Literacy experts and non-experts whose eye movements during visual search were analyzed for nine images of artwork as an external validation of the assessment tasks performed in Sample I. No time (...) constraint was set for completion of the visual search task. A latent profile analysis revealed four typical solution patterns for the students in Sample I, including a mainstream group, a group that completes easy images fast and difficult images slowly, a fast and erroneous group, and a slow working student group, depending on task completion time and on the probability of finding all three targets. Eidetic memory, performance in art education and visual imagination as self-reported visual skills have significant impact on latent class membership probability. We present a hidden Markov model approach to uncover underlying regions of attraction that result from visual search eye-movement behavior in Experiment II. VL experts and non-experts did not significantly differ in task time and number of targets found but they did differ in their visual search process: compared to non-experts, experts showed greater precision in fixating specific prime and target regions, assessed through hidden state fixation overlap. Exploratory analysis of HMMs revealed differences between experts and non-experts in image locations of attraction. Experts seem to focus their attention on smaller image parts whereas non-experts used wider parts of the image during their search. Differences between experts and non-experts depend on the relative saliency of targets embedded in images. HMMs can determine the effect of expertise on exploratory eye movements executed during visual search tasks. Further research on HMMs and art expertise is required to confirm exploratory results. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 12-22 [Access article in PDF] Art of a Child with Autism:Drawing Systems and Proto Mathematics Julia Kellman Sung, a five year old girl with autism, was enrolled by her mother in the university Saturday art program with the hope that Sung's favorite church school teacher, a graduate student in art education, would be able to tutor her daughter during the weekly classes. (...) Though hesitant because of her inexperience with autistic children and because of Sung's frequently angry tantrums on Sundays and the little girl's inability to speak, the young teacher, nonetheless, agreed to the plan. Her concerns proved unfounded, for Sung was able to work in the midst of the churning mass of noisy pre-K classmates without any signs of the fury that drove her to screaming, biting fits in church school. Additionally, and to everyone's delight, Sung's ability to develop as an image-maker was itself confirmed within the first few weeks of art class, dispelling any remaining doubts of her art aptitude or the value of art classes for the little girl.Additional questions and considerations arose about Sung and her art during the classes. How might one understand Sung's changing imagery? What might such explanations and images suggest about Sung herself and her activities? What might her art indicate about her similarity to other children and their art making? The possible answers to these and related queriespresented themselves during the semester, suggesting new avenues for inquiry surrounding both the wordless little girl and her Saturday morning creations.What follows is the story of Sung and her graphic development as it unfolded during the art class. Further, it is an attempt to uncover what Sung's drawings suggest about methods that are useful in the examination of the art of an autistic child. Documentation was carried out with a 35 mm. camera and color copier throughout the semester. Ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews were employed to gather contextual data. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology allowed for [End Page 12] consideration of nonverbal and verbal social interactions and behaviors. 1 A search of the literature of early mathematical development and drawing systems provided the underpinnings for early insights and later hypotheses. Here is Sung's story. Sung Sung, thick black hair swung forward to hide her face, lies prone in the middle of the busy classroom oblivious to the surging, chattering children around her, so intent is she on the sketchbook in which she draws. Next to her left elbow teeters a stack of a half dozen boxes of thick craypas from which she snatches colors, never looking at the hue she grabs. Her drawing behavior has a pattern; it looks like this. Shuffle through the identical boxes. Choose a box. Open it. Snatch out a bright waxy craypa. Hold it close to the eyes. Sniff it. Lick it. If the craypa passes muster, scribble with it in rich heavy lines — banana-like arcs, large solid dots the size of cherries, rectangular patches, and a variety of forms that come and go from one drawing to the next, like heat lightening on a summer evening. Her less frequent forms include: an enclosed yellow irregular shape with a dark dot in the middle suggesting a fried egg; a two-sided zig-zag; X forms; and solid and empty trapezoids made sail-like with superimposed crosses serving as mast and boom.Unlike the chosen craypas, however, those that do not pass Sung's inspection suffer a terrible fate; they are broken in two and their pieces tossed without ceremony to opposite sides of the room to be trodden into flat, bright smears by the other children in the class, pathetic traces of Sung's art. The craypas boxes themselves also play a role. For when they are closed they are used as blocks or toys, objects to be neatly stacked and restacked or placed side by side on the floor. When they are open, however, they are mere receptacles, passively holding... (shrink)

Both the music and subculture of punk historically arose from disaffected working-class youth. This socio-economic starting point was absolutely crucial for making punk what it is. However, along with this standpoint came various levels of class consciousness that we can see evidence of in the lyrics and in various practices of people within the scene itself. I divide this consciousness into 3 specific levels of structural understanding and agency. Inspired by Georg Lukacs' analysis of class consciousness (...) and Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, I demonstrate how punk as a subculture and musical art form is a notable demonstration of "proletarian culture". But just as the revolutionary potential of the proletariat hinges on a unified ideology and consolidated and consistent praxis, so too does the revolutionary potential of punk. [This text was written for a non-academic, general audience] . (shrink)

We have seen that a musical score is in a notation and defines a work; that a sketch or picture is not in a notation but is itself a work; and that a literary script is both in a notation and is itself a work. Thus in the individual arts a work is differently localized. In painting, the work is an individual object; and in etching, a class of objects. In music, the work is the class of performances (...) compliant with a character. In literature, the work is the character itself. And in calligraphy, we may add, the work is an individual inscription. (shrink)

British art historian Charles Harrison presumes the existence of a patriarchal world with power in the hands of men who dominate the representation of women and femininity. He applauds the ground-breaking work of feminist theorists who have questioned this imbalance of power since the 1970s. He stops short, however, of accepting their claims that all women have been represented by male artists as images of “utter passivity” (p. 4), routinely reduced by the male gaze to the status of exploited sexual (...) objects, or that women’s subjectivity is eroded by the visual treatment they receive at the hands of male artists such as Manet and Picasso. He wants to show that what is depicted in the picture plane by the (typically male) artist and enjoyed by the (typically male) spectator is more nuanced than just a simple privileged understanding between two men. He adds a third (and possibly fourth or more) party to the mix when he significantly redefines and expands our concept of the gaze: “A gaze may also be conceived of as a function of a painting’s represented content” (p. 9). In other words, a gaze may be “addressed outward by a represented figure,” and regardless of who and where, “the assumption conveyed by the term [‘gaze’] is that some differential and usually asymmetrical relation will be at stake in any exchange between one who directs the gaze and another at whom it is directed. In fact, it is just this difference—in age, in sex, in class, in interest, in power —that the operation of the gaze tends to mark” (p. 9). Referring to a woman depicted within the picture plane, he asks us to consider, “What does it feel like to look like this?” (p. 21) in order to entertain our many emotional responses and interpretations. When he adds, “What does it feel like to whom?” the sexual difference of the spectator also clearly comes into play. (shrink)

This paper is a study of a social-justice, arts-based literacy curriculum in a low income, working-class, predominately African-American school district in Newark, New Jersey. Participating students studied photography and poetry of established artists and took and developed their own photographs accompanied by written narratives. As a part of the curriculum students also wrote poetry and analytical essays. I present my findings within the context of a Vygotskian pedagogical approach that takes social consciousness and metaphor as its central concepts. (...) The paper lays out this conceptual apparatus and deploys it to analyze the curriculum and student work. The paper argues for curriculum that develops social consciousness as the most effective for preparing students to create and participate in democratic societies. The research and analysis show that an arts based curriculum, in addition to successfully teaching literacy, is one of the most effective ways of bringing students’ life experience into the classroom for analysis and discussion, making activity at school relevant for students lives, especially those whose daily activities regularly confronts issues of life and death. (shrink)

In this original book, I use a poststructuralist perspective to chart explicit and tacit assumptions about the working class in general and the working-class woman, specifically in the classical texts of prominent political philosophers and social critics, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu. Drawing on Michel Foucault, I argue that philosophical discourses that construct these categories as the Other function as disciplinary practices that aim at keeping working-class women either out of (...) or at the margins of academic institutions. I analyze interviews with women from various ethnic origins in New York City’s elite academic institutions, who identified their backgrounds as working class. My analysis foregrounds how these women resist gender, class, and ethnic disciplinary practices in academia. The book contributes to political-theory literature on social injustice and marginalization in academia and challenges and reconfigures the meanings of women and the working class. (shrink)

"In his The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels outlines systematically the miseries of the workers in England in the context of industrialization. A key to his argument concerns the interface between the human body and the machine. In this article I argue that Engels provides a kind of a phenomenology of the body in his analyses of the relation of the worker to the new machines. The limited secondary literature on Marxism and phenomenology has (...) not been attentive to the detailed attention that is given to the body of the worker in this book. Keywords: handwork, machines, technology, Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels, factory work ". (shrink)

All the manifestos for a ‘total work of art’ after Wagner were political programmes: political, however, in a sense directly antithetical to the modern idea of the political. The goal of the total work of art was the formation of the people as a homogeneous political body, as the other of the social and political division, conflict and uncertainty inherent in the whole movement of democratic revolution since the 18th century. In each case the union or synthesis of the arts (...) prefigures the reconciliation of the classes as the condition of the unity of the people. But who is this people that will realize itself in the total work? Is it the same people for the artists of the Bauhaus as it is for the leaders of the Third Reich? These are the questions I try to answer through an interrogation of the continuities and breaks in the re-workings of the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the programmes of the Bauhaus and the policies of National Socialism. (shrink)

The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. -/- Contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the dimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, the relational properties (...) of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on the undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more traditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in contemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities across the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to both the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the institutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging neither. (shrink)

How, if at all, are we to distinguish between the works that we call ‘art’ and those that we call ‘pornography’? This question gets a grip because from classical Greek vases and the frescoes of Pompeii to Renaissance mythological painting and sculpture to Modernist prints, the European artistic tradition is chock-full of art that looks a lot like pornography. In this paper I propose a way of thinking about the distinction that is grounded in art historical considerations regarding the function (...) of erotic images in 16 th -century Italy. This exploration suggests that the root of the erotic art/pornography distinction was—at least in this context—class: in particular, the need for a special category of unsanctioned illicit images arose at the very time when print culture was beginning to threaten elite privilege. What made an erotic representation exceed the boundaries of acceptability, I suggest, was not its extreme libidinosity but, rather, its widespread availability and, thereby, its threat to one of the mechanisms of sustaining class privilege. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

I. Since the appearance in 1902 of Benedetto Croce's L'estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale, the problem of the ontology of the work of art or aesthetic object - what kind of thing it is and what its mode of being is - has come to occupy a central place in the philosophy of art. Moreover, a particular conception of the identity of art objects is at present a driving force in some quarters of the art world itself. (...) As Harold Rosenberg so well points out, Minimalist or Reductive Art has attempted, sometimes quite self-consciously, to establish the autonomous physical reality of the work of art by empty ing it of all expressive and representational content. ! What is the ontological problem? One rather crude way of stating it is to ask where the work of art or object of aesthetic contemplation 2 exists. Is it, to pick some examples, to be identified with the material product of the artist's labors which exists spatially "outside of" and independently of artist and beholder? Or does it exist only "in the mind" of the beholder or the artist? Is it either one perception of a beholder or a series of his perceptions? Or is it the class of all percep tions of either all spectators or all "qualified" spectators? Put another way, it would be a question of whether and to what such purported names as 'Beethoven's Fifth Symphony' refer. (shrink)

This thoughtful, learned, well-written, extensively illustrated, and heavily documented study deserves to be regarded as a landmark in art history. Traditional art history has dealt for the most part with the “fine arts” (chiefly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture), whereas other human creations that take physical form (such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, and metal and glass items), whether utilitarian or decorative (or both at once), are considered “craft” or “applied art” and are studied by folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists and often (...) displayed in different museums. Cooke wishes to break down this “hierarchical taxonomy,” this “fragmented, hierarchical field,” that emerged from Western Europe's “misunderstanding of art,” which valued “the cerebral over the manual.” His goal, in other words, is to outline “a more inclusive human history of art”— “a connected art history.” This phrase from his subtitle refers not simply to connecting “fine art” with “applied art” but also to crossing temporal and regional boundaries. Still another act of connecting is to examine all parts of an object's life history, and thus the three main divisions of the book deal with the making of objects, their circulation from one person and place to another (and “their ability to transmit ideas” in the process), and their meaning for the persons who possessed or encountered them.Over the years I have repeatedly said that all objects made by human beings are worthy of preservation and study because they bring us into direct contact with the past and, as part of our surroundings, affect our thoughts in the present. Every object, I have argued, including copies of a single printed edition of a book (so-called duplicates), is an independent witness to the past. I am particularly pleased, therefore, to welcome a major book that explores in detail, with a wealth of examples from many centuries and cultures, the place of objects in human history. Cooke's pursuit is “object-driven,” beginning with the nature of the materials and finally coming to “the inherent power of the object itself to influence human thought and action.” (Compare the subtitle of Sherry Turkle's 2007 anthology Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.) Cooke's refusal to separate “materials” from “people,” or “technologies” from “values,” reminds me of John Szarkowski's approach to photographs. In Photography until Now (1989), Szarkowski points out that histories of photography generally treat technical matters separately from artistic ones—a split between the “empirical” and the “intuitive” that he finds indefensible, for “these two ways of knowing meet in the process of making things.” He adds, “The meeting can be cordially symbiotic or aggressively competitive, but its resolution defines the character and meaning of the thing that is made.” This statement has been a favorite of mine as an elegant characterization of the nature of art, and it is one that Cooke would clearly agree with.Cooke does not discuss photography, but he makes clear that he is not attempting a “comprehensive history that charts the complete ebb and flow of objects over time.” Rather, his book is meant to be a “suggestive guide” to the “principles of material literacy,” a “kit of tools for future complex constructions of history.” Even so, I find some of the omissions puzzling. Why, for example, are glass objects not taken up, when he so thoroughly deals with other common materials? More serious, in my opinion, is the exclusion of the fine arts. (Of the 215 illustrations, five are of oil paintings and one is of a Japanese print, but they are present only as the sources for information drawn from their pictorial content; one Hogarth engraving is shown because its image was often reproduced on punch bowls; and there is a very brief passage on the “uneasy relationship” between sculpture and material culture, but no sculptures are illustrated or used as examples for discussion.) Presumably Cooke felt it was unnecessary for his book to encompass the fine arts after demonstrating that functional objects are just as sophisticated artistically and culturally as products of the fine arts are. Yet those products also belong to the universe of “entangled objects” (How could they not?), and it would have been illuminating to see them adduced among the examples Cooke cites. One could argue that by excluding them—and by referring to the makers of the objects he does discuss as “artisans” and “craftspeople”—he comes close to reinforcing the division he wishes to eliminate.Less easy to explain is Cooke's omission of books, for they have been one of the largest and most widely circulated classes of utilitarian objects. Most people never think about books as objects, treating them only as disposable receptacles for transmitting verbal texts in tangible form (which is why so many books are destroyed when their texts supposedly become available in another form). Such people do not realize that texts have connections with their physical embodiments. (For example, books, whether manuscript or printed, often contain clues revealing how their texts were affected by the production process; and readers’ attitudes toward texts can be influenced by their presentation.) Cooke, however, with his deep understanding of the way objects function and his impressive knowledge of the scholarship, cannot be one of these uninformed people. He would obviously be aware of the vast literature devoted to leather and cloth bookbindings and their decoration, as well as to the myriad styles of letters and the varieties of paper and parchment; he would also know how letterforms and binding designs reflect a complex interplay of social, political, and artistic forces. Bibliographers have long studied books as Cooke advocates studying other objects: “working from the inside out,” beginning with the evidence in books themselves for reconstructing the routines that were followed in their creation. And book historians are recognizing the necessity for an international approach like Cooke's, since many of the books circulating in one country originated in other countries. Books would have been a prolific additional source for illustrating Cooke's analyses.My admiration for Cooke's book is not altered by these few disappointments. Even without discussions of paintings, sculptures, and books, it is still exhilarating in its scope and depth. One hopes that art and material-culture historians will pay attention to it. But it ought to have a wider audience, for the daily lives of all of us would be enriched by a greater appreciation of the objects that make up a significant part of our environment. (shrink)

Class Society and Psychoanalysis. Despite being sidelined, Michel Clouscard was a prolific writer and taught sociology at the Université de Poitiers from 1975 to 1990. Clouscard focused on describing the peculiar discourse of emancipation that resulted from the marriage of psychoanalysis and Marxism, which was then termed Freudo-Marxism, and was gaining currency in the aftermath of May ’68. For Clouscard, the emancipation of desire and productivity upheld by the Freudo-Marxists went hand-in-hand with the emergence of new markets and techno-structures (...) which defined the development of social democracy in France. Two of his works, The Treatise of Mad Love and the Capitalism of Seduction are telling us the story of the birth of class society at the very dawn of Middle Age and his postmodern transformation. The first work is an interpretation of Tristan and Iseul myth. The second describe how the capitalism gave birth to a new category with veritable ferocity: parasitic non-productive jobs (a large category extending from the false artists of modern art to the intellectual sell-outs to the system, passing through publicists and other dealers). (shrink)

In the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence a miniature history of the English working class can be found. Through their sympathetic portrayals, these authors transformed working-class culture from a patronizing pastiche into a vital reality. This achievement was crucial to the rise of the English working-class as the key agency of democratic reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In our own times, by contrast, depictions of working-class (...) culture are patronizing at best, if not openly denigrating. This crisis of representation has born recent fruit in the phenomenon of populism, a long-term consequence of the undermining of genuinely popular rule under neoliberal capitalism. Returning to the works of Eliot, Hardy, and Lawrence in this book the author offers a sense of direction for contemporary politics, by rediscovering the vital force of working-class culture. (shrink)

In this volume, a well-known psychoanalyst, dance therapist, and educational consultant chronicles her clinical work with deeply troubled children who fall between the cracks of our diagnostic and educational systems. These children, who frequently turn out to have been sexually or punitively abused, have no real emotional home despite the fact that they live in materially comfortable circumstances. In spite of their apparent brightness and precocity, they do not thrive in the classroom, where their disruptive behavior, tendency to act out, (...) and fragmented learning bring them to the attention of teachers, counselors, and school psychologists. Standard diagnoses do not explain their plight; such children are neither retarded nor learning disabled nor neurotic. Through poignant case studies, Siegel reviews the developmental circumstances that bring these middle-class waifs to a critical impasse with both their parents and the educational establishment. Time and again she discovers that the children's expectable developmental course has been derailed by their accommodation to parental abuse and deformed parental expectations. Psychodynamic treatment invariably uncovers the maladaptive solutions that fueled the children's behavioral and learning disturbances. This volume speaks to a broad clinical and non-clinical readership: psychoanalytic clinicians; psychologists; counselors; social workers; art, dance, and music therapists; special education teachers; child therapists; and child care workers. They will all join in admiration of Siegel's treatment approach which focuses on what is healthy in deeply traumatized children and, in so doing, helps debunk the myth of the untreatable child. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as PerformanceMichael WehArt As Performance, by David Davies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 278 pp.If we accepted the claims that David Davies makes in his Art as Performance, we would have to rigorously revise our conception of what kinds of entities artworks are. Art as Performance is a study in the ontology of art, and whereas other well-known theories about the ontological status of artworks say that artworks are (...) to be identified with, forexample, types, classes, or kinds, Davies holds that they are performances that lead to the production of a "focus of appreciation" — the latter being the objects we usually take to be artworks. So according to Davies, a painting presented in a museum or a novel we can buy in a bookshop is in fact not the artwork x.The artwork is rather the performance that cumulated in bringing x into existence.Davies characterizes our "common sense theory" of art as including views about the epistemology, ontology,axiology, and definition of art. It maintains that in order to appreciate an artwork, a direct experiential encounter with it is sufficient; that artworks are those things that are exhibited in our museums or performed on stages; that the value of artworks lies in immediately experiencing them; and that artworks differ from other objects by virtue of possessing aesthetic properties. But the common sense theory conflicts with many, if not most, of the art phenomena of the twentieth century. The puzzlement of audiences in the face of certain contemporary pieces of art is caused by the incompatibility of the common sense theory with those artworks. A philosopher of art can try to solve this problem by either accommodating modern art to the common sense theory or by dismissing the theory as inappropriate. With his performance theory, Davies goes for the [End Page 114] second option, while at the same time constraining his theory to the principle that an ontology of art should not contradict our dealing with art — at least after we have critically revised it — too excessively.Davies's first major step in elaborating his theory is a discussion of whether it is necessary to take contextual properties of artworks into account in order to be able to appreciate and understand them. Defenders of "aesthetic empiricism" (a term coined by Gregory Currie) deny that an artwork's history of production is relevant and would be the philosophical business partners of the common sense theory. According to empiricism, only an artwork's manifest properties matter. The context of an artwork's making is at best of art-historical interest. Building upon the works of Currie, Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, and others, Davies forcefully argues against empiricism in defense of a contextualist epistemology of art. And since he takes an artwork's history of production to be epistemologically indispensable, Davies infers that it also has to be considered concerning the ontology of art.Davies's ontology of art is monistic. He claims that all artworks are not the products of creative activities, but rather "intentionally guided generative performances that eventuate in contextualized structures or objects...or events...performances completed by what I am terming a focus of appreciation" (p. 98). The focus of appreciation, in turn, is defined as "an artistic statement as articulated in an artistic medium realized in a vehicle" (p. 60). Davies understands an artistic medium as a set of social conventions or understandings of how to describe the way an artist articulated his statement — for example by manipulating a physical object. The vehicle can be — as in the case of painting — exactly that physical object, or, for example, an action in the case of conceptual art. The main point is that the focus of appreciation is not the artwork. The focus of appreciation — for example, the object Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — completes the performance that was carried out by the artist, and that performance is the artwork.If artworks are performances, it is clear that artworks possess the properties on whose existence contextualism insists and that are ignored by empiricism. But though Davies emphasizes the role of the properties an artwork has due to its provenance, he is also concerned about the weaknesses of... (shrink)

The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity. “The female is as it were a deformed male,” added Aristotle . As she belongs to the category of the different, the female can only contribute more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for future generations. Aristotle’s seminal work on the generation of (...) monsters posited a rigorously physical definition that was not necessarily linked to deformities: “Monstrosities,” he wrote, “come under the class of offspring which is unlike its parents” . Further, while a “monstrosity, of course, belongs to the class of ‘things contrary to Nature,’ … it is contrary not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality of cases” .The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different species: “People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only” . The monster is thus a double imposture. Its strange appearance—a misleading likeness to another species, for example—belies the otherwise rigorous law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance to an object external to its conception. Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793-1797 and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology. (shrink)

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things and traces how pop art and readymades (...) point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens' performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means with which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class women deemed (...) grotesque for not presenting themselves with sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)