Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

This article examines a strain of contemporary art photography marked by its resemblance to earlier scientific motion studies as indicative of a wider `scientific turn' in recent photographic art. Focusing on Sarah Pickering's series Explosions , Denis Darzacq's The Fall , Ori Gersht's Blow Up and Martin Klimas' Flower Vases , it addresses the conditions that have allowed for forms and methodologies associable with earlier scientific imagery to be reshaped as contemporary art, particularly the large-scale of recent (...) `museum photography' and its self-conscious indeterminacy of meaning. Adopting a schematic approach based on the identification of similarity, I examine the implications of ambiguity and scale as inherent qualities of the work, along with the interpretations that the projects examined share. Noting a potential formalism in artists' repeated isolation of frozen motion, I anchor this interest in the medium-specific qualities of photography in two changes associated with digitization. Where digital post-production has placed pressure on traditional ontological understandings of the medium, the projects are shown to offer a nostalgic return to `purer' forms of photographic production. Drawing on Fredric Jameson's 2003 essay, `The end of temporality', I conclude by considering how the photographs may be implicated in wider transformations to the construction and experience of time under late-capitalism. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly (...) the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York , Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art , or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA . Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels , situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. (shrink)

This clearly designed and illustrated book is dedicated to a complete overview of Richard Meier's Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, completed in 1995. Located in the area of the Casa de la Caritat, a former monastic enclave, this extraordinary building maintains a unique dialogue between the city's old urban fabric and the contemporary art housed within the museum. Barcelona's first institution devoted entirely to twentieth-century art, this museum synthesizes the striking contemporaneity of its bold architecture (...) and the rich medieval history of its context. Meier's masterful use of materials -- pristine white aluminum panels, glass, stucco, and granite -- and characteristic modern style emphasize a play of solid and void, light and shadow, through the museum's fluid, geometric forms. An external ramp leads from the sweeping plaza to a triple-height atrium space. An internal, glass-enclosed ramp unfolds vertically along the front facade of the building, offering breathtaking vistas of a sixteenth-century church and the romantic city beyond and leading to three floors of open exhibition areas. This unique publication documents the dramatic design with preliminary sketches, models, drawings, and lavish color photographs. (shrink)

Through photographs we preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. But what are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a forensic gaze, towards finding evidence of what once took place. At the same time, photographs of excavated sites and artefacts have revealed stunning ancient works, shot as works of art. In Photography and Archaeology, Frederick Bohrer examines some of history’s (...) most famous archaeological excavations, as well as lesser-known and previously unpublished finds, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and the ways these sites have been represented in photographs. Bohrer shows how the development of photography in the nineteenth century made archaeology available to a much wider audience, and he discusses how these images revealed the material traces of the past, as well as their meaning and use today. Spanning the dual histories of both photography and archaeology, the book makes evident how what we know of the archaeological past has always been related to how it has been photographically represented and circulated: in scholarly papers, popular accounts, scientific archives, museum catalogues and numerous other formats. Bohrer concludes that such images possess contending, if not mutually exclusive, properties. While photography seems to guarantee documentary objectivity, at the same time it also fundamentally alters the archaeological object, transforming it into a work of art. Along the way, he discusses archaeological examples and images by photographers including Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, John Beazley Greene, Ernst Herzfeld and others, to more contemporary photographers such as Aaron Levin, Roger Wood and Marilyn Bridges. Beautifully illustrated with fine archaeological images, many published here for the first time, Photography and Archaeologywill be of interest to archaeologists, art historians and photographers, as well as anyone concerned with, or captivated by, archaeology’s ongoing engagement with the past. (shrink)

From the earliest silver-chloride calotypes of inventor of photography William Henry Fox-Talbot to developments in digital photography and the tiny but surprisingly capable cameras that are a component of every smartphone today, photography has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. As technology has advanced, so too has photography as a living, dynamic art form, as evidenced by the innovative techniques and compositions of contemporary photographic artists. Drawing on a diverse collection of historical and (...) class='Hi'>contemporary photographs held by Bank Austria and on display at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Focus on Photography provides a rich visual record of the history of photography. The photographs reproduced here date from the 1840s to the 1970s and include works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, André Kertész, Josef Sudek, Eadweard Muybridge, Alexander Rodchenko, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, and Arnulf Rainer, among others, and range from landscapes and portraits to cutting-edge modern compositions. Together, they offer readers a series of invaluable reference points for thinking about of the important trends and developments throughout the history of photography. A stunning, kaleidoscopic portfolio featuring nearly two centuries of photographic art with representation from among many major movements and figures, Focus on Photography will be welcomed by all with an interest in this powerful medium. (shrink)

Canadian landscapes on gallery walls in art museums serve as a primer for understanding the nation. Visitors cannot easily escape the purposeful emptiness of rugged scenes meant to visually assure them of the nation’s right to colonial possession. Most viewers respond positively to these pretty pictures because such ways of seeing the art history of Canada has been naturalized and normalized, appearing politically neutral.Ubiquitous Canadian landscape paintings also reinforce colonial claiming of land and authorize erasure of Indigenous relations (...) with the land. Understanding the noted landscapes as something other than part of a national narrative, however, has not been widely accepted, even as a sanctioned mandate to broaden art historical narratives has resulted in displaying additional Indigenous art in galleries. In an analysis that considers ways to re-vision the privileged colonial narrative present in Canadian art museums, deeper ethical issues arise in relation to institutional structures. Here the analysis focuses on three projects in and around Canada 150, including examples such as Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the rehanging of Norval Morrisseau’s Artist and Shaman between Two Worlds at the National Gallery of Canada, and the Michael Belmore and A. J. Casson: Nkweshkdaadiimgak Miinwaa Bakeziibiisan/Confluences and Tributaries exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery. This essay explores questions regarding whether ways of seeing land differently come about simply by hanging Indigenous art on institutional walls or whether more systemic change is required. (shrink)

Susan Sontag once remarked that since the invention of the camera, photography has “kept company with death.” And indeed, images of suffering human beings and devastated landscapes appear regularly in the popular media and even in contemporary art. This volume explores these painful images from the past few decades of photography, weighing in on the intense critical debate that has arisen in recent years around depictions of acute human suffering—especially those that are beautifully rendered. Drawing on works (...) from advertising, photojournalism, art photography, and conceptual art, Beautiful Suffering features reproductions of all the pieces in the Williams College Museum of Art exhibition that shares its name—including portrayals of AIDS sufferers, Abu Ghraib prisoners, refugees, and casualties of war. It also includes five critical essays that engage the works themselves as well as the larger issues the exhibition confronts: Is it inherently problematic to seek aesthetic pleasure in a rendering of pain? And if so, why? These essays, composed by scholars in fields as diverse as art history and political science, are perfect complements to the powerful images of suffering that probe some of the most pressing issues we face today. (shrink)

Born like Venus on the half shell from the centuries-long tradition of the nude in painting, the nude first appeared as a subject matter in photography with the introduction of the medium itself, between 1837 and 1840, and has continued as an ever-evolving theme through changing technical developments and cultural mores to the present day. This volume surveys the subject of nudity from the earliest surviving photographs of Greek and Roman sculpture through studies of living nude models for aesthetic (...) or scientific purposes to the burgeoning practice of exploring the human body as pure form. The seventy-eight works, selected from the extensive collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and further contextualized here in the essay “Masterworks of the Nude,” span the entire arc of the history of photography in a manner that is both fresh and illuminating. Among the sixty-four photographers included are nineteenth-century masters Julia Margaret Cameron, Edgar Degas, and Thomas Eakins; early-twentieth-century artists Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston; mid-twentieth-century innovators Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan, and Minor White; late-twentieth-century image makers Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Herb Ritts; and contemporary artists Chuck Close, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and Mona Kuhn. (shrink)

Catalogue of the Cleveland Museum of Art's photographic holdings.

In the museum context, curators and conservators often play a role in shaping the nature of contemporary artworks. Before, during and after the acquisition of an art object, curators and conservators engage in dialogue with the artist about how the object should be exhibited and conserved. As a part of this dialogue, the artist may express specifications for the display and conservation of the object, thereby fixing characteristics of the artwork that were previously left open. This process can (...) make a significant difference to the visual appearance of the work, the nature of the audience's experience, and how the work should be interpreted. I present several case studies in which the nature of the artwork has been shaped by such dialogues, and discuss principles for resolving cases in which there is a conflict between instructions specified by the artist and those adopted by the museum. (shrink)

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts holds the Upper Midwest's most significant permanent collection of fine photographs. Covering the entire history of the medium, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. This beautiful book opens with an 1845 salt print by the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot and closes with a 2002 color portrait by Alec Soth from his series Sleeping by the Mississippi. In between, selected images represent the genres of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography. (...) Included are Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" and Arthur Rothstein's "Dust Storm," as well as Edward Weston's "Pepper No. 30" and Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez." Commemorating the collecting legacy of Carroll T. Hartwell, the founding curator of the museum's department of photographs, this book reveals Hartwell's critical eye for singular historical photographs and his belief in the influence and vitality of accomplished contemporary photographers. In an introductory essay, Christian A. Peterson recounts the history of the museum's photography collection and Hartwell's indelible imprint on the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (shrink)

Canadian theorists and philosophers are recognized internationally for their contributions to normative debates about citizenship, multiculturalism, and nationalism. The superb essays collected here reflect a broad range of contemporary political and philosophical issues: liberalism and citizenship; equality, justice, and gender; minority rights and identity; nationalism and self-determination; and the history of political philosophy.

Deux ouvrages croisent la création des femmes artistes et les luttes féministes, liés à deux expositions à Los Angeles et à New York. Le premier dresse pour les années 1960 et 1970 un bilan rétrospectif des rapports entre la création des femmes et les mouvements féministes aux États-Unis et en Europe occidentale, le second partant des années 1990 jusqu’à aujourd’hui se veut tourné vers l’avenir et ouvert aux autres cultures. Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution : le titre exclamatif entend...

This article proposes to reconceptualize the Hungarian photographer, artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) inter-war call for a ‘new vision’ in order to grasp how artists presently experiment with photography and adjacent new technologies to explore the environmental, ecological and elemental dimension of media themselves. For Moholy-Nagy, photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the increasingly industrialized and automated world and a means of expanding our sensory perception. Drawing on recent scholarship of elemental media theory, I (...) adapt Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the materiality of photography and the atmospheric and medial dimensions of light itself to an environmentally attuned notion of ‘new visions’. Exemplified with discussion of recent works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag, I show how a number of contemporary artists likewise scrutinize photography’s (understood in an expanded way) material basis and atmospheric qualities to explore new forms of image-making, including CGI and synthetic aperture radar images, fitted to reflect the accelerated automation and ecological precarity that mark the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

Cécile Wick's work, oscillating among photography, painting, and drawing, is one of the most important oeuvres in contemporary Swiss art. Solo exhibitions in various galleries and a large retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Berne have recently showcased her prints and etchings to great acclaim. Cécile Wick. Colored Waters offers readers the first glimpse of the artist's more recent photographs and, in particular, drawings. Watercolors, ink drawings, inkjet prints and photographs are presented in series, putting (...) media and motifs in a dialogue and revealing new aspects of Wick's work. Around 160 color reproductions of artworks are complemented with essays by Martin Jaeggi and Nadine Olonetzky on subjects such as light, traces, signs, buildings, nature, and rhythm in Wick's oeuvre. (shrink)

How do we deal with difference personally, interpersonally, nationally? Can we weave a cohesive social fabric in a religiously plural society without suppressing differences? This collection of significant essays suggests that to truly honour differences in matters of faith and religion we must publicly exercise and celebrate them. The secular/sacred, public/private divisions long considered sacred in the West need to be dismantled if Canada (or any nation state) is to develop a genuine mosaic that embraces fundamental differences instead of a (...) melting pot that marginalizes. An ethics of difference starts with a recognition of difference, not as deviance or deficit that threatens but as otherness to connect with, cherish, and celebrate. The book begins with the suggestion that our inability to come to terms with social plurality is not fundamentally the fault of religious differences, and that a public/private split inadequately deals with matters of basic difference. It then explores how encouraging people to live out their respective faiths may open new possibilities for respectful, honourable, and just negotiations of contemporary dilemmas arising out of the multicultural fabric of Canadian life. Towards an Ethics of Community introduces readers to some of the most challenging and divisive dilemmas we face in this increasingly pluralistic, postmodern world — issues such as family and domestic violence, Aboriginal rights, homosexuality and public policy, and female genital mutilation. This is a book truly global in scope and significance. (shrink)

This book is based upon a lecture series that took place between September 2013 and May 2014 to inaugurate the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It brings together some of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the theory and practice of human rights.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 306-309 [Access article in PDF] Philippe Rouet. Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier. Trans. Liz Nash. Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiii + 167 pp. 21 black and white plates. Cloth, $74. This monograph examines the development of two major approaches in the study of Greek vase painting by focusing on a comparison of (...) the work of Sir John D. Beazley with that of Edmond Pottier. Beazley, an English scholar, spent his scholarly life attributing vases to various formerly unnamed artists based on [End Page 306] their style of drawing, thereby ascertaining for the first time the artistic history and stylistic development of Attic black-figure and red-figure vase painting. Pottier, a French scholar, founded the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, an international series whose original goal was to publish all ancient clay vases. Each scholar's interests contrasted with the other's in many ways. Beazley's work focused more on the object and Athens, while Pottier was opposed to the study of individual artists and was particularly interested in the relationship of the origins of Greek civilization to the East and the broader context of the vessels.The book's introduction sets the historical and intellectual background of Beazley and Pottier. Areas covered include the early history of collecting, initial attempts at defining the works of individual Greek vase painters, some influential early catalogues of Greek vases (e.g., those of Hamilton's collection), and the role that the copying of motifs from ancient pottery had in spreading the interest in Greek vase painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the part played by the Wedgwood workshop. I miss here any reference to the fine work of Brian A. Sparkes on these subjects (The Red and the Black: Studies in Greek Pottery[London and New York, 1996] 34-63).The first chapter considers the most influential, immediate predecessors of Beazley and shows how their work formed the intellectual framework for his accomplishment. They are Wilhelm Klein, whose important study of and signatures on Attic vases still serves as the basis for our interpretation of them; Paul Hartwig, who was the first to attribute vases to an anonymous master; and Adolph Furtwängler, who in collaboration with Karl Reichhold initiated the monumental three-volume work, Griechische Vasenmalerei, which featured exceptionally accurate drawings of vase paintings. The author astutely notes that Furtwängler's work on attributing Roman copies of Greek sculpture to artists was likewise influential in augmenting the interest in style and artistic personalities. The intertwined relationship between connoisseurship, collectors, and the art market is touched on briefly in the discussions of Hartwig and Edward Warren. It might also have been noted here that the wording and style of Beazley's earliest work on the Kleophrades Painter clearly owes its inspiration to Hartwig.Pottier's early life and career are the focus of the next chapter. This was the time when museum catalogues and encyclopedic dictionaries were for many the signs of significant national scholarship. Indeed, after France's loss in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, Pottier and many of his contemporary compatriots sought to affirm the intellectual vitality of their nation by initiating and completing such projects. Pottier's contribution was to publish Vases antiques du Louvre, in which photography was used for the first time on a large scale to illustrate the vases, and to serve as one of the editors of the Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, in which he was also responsible for many of the entries on vases.Chapter 3 returns to the subject of connoisseurship and the two non-classical archaeologists whose methodology bear clear resemblances to Beazley's. The first of them, Giovanni Morelli, was the first to attempt a scientific methodology for attributing paintings to unknown artists by examining the minor details [End Page 307] of drawings in order to discover the artistic language of the painters. Rouet concludes that Morelli paved the way for Beazley's work, for... (shrink)

During a period of about four decades following World War I, gasoline was often deodorized at refineries by treatment with alkaline solutions of lead oxide, a procedure generally denoted ‘doctor sweetening’. Contemporary accounts describe it as old, but are generally vague about its origin. This paper traces the early history of the treatment of petroleum distillate by alkaline plumbite solution, dating back to 1866 when it was introduced in Germany by Rudolf Wagner. After 1869, this procedure became the preferred (...) method for deodorizing Canadian kerosene and other petroleum products which were afflicted by unusually high sulphur content. Subsequently, Hermann Frasch improved on this method by distilling the afflicted petroleum in the presence of solid metal oxides. (shrink)

Many recent visual and technological changes in photography are related to the fact that it is increasingly connected to space through computerization and digitization. Photographs no longer appear as framed 2D images, but rather resemble a cloud whose viewing and operating mode necessarily involve navigation. My purpose in this article is to think about photography’s ontological and epistemological status through its contemporary spatial uses. Using two projects by Forensic Architecture, I examine two methodologies of spatial photography (...) – photogrammetric point clouds and the Image-Data Complex – and claim that, whereas with the emergence of the internet, digital photography has primarily been perceived as a networked image, today we should think of it in terms of clouds. Both projects rely on a posthuman multiplication of perspectives and a vertical conceptualization of photography as navigable space. Both also represent and demonstrate the medium’s contemporary political potential for documenting, creating evidence and organizing data. Finally, both challenge traditional definitions of photography and outline new alternatives for interrogating human rights violations. (shrink)

A traditional task of epistemology is to establish and defend systematic standards that must be met in order for us to have knowledge or justified beliefs. A "naturalized epistemology" tries to arrive at such standards through an empirical investigation into how we interact with our fellows and the world around us, what we seek in these activities, and the particular ways in which we can and cannot succeed. This approach is a radical departure from tradition because its means of investigation (...) is empirical. Nevertheless, since its inception three decades ago, this style of epistemology has become a powerful trend in contemporary theory of knowledge. This collection breaks new ground in extending the insights and methodology of naturalized epistemology to the subject of moral knowledge and moral theory. The essays are divided between two overarching themes. One is the so-called fact-value distinction. How can an empirical study of knowledge hope to address the normative questions about how we should reason about moral matters, how we should live morally? The other is the relation of practical moral know-how to moral discourse. Can the biological underpinning of morality explain most of its central features or is moral discourse essential to our understanding of the cognitive dimensions of moral experience? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 84-93 [Access article in PDF] Arthur Wesley Dow's Address in Kyoto, Japan (1903) Researchers concerned with the historical development of American art education cannot help but acknowledge Arthur Wesley Dow's significant contribution to the field. Although many writers have recognized him as one of greatest figures in art education, 1 it was not until the end of the twentieth century that art (...) historians discovered his impact on the early development of modernist American art.Several exhibitions of Dow's work have been shown recently, most notably: "Arthur Wesley Dow and American Art and Crafts," in Stanford, Chicago, and Fort Dodge, Iowa (1999 and 2000) and "Harmony of Reflected Light: The Photographs of Arthur Wesley Dow," at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts (2001). 2 In addition, two galleries in New York showed exhibitions of Dow's work in 1999 and 2000, respectively. These exhibitions indicate a rediscovery of Dow's work and his role, as well as a wider interest in the integral aspects of modernism in American artworks.Joseph Masheck recognized Dow's post-impressionistic aesthetic of flat surface design as influential on modernism in painting and the graphic arts. 3 Nancy Green sees Dow as "one of the first Western artists who did not simply imitate Japanese art, but who actually used the traditional Japanese woodcut techniques to create modernist prints." 4 Leah Ollman writes, "Those who credit Dow as a conduit to American modernism see his traces everywhere" because "Dow is revealed at the end of the rainbow, as the common ancestor" who spread his theory and practice of art and art education. 5 James Enyeart states that Dow can now receive appropriate critical assessment of his work as a photographer and his impact on pictorial and modernist photography. 6 [End Page 84]Dow is one of the few Americans whose work in the field of art and art education was influenced by Japanese traditional art. He came to Japan in October 1903 and spent three months in Japan, including six weeks in Tokyo and a month in Kyoto. His address in Kyoto in mid-December of that year has been mentioned in biographical studies. 7 However, a detailed account of what Dow said to the Japanese public has previously been unknown due to lack of a historical source.Contemporary Japanese newspaper articles are the primary source for the contents of this address. The purpose of this essay is to translate these source materials into English, providing a definitive description to encourage further research on Dow as an outstanding artist and educator. This essay describes his activity in Japan, provides useful primary sources about his address, and discusses the content of the address. Implications for a cross-cultural interpretation are discussed in the concluding remarks. Dow in Japan Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts on April 6, 1857. He studied art in Boston and Paris, and exhibited his paintings at Salon, in Paris from 1886-1887. He established his summer school of art in Ipswich (1891-1907) and became the curator of Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in1897. He was an instructor of art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1895-1904; taught composition at the Art Student's League in New York from 1897-1903; and served as a professor and the director of fine arts at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1904-1922. 8 Dow first studied Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts under the direction of Ernest Fenollosa, and then during his residence in Japan.Arthur Johnson's 1934 biography provides the most detailed description of Dow's life and works. 9 In fact, "every subsequent publication about Dow has relied on this biographical information, and in some cases Dow's aesthetic sources, contained in Johnson's short text of about one hundred pages." 10 According to Johnson, Dow kept a careful day-by-day record during these months, and to read these notebooks, some six in number, is to see the world through the eyes... (shrink)

The connection is made between the Royal Museum of Scotland and encyclopaedia, one of MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry. It is then asked how MacIntyre's other two methods, genealogy and tradition‐constituted enquiry, would function within a museum. It is proposed that the museum fulfils Haldane's criterion for tradition‐constituted enquiry in that it combines the immanence and open‐endedness of the methods of enquiry with transcendence in the objects of enquiry. The ethical judgments of the visitors constitute (...) transcendent truth in morality; hence one can see the museum as a site of Aristotelian enquiry. -/- To pursue this, the museum is explored as a site of Aristotelian study or theoria, and of MacIntyre's updated Aristotelianism. Therein we study the narratives written by historians and by individuals in a version of Aristotelian epagogê, or the sifting of the opinions of the many and the wise. This process may also enhance civic friendship and our exercise of practical wisdom towards disadvantaged groups. -/- Finally, MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry are returned to, and a museum characterised for each. All three are found to involve seriousness in the purposes of enquiry. Attention is drawn to MacIntyre's criticism of the interaction of bureaucracy and social science. It is proposed that such interaction may, in the case of the museum, dilute its seriousness as a site of enquiry. (shrink)

Sarah Angelina Acland is one of the most important photographers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Daughter of the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, she was photographed by Lewis Carroll as a child, along with her close friend Ina Liddell, sister of Alice of Wonderland fame. The critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew many of the Pre-Raphaelites, holding Rossetti's palette for him as he painted the Oxford Union murals. At the age of nineteen (...) she met the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose influence is evident in her early work.Following in the footsteps of Cameron and Carroll Miss Acland first came to attention as a portraitist, photographing the illustrious visitors to her Oxford home. In 1899 she then turned to the challenge of colour photography, becoming, through work with the 'Sanger Shepherd process', the leading colour photographer of the day. Her colour photographs were regarded as the finest that had ever been seen by her contemporaries, several years before the release of the Lumière Autochrome system, which she also practised.This volume provides an introduction to Miss Acland's photography, illustrating more than 200 examples of her work, from portraits to picturesque views of the landscape and gardens of Madeira. Some fifty specimens of the photographic art and science of her peers from Bodleian collections are also reproduced for the first time, including four unrecorded child portraits by Carroll. Detailed descriptions accompany the images, explaining their interest and significance. The photographs not only shed important light on the history of photography in the period, but also offer a fascinating insight into the lives of a pre-eminent English family and their circle of friends. (shrink)

This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the "politics of representation" and the critique of the spectacle, but with a "politics of rights" and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains. The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the (...) artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism. (shrink)

In her book, Goehr defends two claims which surely generate controversy. She argues that for several reasons, no analytic method for defining musical works is viable, and no musical works existed before circa 1800. For Goehr, analysis fails in the attempt to capture the pure ontological character of musical works, to account for their mode of existence in terms of abstracta or relata, or to discover their alleged ahistorical identity conditions. The main reason most analyses fail, according to Goehr, is (...) because the development of a coherent ontological theory is accomplished at the expense of accommodating our precritical intuitions. She argues that neither Nelson Goodman's extentionalist [[sic]] account nor Jerrold Levinson's intentionalist [[sic]] account successfully establish an equilibrium between theory and practice--between what can be logically and clearly stated about musical works and what is actually thought about them. The failure to establish such an equilibrium derives from the impossibility of analytic philosophers to offer clear grounds for resolving whether any given purported condition for the identity of a musical work marks something essential to the musical work's existence. For example, Levinson's desideratum that aesthetic qualities are essential properties of musical works is countered by Goodman's claim that aesthetic qualities merely refer to the evaluative qualities of musical works and not to the identity of musical works. Such a dispute, Goehr argues, is irresolvable. (shrink)

H.A. Prichard argued that the “why should I be moral?” question is the central subject matter of moral theory. Prichard famously claimed to have proved that all efforts to answer that question are doomed. Many contributors to this volume of contemporary papers attempt to reconstruct Prichard’s argument. They claim either explicitly or implicitly that Prichard was mistaken, and philosophy can contribute to meaningful engagement with the ‘why be moral?’ question. A theme to emerge from these papers is that arguments (...) like Prichard’s rely on numerous philosophical presuppositions. The volume therefore touches on a wide range of topics and treatments. Is there one kind of practical reason or multiple kinds of reasons? Are there separate facts that determine the rationality and reasonableness of persons? Does the conception of a practical reason found in classical philosophy have the resources to undercut Prichard’s argument? Does it make sense to hold people morally accountable for their actions if it cannot be demonstrated that there are reasons to be moral? Does applied ethics have anything to contribute to the debate on morality’s rational authority? This volume will be useful for advanced undergraduates and specialists working on the foundations of morality, and morality’s intersection with reason and rationality. The detailed introduction enhances the collection’s accessibility by providing a detailed exposition of Prichard’s renowned thesis that draws on his lesser-known, mature papers. It then carefully situates the volume’s contents against that background. (shrink)

Not too long after photography’s grand debut in 1839, physician and inventor Oliver Wendell Holmes described the new technology as a “mirror with a memory.” What might this phrase mean for the question of African Americans and their relationship to the vicissitudes of photography and the vagaries of memory in particular? Through readings of works of art and social activism that make use of lynching photographs, this essay considers ways in which photography has functioned as a technology (...) of memory for African Americans, what the essay calls critical black memory, and proffers a mode of historical interpretation that both plays upon and questions photography’s documentary capacity.The essay makes two claims specifically. First, the mechanical reproduction of lynching by way of the photograph has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of black political cultures throughout the Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights era. From the usage of lynching photography in pamphlets by early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists, to posters created by mid-century civil rights organizations, to their deployment in contemporary art and popular culture, this archive has been a constitutive element of black visuality more broadly. Second, African American engagements with photography as a “site of memory” suggest a mode of historical interpretation in which African Americans simultaneously critique the “truth-claims” of photography while they mobilize the medium’s documentary capacity to intervene in the classification and subjugation of black life. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of (...) how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice. (shrink)

This article examines recent practices of landscape photography in light of Henri Lefebvre's influential theorisation of the production of space. The abiding value of Lefebvre's analysis for our understanding of social geography and contemporary Capitalism is elaborated through discussion of selected photographic works that, in different ways, each foreground the socio-hisotrically constructed character of space. This analysis enables the rearticulation of Lefebvre's influential analysis of space in light of later artistic practices and in relation to subsequent developments in (...) the form of Capitalism. (shrink)

Woods et al. (2015) claim that secular Simple Reaction Time (SRT) slowing (Woodley et al. 2013), disappears once modern studies are corrected for software and hardware lag, and once Galton’s data are corrected for fastest-response selection. Here, this is challenged with a reanalysis of the secular slowing of SRT in the UK amongst large (N>500), population-representative age-matched (≊18-30 years) studies. Starting with Galton’s sample, this is assigned the simulated value estimated by Dodonova and Dodonov (2013, who like Woods et al. (...) were critical of secular SRT slowing, owing to measurement issues) on the basis that he collected the fastest of three trials (207.5ms). The two sexes in Galton’s study are combined (as in Woods et al.), raising the weighted sample mean to 208.5ms. Next is the Wilkinson and Alison (1989) study, which attempted to replicate Galton’s study one century later, collecting SRTs as part of an exhibit in the London Science Museum. An electronic chronoscope recorded SRTs on magnetic tape, and sampled over eight trials with micro-processor-determined variable foreperiods. The mean SRT value for the 1,189 participants aged between 20 and 29 is 245ms. The presence of long and variable foreperiods necessitates a penalty of 10ms (Dodonova & Dodonov, 2013). Another 10ms should be deducted based on key-pressing time (Dodonova & Dodonov, 2013), reducing the mean to 225ms. The studies of Deary and Der (2005) and Der and Deary (2006) are also included. The first utilized the highly representative Scottish Twenty-07 cohort. Dodonova and Dodonov (2013) identified a 53ms lag stemming from liquid crystal stimulus onset delay. This is subtracted from the weighted average of the two sexes (300.8ms), along with another 10ms for key-pressing time. The resultant mean is 237.8ms.Dodonova and Dodonov (2013) cleaned the male data in the Der and Deary (2006) study, collected from the representative UK Health and Lifestyle Survey, by removing cases for which SRT standard deviations exceeded those for choice RT. This reduced the N from 834 to 661, and also reduced the mean from 300ms to 284ms. The estimate was also penalized for LCD onset delay and key-pressing time, reducing the mean to 221ms. When the SRT value for the female sample is penalized equivalently the resulting value is 239ms. In order to simulate the female N for the purposes of taking a weighted average of both sexes, the actual female N is reduced in proportion to the male N (79.3%=881), yielding a weighted mean of 230.9ms for a combined sample-size of 1,472. Table 1 presents the data used in the analysis.Table 1 SRT means, sample sizes and sampling years for four large, age-matched UK samples[Table 1 here]Consistent with Dodonova and Dodonov (2013), N-weighted regression is employed, as the only data on sample variability is sample size. Figure 1 illustrating the secular trend in UK SRT over 100 years.[Figure 1 here] Figure 1. Secular SRT slowing across four large, representative studies from the UK spanning a century. Bubble-size is proportional to sample size. Combined N=6,622. The secular slowing between UK studies is statistically significant (β=0.97; 95% CI=0.969 to 0.971, N=6,622), at –22.8ms a century. Additional evidence for generational SRT slowing comes from Verhaeghen (2014), who suggested that the ratio of longitudinal to cross-sectional age-related slowing might tentatively infer generational changes in processing speed. Verhaeghen reports ratios for two SRT studies (0.91 and 1.15), implying both secular losses and gains. For the study of Deary and Der (2005), the SRT ratios are “censored because they were excessively large” (p. 256). In this study, the ratio of the cross-sectional slowing trend (taking the weighted average of all paired between-cohort differences rescaled in terms of change per decade for males and females), to the weighted average decadal longitudinal slowing trend for both the males and females is 0.73, for an N of 1,926 (cf. Woodley et al., 2014b, for a detailed reanalysis of this dataset). The weighted average of the three SRT ‘Verhaeghen ratios’ is 0.9 (N=4,078) – tentatively consistent with generational declines (i.e. a ratio of <1). In conclusion Woods et al. (2015) have undoubtedly made an important contribution to the debate concerning the role of software and hardware lag in the inflation of contemporary estimates of SRT, however the evidence for generational SRT slowing remains quite compelling. ReferencesDeary, I.J., & Der, G. (2005). Reaction time, age, and cognitive ability: Longitudinal findings from age 16 to 63 years in representative population samples. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 12, 187–213.Der, G., & Deary, I.J. (2006). Age and sex differences in reaction time in adulthood: Results from the United Kingdom Health Lifestyle Survey. Psychology and Aging, 21, 62–73.Dodonova, Y.A., & Dodonov, Y.S. (2013). Is there any evidence of historical slowing of reaction time? No, unless we compare apples and oranges. Intelligence, 41, 674–687.Galton, F. (1890). Exhibition of instruments (1) for testing the perception of differences of tint, and (2) for determining reaction-time. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 19, 27–29.Verhaeghen, P. (2014). The elements of cognitive aging: Meta-analyses of age-related differences in processing speed and their consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wilkinson, R.T., & Allison, S. (1989). Age and simple reaction time: Decade differences for 5,324 subjects. Journal of Gerontology, 44, 29–35.Woodley, M.A., Madison, G., & Charlton, B.G. (2014b). Possible dysgenic trends insimple visual reaction time performance in the Scottish Twenty-07 cohort: Areanalysis of Deary & Der (2005). Mankind Quarterly, 55, 110-124.Woodley, M.A., te Nijenhuis, J., & Murphy, R. (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time. Intelligence, 41, 843–850.Woods, D.L., Wyma, J.M., Yund, E.W., Herron, T.J., & Reed, B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:131. (shrink)

Edith Stein came to phenomenology after beginning her university studies in psychology. She struggled with the inability of psychology to justify and delineate its founding principles. She found in Edmund Husserl, though his sustained criticisms of psychologism, the possibility of a phenomenological ground for psychology. This article demonstrates how Stein, drawing from but also distancing herself from Husserl, justifies the possibility of a phenomenological psychology framed within a personalist structure of subjectivity and sociality.

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist Raj Patel and environmental (...) historian Jason W. Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach. (shrink)

This article is a critical notice of Sherri Irvin’s Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (2022). After introducing Irvin’s project, notably how she understands the role of “custom rules” for the display and conservation of, and participation in, works of contemporary art, I focus on two case studies that motivate her argument: Jan Dibbets’ work, All shadows that occurred to me (1969) and Sarah Sze’s Migrateurs (1997). According to Irvin, both works require the participation of museum conservators not (...) merely for their preservation, but also realization. Granting the latter, I consider its implications. Prior to the involvement of conservators the works in question appear indeterminate in crucial respects. The conservators’ role is to seek enough clarity about various rules governing the work to afford future installations of the work without consulting the artist. But both case studies reveal considerable artistic whimsy when it comes to abiding by the rules supposedly underwriting these works’ identity, raising worries for their persistence over time. Given their constitutive role, I consider whether there is room, on Irvin’s account, for the conservators to be right and the artist wrong about the nature of the works in question. (shrink)

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its (...) own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art. (shrink)

Sociology of Science: A Critical Canadian Introduction provides an overview of how sociology approaches science and, to a lesser extent, technology. It examines how science developed as a set of theories about both what we know and how we know. The book provides a succinct critical examination of the current state of science studies with a particular emphasis on research conducted by Canadian scholars. Hird illustrates that science studies offers useful perspectives on current and ongoing sociological debates, such (...) as the strengths and limitations of social constructionism, as well as popular public debates, such as the ethics of stem-cell research. Using examples from throughout history and with a focus on the Canadian context, the book provides students with an examination of influential science studies concepts, theories, and debates and situates these theories and debates within contemporary field of sociology. (shrink)

Works by one of the most important artists working in America today—photographs, collaborative projects, ephemeral objects, and trenchant and witty institutional critique. For the past two decades Louise Lawler has been taking photographs of art in situ, from small poignant black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy color pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety of objects—paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements—all of which cleverly describe how (...) art comes to accrue value as it moves through various systems of exchange. Lawler's oeuvre was essential in creating an expanded field for photography, it was crucial in postmodern debates over theories of representation, it remains indelible within the field of institutional critique, and it has always been trenchant and witty in its sustained commitment to a feminist vision of art, art history, and contemporary art practice. But Lawler is also an old-fashioned "artist's artist," long overdue for the kind of serious reconsideration and recognition that this volume affords. The very self-effacing nature of Lawler's practice, however, her continual suspicion about notions of authorship—and her sly disregard for museological conventions—have meant that she has resisted precisely the usual mid-career retrospective. Twice Untitled and Other Pictures, published in conjunction with Lawler's first major museum exhibition in the United States, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, eats away at the standard museum practices of chronology, linear development, and the presentation of masterpieces, opting instead to explore such dynamic themes and undercurrents in Lawler's practice as her relationship to sculpture, her long history of collaborative projects, her production of such ephemera as napkins, matchbooks, and announcement cards, and the steady political dimension of her work—which culminated most recently in works that are deeply critical of the American invasion of Iraq. With essays by art historian and political theorist Rosalyn Deutsche and curators Ann Goldstein and Helen Molesworth, Twice Untitled and Other Pictures promises to be an essential volume for anyone interested in late twentieth- and early twenty-first- century art. (shrink)

As an essential institution of social public aesthetic education, the art museum has always undertaken the primary function of social aesthetic education. The digital art museum expands the role it is not able to play based on the space constructed by the physical art museum. Although the digital construction of domestic art galleries has been carried out for many years, its special significance and unique advantages are difficult to show under the usual operation and exhibition mode. The (...) sudden epidemic has changed people's life track and way of thinking to a certain extent, which will undoubtedly provide a significant development opportunity for the digital art museum. Based on the broad background that the country adheres to building morality and cultivating people, attaches great importance to aesthetic education, and vigorously carries forward the spirit of aesthetic education, this article compares and combs the current digital development achievements of art museums at home and abroad, and it considers the construction and potential problems of the cloud model of digital art museums in China's postepidemic era. This article attempts to provide a theoretical basis for accelerating the renewal of the educational model and ways of contemporary social aesthetic education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates (...) the segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

The history of the concept of “religion” in Western tradition has intrigued scholars for years. This important collection of eighteen essays brings further light to the ongoing debate. Three of the invited participants, W.C. Smith, M. Despland and E. Feil, has each previously written impressive books treating this subject; the last two acknowledged the impact and continuing influence of Smith’s work, The Meaning and End of Religion. An introduction and a recapitulation of Smith’s contribution as a scholar set the stage (...) for a retrospective look at the published literature. Contributors then examine the transformation of words (the classical religio to the modern religion), particularities of religion in nineteenth-century France, Troeltsch’s concept of religion, the study of religion from an Asian point of view and the categorization of “World Religions.” The concluding essays elaborate contemporary anthropological, cross-disciplinary, semiological, deconstructive and psychoanalytical methodological approaches to the concept and study of “religion.” Exploring critically different aspects of the concept and study of religion, these provocative essays typically reflect the methodological pluralism currently existing in the field of Religious Studies. Of interest to scholars and students alike, this collection also contains a complete bibliography of W.C. Smith’s publications. (shrink)