A Philosophy Of Cultural Scenes In Art And Popular Culture

This book seeks to understand culture through the lens of scenes, analyzing them aesthetically and culturally as well as understanding them through the frameworks of gender, social networks, and artworlds. It is common to talk about the cultural and intellectual scenes of early twentieth-century Vienna, the visual art scene of postwar New York, and the music and fashion scene of the swinging London. We often think about artists and works of art as essentially belonging to a certain scene. Scenes might offer a new approach to study what is possible, what is a tradition, and/or to discuss what are the relevant units of contemporary culture for research. The book posits that scenes explain a lot about how the artworld and the cultural field function. Vivienne Westwood, Rene Magritte, Roman Jakobson, Arthur C. Danto, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Didier Eribon are among the figures included in the book, which examines scenes in cities such as Moscow, Bombay, New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Helsinki, and Bratislava. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, philosophy, film, literature, and urban studies.

Discussing popular culture is one of the keys for understanding arts and more broadly culture. This is something which seems to be shared by the scholars who have contributed to this book. Their essays on popular culture and/or the aesthetics of popular culture serve as a platform for discussing cultural, ethical and political issues. Popular culture and its philosophical reflection also help to unlock themes in law, children's literature, everyday aesthetics, high-cultural heritage, the internet, and material culture. In the Interviews section editors discuss some of the roots of these issues with two thinkers who represent the cream of the discussion. With Richard Shusterman, we delve into his theory of popular culture, and with Gianni Vattimo, the popular goes hand in hand with a discussion that more broadly touches on culture and the arts.

How do we define 'culture?' In this volume, Adam Muller brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars in a number of different disciplines who each examine the concept of culture as it is understood and deployed within their respective fields.

This thesis argues that the contemporary artist's objective is the production of new social space and the institution of new cultural knowledge. It does this by drawing an unexpected parallel between the social and political expectations facing the contemporary artist and the deepest philosophic conception of the artist's function. It traces art's historical trajectory from 20th century modernism, post-modernism to post-colonialism, from a broad range of critical, theoretical and curatorial perspectives.

The first scholarly monograph devoted exclusively to this vital work of contemporary public art, this book examines Maya Lin’s Confluence Project through the lens of environmental humanities and Indigenous studies. Matthew Reynolds provides a detailed analysis of each earthwork, along with a discussion of the proposed final project at Celilo Falls near The Dalles, Oregon. The book assesses the artist’s longtime engagement with the region of the Pacific Northwest and explores the Confluence Project within Lin’s larger oeuvre. Several consistent themes and experiences are common amongst all the sites. These include an emphasis on individual, multisensory encounters with the earthworks and their surrounding contexts; sound as an experiential dimension of landscape; indexical accounts of the multicultural, multispecies histories of each place; and an evocation of loss. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and Native American studies.

This book is an introduction to the history of the concept and the institution of (fine) art, from its ancient Southern European roots to the establishment of the modern system of the arts in eighteenth century Central Europe. It highlights the way the concept and institution of (fine) art, through colonialism and diaspora, conquered the world. Ryynänen presents globally competing frameworks from India to Japan but also describes how the art system debased local European artistic cultures (by women, members of the working class, etc) and how art with the capital A appropriated not just non-Western but also Western alternatives to art (popular culture). The book discusses alternative art forms such as sport, kitsch, and rap music as pockets of resistance and resources for future concepts of art. Ultimately, the book introduces nobrow as an alternative to high and low, a new concept that sheds light on the democratic potentials of the field of art and invites reader to rethink the nature of art.

Precisely 30 years after the debut of her provocative photo-portraits, this book chronicles the early career of Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat. In its first 20 years, Neshat’s work weaved viewers into complex readings of women and power in Iran. Yet her images also drew criticisms of exoticizing Muslim women, and later video installations were accused of lacking political assertion during stormy relations between the West and the Islamic world. Now broadly recognized as a social justice artist, this volume chronicles Neshat’s evolution from photography to film, from personal to political expression, and expands existing scholarship to investigate underserved contexts for her work, including the cinematic turn and emergent theories of globality in contemporary art. Neshat’s hyphenated identity was often attenuated by reductive and exoticizing discourses; therefore, this volume draws attention to her transnational methodologies, informed by strategies of appropriation, performativity, and embodiment while articulating Persian visual and literary traditions. Complicating simplistic ethnographies, her disruption of neo-Orientalist paradigms and representations has led audiences to reconsider Islamophobic, Islamism, and gender repressions that are political, psychological, and above all cross-cultural. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, photography, cinema studies, performance, transnational and global studies, women’s studies, and Iranian studies.

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.