Modern Art In The Common Culture

Hoofdstukken over kunstenaars en kunstuitingen vormen het uitgangspunt van deze Studie over de relatie tussen avant-garde kunst en de massacultuur

Readins in high & low

Uses popular and lesser-known paintings to show modern art's reflection of a dying culture and how Christian attitudes can create hope in today's society.

Modern Art Culture: A Reader provides an essential resource for understanding the culture of modern art since the 1960s. In recent years, media theorists and historians have asked whether works of imaginative art can have any impact in our image-saturated culture. Given the power of institutions, how do radical artists produce effective cultural interventions? In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, many argue that pressing questions about works of art and their meanings are inseparable not only from contemporary social and political issues but also from major debates and developments in the last four decades. To explore such questions and issues, the Reader is divided into six related parts with articles from journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues that exemplify important interventions from the 1960s onwards: Histories, Representations and Remembrance; Art and Visual/Mass/Popular Culture; Institutions; Inclusions/Exclusions; Bodies and Identities; Power and Permissibility. Texts range from artists' engagement with the veil and veiling as metaphors for post-colonialist understandings of representation and contemporary art to early debates about, for example, 'activist art', discourses of the 'body', civil rights, ethnicity, and cultural power. Importantly these selected texts offer examples of analysis that can enable readers to examine, critically, their own selection of representations produced in a variety of contexts.

02 This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. This gorgeous book presents and discusses the oils, works on paper, and other artistic creations of William Holman Hunt, one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

Grant Kester discusses the disparate network of artists & collectives united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, & culture.

Robin Veder's The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to achieve kinesthetic goals. In fact, the formalist approach to art was galvanized by theories of bodily response derived from experimental physiological psychology and facilitated by contemporary body cultures such as modern dance, rhythmic gymnastics, physical education, and physical therapy. Situating these complementary ideas and exercises in relation to enduring fears of neurasthenia, Veder contends that aesthetic modernism shared industrial modernity's objective of efficiently managing neuromuscular energy. In a series of finely grained and interconnected case studies, Veder demonstrates that diverse modernists associated with the Armory Show, the SociŽtŽ Anonyme, the Stieglitz circle (especially O'Keeffe), and the Barnes Foundation participated in these discourses and practices and that "kin-aesthetic modernism" greatly influenced the formation of modern art in America and beyond. This daring and completely original work will appeal to a broad audience of art historians, historians of the body, and American culture in general.

Shine allures and awakens desire. As a phenomenon of perception shiny things and materials fascinate and tantalize. They are a formative element of material culture, promising luxury, social distinction and the hope of limitless experience and excess. Since the early twentieth century the mass production, dissemination and popularization of synthetic materials that produce heretofore-unknown effects of shine have increased. At the same time, shine is subjectified as “glamor” and made into a token of performative self-empowerment. The volume illuminates genealogical as well as systematic relationships between material phenomena of shine and cultural-philosophical concepts of appearance, illusion, distraction and glare in bringing together renowned scholars from various disciplines.