The Art Of The Poor

The history of art in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance has generally been written as a story of elites: bankers, noblemen, kings, cardinals, and popes and their artistic interests and commissions. Recent decades have seen attempts to recast the story in terms of material culture, but the focus seems to remain on the upper strata of society. In his inclusive analysis of art from 1300 to 1600, Rembrandt Duits rectifies this. Bringing together thought-provoking ideas from art historians, historians, anthropologists and museum curators, The Art of the Poor examines the role of art in the lower social classes of Europe and explores how this influences our understanding of medieval and early modern society. Introducing new themes and raising innovative research questions through a series of thematically grouped short case studies, this book gives impetus to a new field on the cusp of art history, social history, urban archaeology, and historical anthropology. In doing so, this important study helps us re-assess the very concept of 'art' and its function in society.

An unconventional socio-economic analysis of the economic position of the arts and artists

An examination of the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections, with works that use the powerlessness of art. Cybernetics of the Poor examines the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections in the past and present. From the late 1940s on, the term cybernetics began to be used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in order to intervene in changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, under digital capitalism cybernetics has since become an economic factor (particularly in the realm of big data). In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to a new situation: a cybernetics of the poor. Cybernetics of the Poor presents work that uses the powerlessness of art--its poverty--vis-à-vis the cybernetic machine to propose countermodels: work that is both recent and historical by artists who believed in cybernetics as a participatory, playful practice or were pioneers in delineating a counter-cybernetics. How much of what Thomas Pynchon termed "counterforce" exists within art when it is conceived as a cybernetics of the poor?

The Art of Poverty is the first book in English to analyze depictions of beggars in 16th-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France, and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It argues that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The book tracks the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, alongside the other predominant visual mode, where beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. The Art of Poverty's progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme makes it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture.

Everything you always wanted to know about the art market but were afraid to ask. A pioneering collector explains how to use passion and intuition to acquire key pieces or build a collection--even on a limited budget.

The story of a middle-class, immigrant pianist who has fallen on hard times, and now finds himself washing dishes to make ends meet. He awakens to the possibility of a solution to his troubles and begins to formulate a plan of attack, in which the only answer is to get rid of the 1%.

Documents the author's observations of circumstances reflected in a maximum-security prison and subsequent launch of a humanities college course for dropouts, immigrants and former inmates who eventually became high-achieving contributors to society.

Catholicism in China has had a history of over seven hundred years. Especially since the founding of New China, it has experienced many ups and downs, but its adherents have never disappeared. Especially in some out-of-the-way rural areas, Catholicism represents important spiritual sustenance for many, and penetrates all aspects of daily life.Yang Yankang spent ten years in the Shaanxi countryside creating his exquisite set of works documenting Chinese rural Catholics, The Poor in Spirit. With empathy and humour, he depicts churches and solemn ceremonies rising like apparitions in the remotest countryside; a wall calendar of celebrity photographs written over with a musical score, played by a group of women; dugouts and earth houses used for preaching and ministry; a rural family assembling a Christ figure; the pious faces of children singing; processions through the wheat fields of mourners in traditional Chinese funeral dress, carrying the coffin or shouldering a cross; a priest in ceremonial attire conducting mass for the sick in a maize field, and so on.Documentary photography practice in China started, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a focus on people marginalized by the mainstream (psychiatric patients, homosexuals, transgender people, Catholics, free artists, etc.), and on vulnerable groups deliberately neglected by the powerful elites. These images by Yang Yankang demonstrate a courage in facing Chinese social reality - the images themselves have a visual intensity, and the photographer expresses compassion through them.