Value Art Politics

Value, Art, Politics draws together questions of value and evaluation in relation to studies of historical and contemporary art and artists, within a broad 'social history of art' conceptual framework. Topics covered include the status of aesthetic and other judgements and their relation to analytic methods in the discipline; the reformulation of feminist aesthetics and cultural politics; the impact of postcolonial theory; the status of 'traditional' media now such as paintings and sculptures; new technologies of visual representation; Marxism and culture after Postmodernism; revisionist histories of formalist criticism.

Essays, conversations, and artist portfolios confront questions at the intersection of race, institutional life, and representation. Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation. The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity. Copublished with the New Museum

Contemporary art is increasingly concerned with swaying the opinions of its viewier. To do so, the art employs various strategies to convey a political message. This book provides readers with the tools to decode and appreciate political art, a crucial and understudied direction in post-war art. From the postwar works of Pablo Picasso and Alexander Deineka to thie Border Film Project and web-based works of Beatriz da Costa, Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change after 1945 considers how artists visual or otherwise have engaged with major political and grassroots movements, particularly after 1960. With its broad definition of the political, this book features chapters on postcolonialism, feminism, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, gay rights and anti-globiliaztion. It charts how individual artworks reverberated with enormous idealogical shifts. While emphasising the West, Art and Politics takes global developments into account as well - looking at art production practiced by postcolonial African, Latin American and Middle Eastern artists. Its case-study approach to the subject provides the reader with an overview of a most complex subject. This book will also challenge its readers to consider often devalued and marginalised political artworks as properly part of the history of modern and contemporary art.

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term “value” in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet’s art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, “high in value” and “low in value”? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history’s most famous and racially charged paintings, Édouard Manet’s Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced the new “law of values” in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola’s essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola’s usage of value was intentionally double coded—an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet’s painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet’s painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism’s roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

"Money for Art is the story of public funding of the arts in modern America - the risks and achievements inherent in the ongoing relationship among artists, art administrators, and the legislators who control spending. It is a story of noble intentions that have often foundered on the conflict between individual creativity and democratic expectations." "As David A. Smith shows, government funding of the arts in America has never followed an easy course. Whether on a local or national scale, political support for the arts has carried with it a sense of exchange - the expectation that in return for public money the community will benefit. But this concept is fraught with potential difficulties that touch upon basic tensions between the fierce vision of the individual artist and the standards of the community."--BOOK JACKET.

Author addresses the deplorable absence of discourse on black artists.

Through comparative and integrated case studies, this book demonstrates how aesthetics becomes politics in cultural policy. Contributors from Norway, Sweden and the UK analyse exactly what happens when art is considered relevant for societal development, at both a practical and theoretical level. Cultural policy is seen here as a mechanism for translating values, that through organized and practical aesthetical judgement lend different forms of agency to the arts. What happens when aesthetical value is reinterpreted as political value? What kinds of negotiations take place at a cultural policy ground level when values are translated and reinterpreted? By addressing these questions, the editors present an original collection that effectively centralises and investigates the role of aesthetics in cultural policy research.

In dem Band wird erörtert, ob die Strafrechtstheorie (bzw. die allgemeine Rechtstheorie) als ein Zweig der Wissenschaft angesehen werden kann. Dabei werden folgende Fragen behandelt: In welchem Sinne ist die Strafrechtslehre eine Form der Wissenschaft? Kann es systemische Entwicklungen in der Strafrechtstheorie geben? Die Frage nach dem Wesen der strafrechtlichen Erkenntnis ist eng verknüpft mit der Frage, was Rechtswissenschaft im Allgemeinen ausmacht. Eine Diskussion im Bereich des Strafrechts kann einen Beitrag zur allgemeinen Diskussion in der Rechtstheorie leisten und deutlich machen, wo die Strafrechtstheorie steht, wenn die juristische Forschung mit den Herausforderungen der Interdisziplinarität konfrontiert wird. Mit Beiträgen von Petter Asp, Thomas Elholm, Liang Genlin, Luís Greco, Eric Hilgendorf, Jørn Jacobsen, Heike Jung, Massimiliano Lanzi, Shin Matsuzawa, Kimmo Nuotio und Michael Pawlik.