What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, What Art Is challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in The Republic, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent.

This book explores how artistic strategies of resistance have survived under the conservative-authoritarian regime which has been in place in Russia since 2012. It discusses the conditions under which artists work as the state spells out a new state cultural policy, aesthetics change and the state attempts to define what constitutes good taste. It examines the approaches artists are adopting to resist state oppression and to question the present system and attitudes to art. The book addresses a wide range of issues related to these themes, considers the work of individual artists and includes besides its focus on the visual arts also some discussion of contemporary theatre. The book is interdisciplinary: its authors include artists, art historians, theatre critics, historians, linguists, sociologists and political scientists from Russia, Europe and the United States.

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity.

This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

 

This textbook on Instructional Design for Learning is a must for all education and teaching students and specialists. It provides a comprehensive overview about the theoretical foundations of the various models of Instructional Design and Technology from its very beginning to the most recent approaches. It elaborates Instructional Design (ID) as a science of educational planning. The book expands on this general understanding of ID and presents an up-to-date perspective on the theories and models for the creation of detailed and precise blueprints for effective instruction. It integrates different theoretical aspects and practical approaches, such as conceptual ID models, technology-based ID, and research-based ID. In doing so, this book takes a multi-perspective view on the questions that are central for professional ID: How to analyze the relevant characteristics of the learner and the environment? How to create precise goals and adequate instruments of assessment? How to design classroom and technology-supported learning environments? How to ensure effective teaching and learning by employing formative and summative evaluation? Furthermore, this book presents empirical findings on the processes that enable effective instructional designing. Finally, this book demonstrates two different fields of application by addressing ID for teaching and learning at secondary schools and colleges, as well as for higher education.

The issue of capital city relocation is a topic of debate for more than forty countries around the world. In this first book to discuss the issue, Vadim Rossman offers an in-depth analysis of the subject, highlighting the global trends and the key factors that motivate different countries to consider such projects, analyzing the outcomes and drawing lessons from recent capital city transfers worldwide for governments and policy-makers.

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The book includes a general introduction to the everyday in contemporary philosophy, as well as a number of specialized articles. These articles provide short presentations of important 20th and 21st century thinkers of the everyday. The pertinence of their approaches is visualised in empirical studies of the everyday and its representations in photography, film, theatre, childhood narratives and painting.

Under the title Phenomenology of the Eveyday we meant both the stricter sense of the philosophical endeavour launched by Edmund Husserl, and the wider sense of a description of significant features of a phenomenon that concerns us all and that nobody can reject as irrelevant.

This book is a result of the "Urban treasures: Photography" workshop organized by Strelka Institute for media architecture and design and held by Charlie Koolhaas in Moscow from July 2-8 2014.

This book examines Japanese culture of the Muromachi epoch (14-16 centuries) with Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) as its focal point. Ikkyu's contribution to the culture of his time was all-embracing and unique. He can be called the embodiment of his era, given that all the features typical for the Japanese culture of the High Middle Ages were concentrated in his personality. This multidisciplinary study of Ikkyu's artistic, religious, and philosophical heritage reconstructs his creative mentality and his way of life. The aesthetics and art of Ikkyu are shown against a broad historical background. Much emphasis is given to Ikkyu's interpretation of Zen. The book discusses in great detail Ikkyu's religious and ethical principles, as well as his attitude towards sex, and shows that his rebellious and iconoclastic ways were deeply embedded in the tradition. The book pulls together materials from cultural and religious history with literary and visual artistic texts, and offers a multifaceted view on Ikkyu, as well as on the cultural life of the Muromachi period. This approach ensures that the book will be interesting for art historians, historians of literature and religion, and specialists in cultural and visual studies.

The Baku Museum of Modern Art has opened its doors to Lalla Essaydi’s Beyond Time and Beauty exhibition. Beyond Time and Beauty is Essaydi’s first exhibition in Azerbaijan and follows her retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in 2012-13. Bringing together works from across her career, the show features the series Harem, Bullets, Converging Territories and Les Femmes du Maroc. As the curator, Dina Nasser-Khadivi, describes “Essaydi is a remarkable international artist; she navigates pervasive cultural and aesthetic dichotomies to make something wholly original - East and West, Tradition and Modernity and the changing perceptions of women.” A fully illustrated colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition and include an essay by Olga Nefedova, the founding director at the Orientalist Museum, Qatar. Essaydi was raised in Morocco and spent many years in Saudi Arabia, and although she was educated in Europe and the United States, this experience of traditional Islamic life was fundamental in shaping her. Essaydi’s photography provides a contemporary reflection on an iconography that stretches as far back as the Orientalist imagery of nineteenth century artists such as Ingres, Delacroix, and Gérôme. More recently Essaydi has produced a series of pictures in a former harem in Morocco, often swathing her subjects in robes which closely echo the decorative tiles that wall the complex. Lalla Essaydi lives in New York. Selections from her series Les Femmes du Maroc were published by powerHouse Books in 2009. Recent exhibitions of her work have been staged at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Williams College Museum, Williamstown, Mass.; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Her work is represented in the collections of the Louvre, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many others

The volume presents for the first time four 17th-century paintings commissioned by the Habsburg Ambassador Hans-Ludwig von Kuefstein after his diplomatic mission to Istanbul, accompanied by twelve gouache works from a collection in Austria. In spite of its diplomatic and political success in the Ottoman–Habsburg relations, the Kuefstein’s embassy is remembered first of all for its artistic legacy documented by the ambassador’s diary, the draft of a final report to the Emperor, diplomatic correspondence, a list of gifts presented and received, and last but not least, a series of gouaches, executed in Istanbul, and a series of oil paintings – which serve to illustrate various aspects of 17th-century Ottoman life, and provide a detailed account of the ambassador’s mission. The Orientalist Museum of Qatar curatorial and conservation departments, with the assistance of external scientific experts, have embarked upon a collaborative project to provide new insights into the history of the Ottoman–Habsburg relations. The result is the exhibition and the volume Heritage of Art Diplomacy: Memoirs of an Ambassador – the culmination of two years’ restoration and research work aimed to provide a better understanding of the cultural heritage in respect to its aesthetic and historic significance and its physical integrity.

In September 2012 Christie’s will present ‘Of Sand and Silk’, the first European solo-exhibition of the prominent Russian artist Alexander Volkov (1886-1957). The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue. Volkov was born in the Fergana valley into the family of a Russian military doctor. He achieved significant lifetime recognition for his depictions of Central Asia, his paintings uniquely combining cutting-edge Western painterly styles with the inspiration he drew from traditional Central Asian craftsmanship. Volkov loved his homeland passionately and often repeated: “One does not need the whole world. A small part will suffice”.

One of the most popular travel destinations among nobles, wealthy merchants, travellers and diplomats during the sixteenth century was the world of the Ottoman Empire, as European–Ottoman relations pervaded the centuries, combining cultural, political and economic interests. So there was increasing demand for pictorial as well as written records of life in the Ottoman world. Travellers and diplomats commissioned artists as an essential part of their duty to bring back to their countries as much information as possible on all things Turkish. One such record is an album dated 1590 and commissioned by Bartholomäus Schachman, mayor of Danzig (Gdan´sk), traveller and explorer, art patron and collector, benefactor and connoisseur. His journey through the Ottoman Empire lasted two years (1588–89), and his album, conveying the tale of his adventures, became one of the greatest travelogues of the sixteenth century. - See more at: http://www.skira.net/bartholomaus-schachman-1559-1614.html#sthash.Vw3whUBL.dpuf

Orientalism can be defined as a historical and cultural event, which has been uniting various aspects of cultural life for a number of centuries—literature, fine art, architecture, music and philosophy. A "vision" of the East—positive or negative—based on imagination or historic facts, it has generated an exotic image in our consciousness, which has its own right to existence. At a crucial and timely moment in the history of relations between the West and Islam, this book provides the context and essential background to understanding this part of the world and the intense debate on this theme. The art-biographer of the XVIII-century Ottoman Empire Franco-Flemish artist Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737) left a very important legacy—pictorial evidences which can be considered as historical illustrations of all the aspects of XVIII-century Ottoman life: from diplomatic ceremonies in the Ottoman court to everyday events of Istanbul multinational society. It will be of strong interest to scholars of Middle East studies, anthropology, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and literary studies.

Shafik Gabr started his collection of Orientalist art in 1993 by acquiring a painting by Ludwig Deutsch entitled Egyptian Priest Entering a Temple. His collection is today amongst the very few in the world to count such a large number of works by the famed Austrian artist as well as some of the finest examples of the greatest masters of Orientalism such as Jean-Leon Gerome, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Gustav Bauernfeind and many others. Important for both scholars and art lovers, the Shafik Gabr Collection impresses us with its richness and variety. It includes masterpieces by some of the major nineteenth and twentieth century Orientalists found in private hands today and demonstrates the owner's appreciation of differences as well as similarities in European visions of the versatile and diverse Orient. The selection of paintings in this collection illustrates the owner's evolving taste, his relationship with the world of Orientalism and his interest in its European expression. This Orientalist collection is a harmonious "kaleidoscope" of genres, presenting the Orient through a variety of forms, styles and techniques, and revealing to the European viewer the mysterious East with its bright colors, its exotic and leisurely lifestyle. Over the years, it has become one of the most complete and magnificent tributes dedicated to the world of Orientalism and as such some of the most renowned experts in this field have contributed to this book in order to mark its importance in the art world.

The article considers the problem of lost silent films, which is especially relevant to the study of Russian cinema, since most early Russian films have not been preserved, and it is hardly possible to describe the film history of this period without them. It is necessary to reconstruct films that have been lost or have been only partially preserved using every available source: stills, production photographs, reviews, memoirs, etc. A case of such “paper” reconstruction is presented in the article using the example of Vladimir Gardin’s Anna Karenina (1914), one of the most important Russian films of the mid-1910s. The results of this reconstruction prove that Anna Karenina was an innovative screen adaptation made in the spirit of the Silver Age that contributed to the development of the so-called Russian Style in pre-Revolutionary cinema.

The article deals with the first-person unreliable narrator of Emma Healey’s novel, Elizabeth is Missing. Maud, the narrator, makes incredible efforts to investigate her friend’s absence, and finally, she might have disclosed a seventy-year-old mystery.

The article is about of the perception soviet cinema about Donbas.This essay is written in the genre of psychogeography, employing sources from Soviet and post-Soviet films and novels that portray the Donbass as an industrialized space of both collective amnesia and collective memory, conjuring up the surreal territory of the “mining-metallurgical civilization.” The modern context of the Donbass as an area of armed conflict comes up only when related to the industrial past of this region. The problem of Donbass identity in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union is discussed in terms of its integration into the new reality of an independent Ukraine. The essay is about several Soviet films that show the Donbass as a space of labor heroism, a site in the memory of the Great Patriotic War, and contradictory first postwar years of the late Stalinist era. This analysis covers several important films about this space where spy stories and the struggle to improve productivity are complemented by scenes of building a new life on the basis of “cultural” principles.

Review of Isaiah Berlin's The Soviet Mind. Russian Culture under Communism

Abstract. A three-dimensional artistic fractal tomography method that implements a non-glasses 3D visualization of fractal worlds in layered media is proposed. It is designed for the glasses-free 3D vision of digital art objects and films containing fractal content. Prospects for the development of this method in art galleries and the film industry are considered.

Studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This paper shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the objects’ physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesizing the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways whereby an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The paper is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres attracting the visitors’ attention.

A new analysis of the so-called Inscription on the Chalice of Solomon (known mostly from literary documents in Slavonic) is based on the totality of the available sources, including a recently published (2000) Greek recension and recently found (2013) but unpublished two Latin ones. It is argued that the text was written in Hebrew in the late Second Temple period, being therefore roughly contemporaneous to the Damascus Document and some other Dead Sea Scrolls and representing a similar but different liturgy and theology. The original liturgical setting of the chalice as a liturgical utensil is some kind of new wine festival.

Visual propaganda played an enormous role in the history of the twentieth century. Unlike the propaganda of nineteenth century, it was aimed not only at educated classes in the imperial centers, but also at subaltern masses living in the colonies of great powers, including the vast territories in the east and south of the former Russian Empire. Posters created for (and with the assistance of) Muslims between the two world wars in the Soviet Orient (i.e., in the Volga region, Crimea, Urals, and Siberia, on the Caucasus and in the Central Asia) represent an enormous and still poorly studied layer in the history of Soviet propaganda. So far, the posters have been studied primarily in the context of art history. But the creation of visual propaganda is critical for historical reconstructions as well. It is more important to understand posters’ language, historical context, attitude to public policy, cultural background, in other words - the discourse of propaganda. This is a part of life, even if semiofficial, the loss of which would simplify and impoverish the picture of the past. Discursive analysis of poster art allows one to understand the relationship between knowledge and power in society, the role of different social strata in its reproduction, and the aspects of perception and rejection of official propaganda.

In the past 20 years, the increasing number of papers in cultural studies, sociology of the arts and industrial sociology has been focused on creative/cultural workers. They critically reconsidered the over-optimistic view on creative workforce presented earlier by the cultural economists as R. Florida, C. Landry and others. However, there are still many topics, which remain understudied. First, most of the studies were focused on free-lancers, short contract and self-employed workers and still exclude those who are employed full-time or strongly tied with an institutional organization. Furthermore, while much research has been devoted to the UK, other regions or global concerns have gained little attention. This paper aims to bridge abovementioned gap at least partly by presenting an empirical case of full-time workers in Moscow art-centres, based on 20  in-depth interviews and 20 observations at the workplaces and public events of these centres.   

The preprint is dedicated to the Ukrainian architectural features of 18th century Russsian buildings. Many of these were built in the milieu of intense cultural exchange between Russia and Ukraine. The research aims to discuss how exactly and why Ukrainian elements were used in Russian architecture. Volume organization and decoration of Russian buildings having Ukrainian features are analyzed and compared. The results reveal a clear distinction between the buildings which intentionally copy Ukrainian models or singular elements and those unintentionally using some Ukrainian features as elements of architectural fashion. The detailed analysis of such cases is invaluable for the understanding of Russian architectural transformation in the 18th century.

Throughout history Chinese artistic culture has developed a fairly complex system of diverse art forms and styles. Chinese export art, being created particularly to satiate constantly growing appetite of the Western world for Chinese goods, holds a specific place among them. In spite of being considered as insignificant in terms of artistic merits, nevertheless, Chinese export painting succeeded to cover a modest segment in the European market in the XVIII – XIX centuries. Unlike most other types of Chinese decorative and applied arts, Chinese export painting until recently has never been taken as a subject of scientific research. The collection of the National Library of Russia possesses a number of Chinese painting albums. Comprehensive study of these art works might bridge lacunas for research of other multitudinous kinds of Chinese export arts and crafts of the XVIII-XIX centuries.

Clothing and fashion play significant role in the process of ageing, and help put bodily experiences in the context of culture. It is especially important for young people as social subjects, who are starting to become independent but do not have sufficient experience and social competences to do this.    This paper explores how youth of middle and working class in Russia use clothing to denote their social identity and construct boundaries.The paper is based on materials of 81 IDI with young people from St. Petersburg.

The paper examines social features and cultural profile of the audience of Manifesta 10, first global scaled art-event ever hold in St. Petersburg and Russia as well. Based on the empirical study of 400 formalized interviews with biennale visitors (July-September 2014), this paper compares the audience of Manifesta 10 with visitors of European art-events, firstly previous edition of Manifesta. Despite the democratization of the field of contemporary art (including the elimination of the financial barrier to access to the exhibition), the research shows that the majority of visitors are people with higher education and income slightly exceeding national average. The significant differences were found also: Russian audience is biased towards younger visitors (more than 70% is younger than 35) and gender misbalanced. The study also shows the differences between the patterns of art-tourism in Russia and Europe:  European event attracts larger flows from neighboring regions, in Russia there is a long tail: small groups from many distant locations.   

The paper aims to explore how aesthetic objects are constituted in the process of perception. Most of the studies of arts in social sciences take an artwork for granted and assume that it is seen because it is meant to be seen. Using examples of recent works in the sociology of art, I demonstrate that this question is usually ignored by the researchers, even though their empirical data reveals its importance. To overcome this disadvantage I suggest a theoretical analysis which includes Simmel’s aesthetic theory, phenomenological concepts of attention and contemporary approaches to perception in the sociology of art. As a result, I formulate a set of guiding conceptual principles and apply them to the study of the architectural festival “Arkhstoyanie”. The empirical cases provided in this paper show how and why certain artworks become an object of contemplation, disappear, or achieve a multiple presence.

The paper aims to provide analysis of the most general problems of the music industry in the digital age. It poses a question about the possibility of innovation and conceptual development in contemporary popular music, overflowed with retromania. A growing popularity of such form as a “concept album” and its transformation into concept multimedia projects is regarded as a positive sign of the changes in music production and distribution. Detailed cultural analysis of one particular case, the multimedia concept project by the British band Gorillaz, demonstrates how a substantial cultural and musical innovation can exist today in the framework of popular entertainment. The last studio album by Gorillaz, called Plastic Beach (2010) works with the concept of Utopia and utopian imagery, presenting music as a space for free and meaningful collaboration among musicians and for the creation of the diverse community of listeners.  

Hokusai  Manga  (HM)  is  the  biggest  and  the  best  known  work  of  Katsushika  Hokusai  (1760-1849)  which  consists  of  ca.  900  pp.  published  in  15  volumes  from  1814  to  1875.  This  publication  discusses  the  phenomenon  of  HM  and  its  place  in  the  context  of  Japanese  picture  books. Was it a drawing manual or comic cartoons or perhaps a pictorial encyclopedia? What are  the historical meanings and etymology of the word manga? The special attention is devoted to the principles of compilation of HM and to the ways of  organization of the compositional unity of its volumes. This research  offers a major revision of  the textual nature of this famous, yet insufficiently studied, masterpiece. Contrary to the common  belief  that  HM  is  a  chaotic  jumble  of  random  disjointed  pictures,  every  volume  is  act ually  composed as a sophisticated whole with the help of elaborate schemata  deeply imbedded in the  traditional Japanese ways of textual organization.