This book is dedicated to Viktor Shklovsky literary and theoretical legacy

This collection of essays was published in a form of a catalogue for one of the propgrams screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Fstival in October 2019. The program entitled "The Creative Treatment of Grierson in Wartime Japan" was co-organized by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the National Film Archive of Japan and presented a broad variety of wartime Japanese documentaries as well as British and Soviet films that have influenced them. The collection of essays explores the development of wartime Japanese documentary cinema from variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.

This collection of thirteen vignettes addresses several important episodes in the history of Russian temporary architecture and public art, from the royal festivals during the times of Peter the Great up to the recent venues including the Sochi Winter Olympics. The forms and the circumstances of their design were drastically different; however, the projects discussed in the book share a common feature: they have been instrumental in the construction of Russia’s national identity, with its perception of the West - simultaneously, a foe and a paragon - looming high over this process. The book offers a history of multidirectional relationships between diplomacy, propaganda, and architecture.

Looking at pictures can be a delightful, exciting or moving experience, but some pictures – and these are often the most rewarding – require some explanation before they can be fully understood. Delving into the origins, designs and themes of over 100 pictures from different periods and places, this book illuminates the art of looking at – and talking about – pictures. Woodford shows how you can read a picture by examining the formal and stylistic devices used by an artist, and explores popular themes and subject matters, and the relationship of pictures to the societies that produced them. The book is supplemented by a glossary of key terms, ranging from art movements and technical terms to religious and classical terminology, to give readers all the information they need at their fingertips.

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

Academic Bibliography of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies in Russian published in 2019.

The legacy of Russian psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is most closely associated with the cultural-historical paradigm and, in the West, has found its most extensive application in contemporary developmental and educational psychology. However, Vygotsky’s project was far more ambitious than this perspective implies—in fact, he conceived a new, original program of general psychology that could address human beings in their full measure, foregrounding the human potential for freedom and agency. The distinctive characteristic of Vygotsky’s approach was his profound interdisciplinarity and, specifically, his evolving dialogue with art practices and aesthetics, the scope of which has only become clear with the recent publication of previously unpublished archival material and his writings as an art and literary critic. This article has two aims: to outline a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of Vygotsky’s views on general psychology, on the basis of recent archival discoveries and publications, and attending to these materials closely, to explicate the role that Vygotsky allocated to art in his radical project of creating the “height psychology.”

In recent decades the social history of art has revealed that virtually no piece of art in the Renaissance was created just because of a painter’s intention or desire.  It was an expensive undertaking and normally had a commission with the commissioner’s expectations behind it.   Renaissance art works have conventional meanings and functions which are not always evident to  contemporary viewers. Research on meaning and function ­– these two basics are deeply imbedded in the historical context – has dramatically changed our understanding of many central artworks, such as Venus of Urbino by Titian or Primavera by Botticcelli.  Few attempts  have been made to define the possible function of Lady at her Toilette by Giulio Romano from the Moscow Pushkin State Museum. The issues of why and under what circumstances this enigmatic painting was created have not received much scholarly attention. Issues of its function have not been addressed directly – few scholars have questioned why it was created. The present study aims at defining the meaning, the function and the possible patron of this painting.

This article presents an analysis of the movement of children’s choir studios (DKhS), which began in the late 1950s and included some one million participants before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The movement, facilitated by state decrees of 1957-1958, aimed to produce a particular subjectivity. The subject was to embrace national culture and correct aesthetics, extreme discipline and responsibility, a proper and enthusiastic work ethic, and friendship and collectivism—in sum, to be an exemplar of a “disciplined emotional solidarity.” Creation of such a disciplined, collectivist subject was crucial during the early post-Stalin years, given the leadership’s need and desire to replace repression with positive mobilization. In this sense, the children’s choir studios were very much of their time.

This article explores the way of evaluation of artistic recognition by analysing the materials of critics writings. Focusing on the post-war unofficial contemporary art scene in Soviet Union and Post-soviet Russia, we put an emphasis on mechanisms of legitimation and dynamics of artistic prestige in the restricted field of underground art. The research reveals major patterns for not only the recognitional process of unofficial Soviet art, but also discuss the role of criticism in the transitional period in a Post-Soviet republic.  Politics turbulence caused by the dissolution of Soviet Union, facilitated radical changes in conditions for artistic production and transformation.  By employing methods of social network analysis (SNA) we reconstruct and evaluate interconnections between unofficial post-war artists and critics, working in three the most significant paper media in the 1990s.

This article is a polemics on the methodology of research in historical inquiry discussing recent publications in the domain of early Soviet children’s books. The study of this material has gained momentum in recent years. Scholars use this material for many reasons: demonstration of the new facets of the Russian Avant-garde, investigation of peculiarities of the Soviet childhood, or for deconstruction of the subtle way of indoctrination of the first generation of the Soviet kids and construction of the New Man (as in my own book which happened to be the first English-language monograph on the subject of Soviet picture-books). The article problematizes the limits of the usage of the trendy theories (or their buzzwords – like “disempowerment”) for writing on the material which cannot be easily matched with these theories. It discusses broad methodological issues: the applicability of fashionable theories to a given subject matter and where-when-how the popular agenda turns into tendentiousness and distortion of facts.  

 

 

The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore “biennial art” that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which “artfulness” is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large.

The paper is focused on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s film “Picture of Dorian Gray”, a screen version of Oscar Wilde’s novel released in 1915. This famous film is considered to be lost, yet one can learn of it using various sources: a film script, a list of intertitres and other documents held in RGALI, a libretto, stills published in the press, film reviews and memoirs. These sources can help to reconstruct film structure. Historical context of the film will also be discussed. Meyerhold seems to have used many translations of Oscar Wilde’s novel and some theatrical adaptations of Oscar Wilde in Russia before 1915. It is argued that Basil Hallward for Meyerhold was an autobiographical character as well as Lord Henry played by Meyerhold himself. Thus Meyerhold’s approach to the novel is similar to that of Oscar Wilde’s: the writer called himself a prototype of all three main characters. “Picture of Dorian Gray” (1915) may be considered to be the portrait of its author, theatre and film director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

During the Cold War, official Soviet institutions organized tens of exhibitions of an American figurative artist Rockwell Kent. These exhibitions, undertaken bypassing the official United States, demonstrate that promotion of Kent in the USSR was an exclusively Soviet enterprise. Examining the role of Soviet institutions in Kent’s success, the article sheds new light on the Soviet approach to the representation of American visual art during the Cold War.

Basing on unique findings from American and Russian archives, the article provides a comprehensive analysis of political and aesthetical factors, which predetermined Kent’s incredible popularity in the Soviet Union. Contextualizing the Soviet representation of Kent within relevant Cold War contexts, the article argues that Kent occupied a specific symbolic position in Soviet culture, as Soviet propaganda re-conceptualized the artist’s biography and established the Myth of Rockwell Kent. This myth served for legitimization of Soviet ideology and for anti-American 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.