Art And Its Discontents

Author : Richard Read
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271022963
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Art and Its Discontents written by Richard Read and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902&–1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown. Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he weaves Stokes's experiences and writings into the great social and cultural issues of his era. Stokes's friendship with Ezra Pound is given its due, but Read balances his exploration of Stokes's modernist ideas with detailed discussion of his profound debt to the teachings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Seen in this broad perspective, Stokes emerges as a thinker who bridged Victorian and modernist cultures and renewed the British tradition of aesthetic criticism.

Author : Martin Gammon
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262037580
Total Pages : 445 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Deaccessioning and Its Discontents written by Martin Gammon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history of the deaccession of objects from museum collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum practice. Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works—formally remove objects from permanent collections—with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that deaccession is always wrong—and “deaccession apology”—when museums justify deaccession by finding some fault in the object—as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role of deaccessions in proper museum practice. He chronicles a series of deaccession events in Britain and the United States that range from the disastrous to the beneficial, and proposes a typology of principles to guide future deaccessions. Gammon describes the liquidation of the British Royal Collections after Charles I's execution—when masterworks were used as barter to pay the king's unpaid bills—as establishing a precedent for future deaccessions. He recounts, among other episodes, U.S. Civil War veterans who tried to reclaim their severed limbs from museum displays; the 1972 “Hoving affair,” when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a number of works to pay for a Velázquez portrait; and Brandeis University's decision (later reversed) to close its Rose Art Museum and sell its entire collection of contemporary art. An appendix provides the first extensive listing of notable deaccessions since the seventeenth century. Gammon ultimately argues that vibrant museums must evolve, embracing change, loss, and reinvention.

Author : Jacques Rancière
Publisher : Polity
ISBN 13 : 0745646301
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics and Its Discontents written by Jacques Rancière and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today's calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Author : Jacques Rancière
Publisher : Polity
ISBN 13 : 074564631X
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics and Its Discontents written by Jacques Rancière and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-08-17 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated by Steven Corcoran Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today?s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Author : Anita Brookner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140294897
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Romanticism and Its Discontents written by Anita Brookner and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, the author has written her first book on art history for many years. She examines the works and lives of eight 10th century painters and writers.

Author : Patricia Mainardi
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300101041
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Husbands, Wives, and Lovers written by Patricia Mainardi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural and social history of early 19th-century France, Patricia Mainardi focuses on what was considered a major social problem of the time - adultery. In a period when expectations about marriage were changing, the problems of husbands, wives and lovers became a major theme in theatre, literature and the visual arts. The author demonstrates that this intense interest was historically grounded in the post-revolutionary collision between the new concept of the individual's right to happiness and the traditional prerogatives of family and state. duty or happiness more important? Are arranged marriages doomed to be empty of love and poisoned by adultery? Should adulterous wives and their lovers be punished while husbands may commit adultery with impunity? Out of such legal, social and cultural debates ultimately emerged modern bourgeois family values, Mainardi argues. And she illuminates how art, in all its varieties, both influences and is influenced by social change.

Author : Maria Boletsi
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804785376
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barbarism and Its Discontents written by Maria Boletsi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which "civilization" fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others "barbarians." Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. Boletsi recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.

Author : Gordon McMullan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191009938
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Late Style and its Discontents written by Gordon McMullan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production—often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work. The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.

Author : James Elkins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135872562
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Master Narratives and their Discontents written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bracing engagement with the many versions of art history, James Elkins argues that the story of modernism and postmodernism is almost always told in terms of four narratives. Works of art are either seen as modern or postmodern, or praised for their technical skill or because of the politics they appear to embody. These are master narratives of contemporary criticism, and each leads to a different understanding of what art is and does. Both a cogent overview of the state of thinking about art and a challenge to think outside the art historical box, Master Narratives and their Discontents is the first volume in a series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Author : Michelle Pannor Silver
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547927
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Retirement and Its Discontents written by Michelle Pannor Silver and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the popular imagination, retirement promises a well-deserved rest—idle days spent traveling, volunteering, pursuing hobbies, or just puttering around the house. But as the nature of work has changed, becoming not just a means of income but a major source of personal identity, many accomplished professionals struggle with discontentment in their retirement. What are we to do—individually and as a culture—when work and life experience make conventional retirement a burden rather than a reprieve? In Retirement and Its Discontents, Michelle Pannor Silver considers how we confront the mismatch between idealized and actual retirement. She follows doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors, and homemakers during their transition to retirement as they struggle to recalibrate their sense of purpose and self-worth. The work ethic and passion that helped these retirees succeed can make giving in to retirement more difficult, as they confront newfound leisure time with uncertainty and guilt. Drawing on in-depth interviews that capture a range of perceptions and common concerns about what it means to be retired, Silver emphasizes the significance of creating new retirement strategies that support social connectedness and personal fulfillment while countering ageist stereotypes about productivity and employment. A richly detailed and deeply personal exploration of the challenges faced by accomplished retirees, Retirement and Its Discontents demonstrates the importance of personal identity in forging sustainable social norms around retirement and helps us to rethink some of the new challenges for aging societies.