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The border is everyone's, can be seen by everyone, and is travelled and crossed in multiple and dynamic ways. Northern Mexico's border cities have particular characteristics that distinguish them from others. Ciudad Juárez is one of the 100 most resilient cities, and along with its sister city of El Paso, Texas, is a space that claims the right to the city through "artivism", a series of actions and manifestations of art and resistance. This paper maps and analyses these spatial appropriations in Ciudad Juárez as an essential dimension of the right to urban life and a symbolic territory for dialogue between urban residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of frame plays a significant role in art design. However, traditional picture frames do not offer human interaction. To create a new dimension of graphic artwork demonstration, we utilize the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to develop human and digital frame interaction. Specifically, this paper uses IoTtalk, an application-layer IoT device management platform, to quickly establish connections and meaningful interactions between IoT devices. The interaction between human and frame is accomplished by implementing an output device of IoTtalk called FrameTalk, which allows the input devices to control the dynamic graphics on a digital frame. The FrameTalk device can be exhibited in specific frame hardware or the screen of any computing device. We illustrate the functional block diagram of the FrameTalk device and its default applications. Then we demonstrate two FrameTalk application examples. The first example is CalligraphyTalk, where an audience can interact with the frame to write Chinese poems. The second example is PortraitGuess that allows an audience to play the historical figures portrait painting guess game by the frame. We measure the delays between the smartphone and the FrameTalk device, and develop both analytic and simulation models to investigate the user experience of the FrameTalk applications. Our study indicates that good user experience can be achieved in FrameTalk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature and context of censorship from the perspective of those who have been censored. Sixteen visual artists, whose work has been challenged, restricted, or removed from display, were interviewed. They discuss why their art was challenged, the broader themes of their art, how it felt to be the recipient of such a challenge, and the broader implications of challenging artwork. The respondents also discussed the definition and significance of censorship and community support. Artists acknowledged that they frequently challenged social norms, but were nonetheless surprised when their work was challenged by onlookers. This paper explores this paradox of shock, analyzes artists' emotional responses, considers definitions of censorship, and reflects on the broader value of art for society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the designation of cultural actors' actions as a decisive factor in the emergence of urban patterns of art-driven social co-presences in Istanbul. It contributes to the creative city debate from the perspective of community development by incorporating the contemporary arts into urban social space making efforts. Methodologically, the locations of art organizations in the contemporary arts scene of Istanbul are approached as an urban pattern of art driven social co-presences that resulted from the 'collective action' in which a multitude of cultural actors are involved. We find that the clusters of art organizations serve as multidimensional social interactions among artist communities. There are, however, inefficiencies in spreading this interactive networking throughout different social segments. Research findings conclude that the cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place, are not effectively contributing to the society's social coherence, particularly in terms of creating links with disadvantageous neighbourhood residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing concern over environmental sustainability and socioecological well‐being has motivated people to consider ways to reconnect humans with the natural world through lifestyle changes that integrate well with natural systems. Educators who share environmental concerns have explored diverse aspects of ecological art practices to envision an extended and socially relevant role of art. Accordingly, the present study aims to bring educators' attention to a collective journey of artists who have immersed themselves in making an affective relationships with nature. Regarding the journey as an invaluable cultural resource that holds the potential to extend the horizon of how we may live with nature, it examines the collective journey of the artists in Yatoo, an artist association based in Gongju, a greenery city in the southwest region of South Korea. The guiding questions set for the contextual analysis are: 'how do Yatoo artists become native to their place?' and 'what can be learned from their collective journey?'. First, the collective journey of the artists is examined based on four major factors: regionality, positioning, methodology and networking. This is followed by discussions focusing on the value of the collective identity shaped by bioregionally conscious art practices and the pedagogical potentials arising from the collective journey. This paper suggests that the collective journey of Yatoo's life‐sustaining practice, operating in an era of environmental crisis, contributes to the recently developing alternative pedagogical discussions by opening up dialogues that navigate ways to encourage more sustainable practices for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on classroom examples to discuss the integration of arts-informed teaching practices. Keeping in mind the increased awareness of the potential contributions of arts-informed practices to social work education and practice, the paper presents concrete examples of how such approaches could be applied in a graduate anti-oppression course. Through activities that relied on drawing and performance, students were engaged in critical reflection on knowledge, social work education and practice. Discussion of three classroom examples includes a description of the intended learning objectives, student reactions and feedback, as well as instructor learnings. The paper argues that graduate education undertaken on the principles of questioning knowledge could contribute to a critical deconstruction and reconstruction of social work practice and teaching, and arts-informed approaches could offer a contribution in this regard. Throughout the paper, the links to anti-oppression and social justice oriented approaches to social work are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on empirical data from a 2004–2007 study of Australian art students and professional artists who specialised in drawing and painting to understand their work processes. Making use of Galenson's typology of ‘seekers’ and ‘finders’, the study discovered that ‘seeking’ rather than ‘finding’ was the dominant approach used by the vast majority of artists. To explain the predominance of seeking processes, the paper argues that Galenson's typology is best understood in the context of the field of artistic production in the 21st century and the habitus operating among painters. Creative processes of contemporary art are thus inseparable from artists’ strategies for surviving in the artworld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Government of India declares its plan to convert Mumbai's Kala Ghoda art district into India's equivalent of Times Square, it does something that many Asian countries are doing in their understanding of the needs of the creative industry. In Mumbai's case, however, such an act has several additional historical echoes. This paper proposes that the origins of the so-called ‘creative class' lie in the failure of the city's historic 1982 textile strike, which saw the return of an artisanal practice to the city, often practiced by a class of casual labourers being forced to turn into low-end entrepreneurs without financial security. Such an artisanal entrepreneurship has had a far more complex relationship with industrialization than most theories recognize, and today's cultural industries are effectively replaying a longer history of this class in Bombay that may go back to pre-colonial and colonial times. The paper explores both the colonial and developmental interventions into this artisanal class as essential histories to understanding their new relationship to the ‘creative’ economy into which they are being presently inserted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of Standard Representational Photography in clinical photography and its aid in maintaining the gold standard in the Medical Illustration profession. It is important that professionals are aware of potential threats to good practice with many areas identified in the article [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (DMAS, dinghaiqiao huzhushe, its urban context, issues that it concerns and strategies that it uses by introducing three of its projects. As a group that locates itself in a historically working-class neighborhood under the pressures of urban renewal, it clarifies its vision by both embodying the participants to the projects, and extending knowledge production and imagination of the place into a more profound social and historical dimension. The “common” here, serves as the interactive element and mechanism in DMAS events, as well as in its operational logic. The strategies that it develops, based on this, is a reflection and transcendence of the social political atmosphere and questions the developmental ideology of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances the concept of disruption, drawing upon Butler's (1993) work on performativity, her engagement with Goffman's (1974) frame analysis and recent work on performativity within critical geopolitics. It argues this approach provides a useful tool with which to elucidate gaps in the iterative processes of geopolitical discourse production that offer opportunities for momentary distortions to these dominant articulations of power. It analyses the utility of this approach through discussion of three artworks by the acclaimed British artist Fiona Banner. In June 2010 she unveiled her prestigious Duveens commission project at Tate Britain. The work, entitled 'Harrier and Jaguar', was the most ambitious of a series of engagements with military aircraft which have spanned over a decade of creative work. Banner's work has become synonymous with challenging dominant discourses on power and war especially through textual representations of war films and innovative uses of military aircraft. Beginning with her book project, 'All the world's fighter planes' (2004) and moving through her Duveens project to the military aircraft-related work 'Tornado' (2010), this paper argues that Banner's work illustrates the utility of the concept of disruption; going beyond simply raising questions about our engagements with military aircraft, to actively disrupting our encounters with and understandings of these objects and thus popular representations of air power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Hegel, art in its ‘supreme task’ is engaged in ‘bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit’. Raymond Geuss, in a highly illuminating paper, has connected Hegel’s conception of art’s supreme task with the project of theodicy. In this paper I explore Hegel’s aesthetics of comedy through this theodicy-based framework Geuss has proposed, and I consider what light this framework can shed on comedy and, reciprocally, what light comedy can shed on it. In particular, invocation of a theodicy can give the impression of art as a kind of defense of the status quo. Yet Hegel’s brief, but pivotal remarks on comedy complicate this picture in an interesting way. The best comedy does reassure us about the basic rationality and goodness of the world. Yet Aristophanic comedy—the sort Hegel lauds as the best and the most truly comic—has a strongly social-critical streak that Hegel notes with great admiration. Hegel’s theory of comedy says as much about him as it does about the genre. But if we are attentive to Hegel’s remarks on comedy, they will offer us a point of resistance against overly Panglossian interpretations of the Hegelian supreme task of art and will help us better understand in what way active social criticism through art is compatible with that higher calling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present scientific paper considers some of the modern day philosophic and aesthetic problems and different aspects concerning the sociology of the fine arts. This paper intends as well to discover the right place and role of the fine arts in the realm of the present day society and at the same time presents an analysis of some of the existing trends of development. This paper turns its attention towards some of the postmodern presentations of the artistic events and the connection existing between their individual and social nature. In doing all that the present author still considers the subject matter of the paper far from exhausted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yu's given name is actually Zhuowei Yu, but most people in the mineral community know her as Safaa Yu. This article presents the colored-pencil artwork of Safaa Yu of Littleton, Colorado. So finally 2020 comes, and for a while I had some time to challenge myself a little by using colored pencils (Prismacolor brand).... As I [progress in my art], I really like to work with them and hopefully will explore more with colored pencils in the future. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines a number of works of art that relate to the issues of borders, mobility, space and place in Britain and the European Union (EU). It focuses on the years 2014–16 in which the financial crisis, the migration crisis and the impending referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU weighed heavily upon public debate. Some of the works considered—installations by the Italian group The Tomorrow and by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—can be related directly to the EU’s own initiatives: specifically, the New Narrative for Europe that was championed by the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. Others—stencilled murals by the street artist Banksy in Clacton-on-Sea and Calais—approach the issue of Europe more obliquely. All of the works, it is argued, engage in forms of visual and spatial thinking that bear upon the idea of Europe and its much-discussed imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Free Open-Source Software (FOSS) is essentially seen by many organizations as a key pillar for accelerating technological innovation. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which factors such as cost and quality of the system, as well as usability, interoperability, and security, influence the intention to use FOSS. Based on the data obtained from the survey, we propose a new theoretical model that we test and evaluate using the SEM-PLS method. The results suggest a significant relationship between FOSS adoption and factors such as low cost, performance expectation, social influence, and system quality, which was explained on a large scale by safety, interoperability, and usability as the most important factors in adoption decisions. Thus, this paper presents a new model for the adoption of FOSS in countries with high growth potential and aims to be a significant contribution to the scientific community on the state of the art in FOSS organizations in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of cultural consumption, which may be symptomatic of a gradual and general decline in education standards, has prompted much of legal thinking to privilege the «cultural» dimension of religious art over its religious dimension as such. Given this context, the legal nature of religious artworks is explored here using the methodology of a historical-legal, regulatory and jurisprudential perspective. This paper is framed by issues of intentionality and author copyright, the productive will(s) enacted in the legal transaction underlying a given artwork's creation, as well as the social perception of artistic production in different historical periods. In addition to concerns relating to property rights and the ranking or prioritization of criteria as regards current use(s), the purpose of this paper is to establish the essential legal elements of religious artworks as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015-2016 the author installed interactive public artworks on sidewalks in Brooklyn and Queens using ordinary city permits. The locations were chosen in counterbalance to the dominant choices of location for public art in New York, which tends to be placed in Manhattan or other tourist-concentrated areas. The works are entitled the Public Utteraton Machines and enable passersby to utter their opinions about other public art in the city as well as art's role in society. The device's earpiece recorded over 100 open-ended narratives and 391 responses to quantitative data questions via an integrated e-paper display screen. This public art project combines social practice with object-based public art into a conceptual public art practice that forms a commons or civic art. Sound archives of the responses can be found at local libraries in Queens and Brooklyn and at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper offers a re-evaluation of the significance of porcelain during the Yuan dynasty by analyzing a type of ceramics known as luanbai or shufu wares. These matt white porcelains, sometimes inscribed with the characters shu and fu, have generally been seen as official wares, manufactured on the orders of the highest echelons of the Yuan central government and classified as high-quality luxury wares associated with the imperial court. This paper proposes that this conventional interpretation is misleading. Instead of understanding luanbai wares as part of the narrative of ceramics manufacture and the history of porcelain, I explore their relevance by situating them in the context of Yuan-dynasty material culture more broadly, court-sponsored craft manufactures, and the practice of inscribing objects. This approach reveals a different story, highlighting the absence of court control over ceramic production, the ensuing freedom to experiment locally with new ceramic production methods, and the significance of the demands of consumers in territories outside Yuan China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dozen years after I first asked the question "is Canada postcolonial?," I have returned to consider it again. Of more concern now than the original question itself, however, is the productive set of questions it raises. These questions from the heart of this paper and are, I argue, at the core of contemporary postcolonial discourse in Canada: (1) What is the triangulated relationship between art, politics and place?; (2) What responsibility does an artist have to her subject matter?; (3) What are the ethics of representation?; (4) Who speaks for whom?; (5) Who profits?; and (6) How then to remember? To engage these serious questions, I turn to the controversy surrounding the cancellation of an art exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. In early 2011, Pamela Masik was set to launch "The Forgotten" project, an exhibition of the portraits of sixty-nine women who were missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Citing "serious concerns" raised by the victims' families and community groups, the museum cancelled the show (Museum of Anthropology 2011). This was a controversy over the public role of art and the role of art in public spaces. It was also a pivotal case for considering cultural memory and victims' rights in the process of memorializing. This paper examines the exhibition and its cancellation and, by extension, art and public memory in a postcolonial framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of Arnold Hauser's work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser's project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge-where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser's personal and intellectual background, as well as of the shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser's central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser's conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser's work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer-'on Hauser's behalf', as it were-to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ever-expanding number of urban authorities have declared 'war' on graffiti. This paper explores the role the wars on graffiti have played in the creeping militarization of everyday life in the city. Wars on graffiti have contributed to the diffusion of military technologies and operational techniques into the realm of urban policy and policing. Furthermore, new Western military doctrines of urban warfare have sought to 'learn lessons' from the wars on graffiti (and other crime) in their efforts to achieve dominance over cities in both the global South and the Western 'homeland'. The blurring of war and policing has deepened with the declaration of wars on terror. The stakes have been raised in urban social control efforts intended to protect communities from threats of 'disorder' such as graffiti, for the existence of even 'minor' infractions is thought to send a message to both 'the community' and 'enemies within' that there are vulnerabilities to be exploited with potentially more devastating consequences. Increasingly, there is a convergence around the notion that situational crime prevention strategies are crucial in combating both graffiti and terror threats, because even if graffiti writers and terrorists don't share the same motivations, they do exploit the same urban vulnerabilities. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on what graffiti writers might be able to teach us about how to evade and/or contest the militarization of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically considers the recent history of graffiti regulation in one municipality. It draws upon my experience of being appointed to develop a Draft Strategy on Graffiti for the City of Melbourne in 2004. My appointment was based upon the several years I had spent as a criminologist and socio-legal researcher, engaging with the communities of graffiti writers and street artists in Melbourne and internationally. The aim was to develop a Strategy that would take a more progressive approach to graffiti and street art management, and the proposed policy focused upon notions of 'negotiated consent' to the presence of graffiti or street art and 'zones of tolerance' with varying degrees of self-regulation by graffiti writers or external regulation by police and council authorities. Despite widespread support for the Strategy, the Council elected instead to pursue a policy of zero tolerance combined with a discretionary permit system. The paper examines the fate of this particular attempt to think differently about graffiti, and engages critically with the more conventional approaches put in place instead. It considers the policy-making process in a manner informed both by autobiographical experience and by some recent writings on graffiti and the city, community and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes a programme of research and practice in which the evaluation of interactive artworks in a public space is undertaken as part of the creative process. It explores the different perspectives involved in the research process of Beta_Space, a public exhibition and evaluation facility in the Powerhouse Museum Sydney. The three viewpoints presented, of artist, evaluator and curator, add up to much more than each one can offer on its own. The three roles can be taken by one, two, three or more people in any particular case but teamwork across disciplines is strongly implied by the approach that we have described. The paper reflects upon the different concerns and approaches and the ways in which they are entwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original medina of Algiers - currently called the Algiers Casbah - constituted an integral part of the indigenous struggle for national independence. Constantly subject to French colonialist propaganda, it suffered throughout the colonial era (1830-1962) brutal destruction, negative representation, and ideological marginalisation. Yet it emerged after Algerian revolutionary war against French occupation (1954-1962) as an icon of people's solidarity, a physical landmark of Algerian identity, and an emblem of national memory. This paper investigates the historical formation of these symbolic values, and examines how the built environment gains its cultural meaning from political struggles. It also highlights the way that such meaning becomes an immaterial tool for the instrumentalisation of the medina area in the affirmation of national identity in the post-independence era. Using a historical approach, which discusses the emergence of Algerian nationalism and the later famous battle of Algiers in the 1950s, this paper argues that the psychological and cultural implications of Algerian anti-colonial resistance contributed heavily to the way that people today perceive the emblematic importance of the Ottoman medina of Algiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between the visual arts (film, painting, photography, and sculpture), social class and gender as they pertain to the attainment of cultural capital as defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1993). In a review of current sociological literature from the last five years, inequalities of access to and possession of cultural capital are noted. Since much of the research is of the Bourdieuian approach, most research analyzes the relationship between the visual arts and social class, more so than other demographic variables. Secondary to social class, gender differences are also assessed. In its conclusion, this paper argues for a thorough investigation of the relationship between the visual arts and race, claiming that many studies in this area are limited and biased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the basis and main characteristics of fine art as a subject discipline and looks at how these elements combine to create a distinctive and in many ways unique learning environment. Taking the premise that fine art as a subject discipline is concerned with encouraging the development of individual artistic practice and enabling the student to articulate and define the social and cultural context that they are working within, this paper considers how fine art students come to develop alternative ways of thinking, seeing and conceptualising. Referring to the Art and Design Subject Benchmark statements the paper argues that in a fine art education, a set pf principles, core characteristics, skills and abilities are combined to create a unique learning environment that gives its graduates a set of abilities that are particularly relevant to our complex society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences,), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the bookDistinction(), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized– that is,eithercultivated or popular– ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative,‘postmodern’, approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking a short extract from Marguerite Duras' novel 'Summer Rain' (1990) as a starting point, this paper focuses its analysis on three contemporary art installations: Dorothy Cross' 'Bible' (1995); Robert Gober's 'Untitled' (1995/7) and Melanie Manchot's 'Travers' (1997/8). As well as imparting a discursive status to the unrepresentable facets of womanhood, these installations invoke a challenge to the old idea that analytical thinking and creative making are polarised activities. [1] With reference to the theoretical models of subjectivity and change constructed by Donald Winnicott and Julia Kristeva, this paper investigates the ways in which artistic experiment and risk-taking interface with our ability to restructure our sense of self and sociality. The underlying premise informing this analysis is based on the Kristevan suggestion that what we create as artists and writers is never 'new', but always involves revisiting an old site, that is the site of the repressed—be it from a social, cultural or individual vantage point (Kristeva, 1984, pp. 103-104). From this perspective, creative making (the making of objects and/or the making of meanings) is always interlinked with changes in our own self-perception. [2] This overlap between making meanings and reconstituting our sense of self can be understood, to borrow Marguerite Duras' graphic description, as an unfolding within the body. (Duras, 1990, p. 14). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Jena Romantics the idea of a self is always in a process, never fully completed. It develops itself as an acting I that interacts with the world, an ongoing interchange between what I am and what I am not. In order to grasp how the self develops and is educated, this paper compares this idea of the self to Schlegel's account of irony. Both irony and the I exist as an ongoing process. In this comparison the self is found to be a work of art, which is never what it is since its identity always still has to become completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematicians sometimes judge a mathematical proof to be beautiful and in doing so seem to be making a judgement of the same kind as aesthetic judgements of works of visual art, music or literature. Mathematical proofs are also appraised for explanatoriness: some proofs merely establish their conclusions as true, while others also show why their conclusions are true. This paper will focus on the prima facie plausible assumption that, for mathematical proofs, beauty and explanatoriness tend to go together. To make headway we need to have some grip on what it is for a proof to be beautiful, and for that we need some account of judgements of beauty in general. That is the concern of the first section. The second section faces the problem that it is far from obvious how abstract entities, such as mathematical proofs, can be beautiful, strictly and literally speaking. Reasons are given for the view that they can be. The third section introduces the distinction between proofs which explain their conclusions and proofs which do not. Finally, the question whether, for mathematical proofs, the beautiful and the explanatory tend to coincide is addressed. It is argued that we have reason to doubt that explanatory proofs tend to be beautiful, and insufficient reason to believe or disbelieve that beautiful proofs tend to be explanatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the ?anthropomorphizing? discourses that attribute agency to images and things, stressing their efficacy and power, are motivated by a perception of a lack in the artwork, or in art itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street art has exploded: it pervades our back alleys, surrounds us at bus-stops, covers billboards, competes with advertising and generally serves as urban wallpaper in most cities. But what is street art? A far cry from mere graffiti, street art has gained some social acceptance, but it remains neither officially sanctioned like public art, nor institutionally condoned, like its more traditional artistic cousins in museums. Somewhere in between these two extremes, street art has emerged, occupying a metaphysically suspect grey area between illegal activity and bona fide art. This paper explores the nature of this emerging art form and draws out some of the differences between street art, public art and 'mere' graffiti. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The focus of this theoretical paper is the analysis of the European historical avant-garde as an excess of modernism. As such, its goal was two-fold. First, it tried to transcend the institution of autonomous art and second, it attempted to integrate art into everyday life. In this light, the paper presents the contingencies of the genesis and main features of the historical avant-garde's doctrine and practice. It further argues that the historical avant-garde ended in a collapse of the aesthetic and practical dimension without corresponding emancipation. This failure, in turn, laid down the groundwork for the post-modern art which appropriated the stylistic and formal innovations of historical avant-garde while comfortably remaining within the institution of art. Thus, the post-modern betrayal of the values embedded in avant-garde and modernist works of art appears to be a necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research undertaken into the aesthetics of the everyday. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy, art criticism and of the sociology of art, beauty, and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday settings and in natural language, we use the data collected in a study conducted with a group of low-income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analyzing their lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e., with 'beautiful' objects and/or experiences. Participants' self-reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of 'beauty' are used as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. Their aesthetic judgements take on an anthropological function, creating a framework of meanings that help the participants make sense of the world of objects and of their own lives with/through them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a systematic approach to the study of immigration and art by considering relevant theoretical concepts. We focus on the role of institutions and economic change as forces shaping the expressive alternatives of immigrants and their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of art as synthesized by Arnold Hauser is based on a theory of knowledge and articulates the cognitive role of art. In a brief analysis, this paper elaborates on the sources of this epistemological enterprise. The pedigree of Hauser's main thoughts was oriented towards a Kantian and Marxist framework, respectively. As a Kantian, he tried to take into account the philosophical consequences of two (or even more) different sources of cognition that are equal in value, correlative and necessarily cooperating. Giving exclusive priority to only one of these leads to classical philosophical errors such as psychologism and intellectualism. As a Marxist, Hauser was anti-dogmatic and anti-deterministic, because he adopted an interpretive-hermeneutical meaning of Marxism and considered it an aid against distorting tendencies in our thinking. His basic insight that the different sources of value-equal and cooperating cognitive layers are in an everyday-life perspective intertwined, so that a kind of reservatio mentalis is needed to methodically separate them for the sake of better understanding, makes him a distant relative of classical phenomenology. This web of epistemological investigations is what I call the multilayer theory of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the characteristics of expressionism and presents perspectives of various artists concerning Christianity and their reasons for depicting the Crucifixion. Examples of works by artists such as Emil Nolde, March Chagall, Georges Henri Rouault, Wasily Kandinsky, Wilhelm Morgner, Oscar Kokoschka and Otto Dix help to illustrate and explain the relationship between expressionism and Christianity. In a period of technological development, during which the agonies of warfare were commonplace, the expressionists recognised a descent towards evil and searched for ways to warn society. They rejected all forms of slavery and aimed to create a new type of human for whom humanitarian feelings were dominant, at peace instead of at war. Christianity was accepted by them as the greatest power to be perceived and experienced properly as a religion. Depictions of the Crucifixion were used as a symbol to represent these emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue, we describe some of the rewards and challenges of community-based arts initiatives for our discipline. We explore the inherent tensions between art and science that are reflected in community-based arts activities. We pose larger questions about researching community-based arts activities and defining the arts as a means of promoting social change. The diversity of populations, settings, and issues represented by the papers in the special issue are described and a common set of values, methods of inquiry and action are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper compares the views of styles of science of Alistair Crombie and Ian Hacking with the notion of styles of art, as developed by Alois Riegl at the end of the 19th Century. Important similarities are noted, notably in the conceptualization of the autonomy of styles. Riegl developed in particular the notion of Kunstwollen (“will to art”), which encompasses an implied relation to the world, in both a cognitive and an ethical sense, and a relation to the public of art. The latter aspect will be examined as the “role of the spectator”. Finally, a number of Riegl’s view on art are tentatively applied to styles of science. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper explores the dynamic interaction that occurs between large-scale social processes, urban development and the production of artistic expression and meaning through an analysis of art and urban change in the West Chelsea district of New York City. I begin my analysis with a discussion of specific works of art and expand to the local and global context to which these works respond and help to construct. Both urban space and artistic production, consumption and the social meaning attached to art by artists, critics, audiences and other art world actors have felt the impact of the turn to free market policies and ideology that have attended global economic restructuring and the rapid pace of globalisation. At the same time, art's new role as an engine of urban commerce and the accompanying expansion of the art market have helped to shape city districts like West Chelsea and have left their mark on the work that is exhibited and sold there. My analysis integrates a close study of two works of art exhibited in West Chelsea, interviews and other ethnographic data and recent literature on the arts and urban restructuring and the perspective of critical theory. I also provide photographic documentation of social interaction and the built environment of West Chelsea as it evolved in response to the expansion of the art worlds there. A secondary aim of this research is to contribute to a larger discussion about the social role and critical capacities of art in today's social, economic and political climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duchamp's legacy in contemporary art is manifest in the increasing importance of the conceptual dimension in art and in the separation of art and beauty. Art as a conceptual or intellectual activity is, thus, dissociated from a sensible appreciation of beauty. Plotinus' metaphysics of the beauty challenges this separation between intellect and beauty by referring beauty to the perception of what is intelligible in the sensible. Accordingly, the thesis of this paper is that Plotinus' metaphysics of the beauty illuminates social and political aspects of art that are of interest for understanding some important trends of contemporary art. In order to support this thesis, I will analyze Plotinus' account of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, and the concepts of participation and imitation as they appear in Enneads I 6[1] and VI 4 [22]. Finally, I will refer to Richard Box's Fields of Light (2003) as an instance that clarifies this thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s well known unpublished remark, ‘Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ I argue that it is not helpful to construe this remark as a claim to the effect that art falsifies the truth by, for example, peddling lies or deceptions. Rather, I suggest, the remark should be taken to refer to the various ways in which art can present us with the truth in such a manner that we do not perish of it. And of these ways, I argue, the most interesting is that in which art facilitates awareness of putatively ugly truths while actually abolishing their ugliness: a striking discussion of this possibility is to be found in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. I conclude that, overall, Nietzsche is best understood as a conditional cognitivist—as someone who thinks of truth as valuable, but not as valuable no matter what; and I suggest that what makes his position interesting and distinctive is the alethic pessimism (‘Truth is ugly’) that runs through his version of cognitivism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the transition from voluntaristic to state-led cultural provision after 1945 with the emergence in Britain of the Arts Council and its regional representatives. The chief ambition is to examine the concern over the cultural deficit of the industrial working class expressed by leading figures in the new arena of cultural policy such as Mary Glasgow and Lord Keynes. Drawing upon research from the North East Association for the Arts (established in 1961), which maintained links with the North East's political and economic establishment, this paper explores the experience of such metropolitan cultural imperatives in the Labour stronghold of the North East. It also seeks to examine how far the civic concern to improve popular sensibilities after 1945 was peculiar to British cultural policy. It asks whether there were similar movements to realize the improvement of working-class culture in comparable European regions, and considers the possibilities for a comparative or transnational approach to the history of European cultural policy during the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the logics and limits of graffiti management at a key site within an Australian city. Using writers' narratives, we examine attempts to control the type of graffiti (script) against efforts to control its location (bleed). Our central claim is that both these strategies demand that graffiti only speak its name when it (visually) ceases to be itself—that the 'best' graffiti, bureaucratically speaking, is that which functions as its own form of erasure. We conclude by posing and responding to the key question: under what conditions is graffiti permitted to exist? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]