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Instead of stabilising the poles of stasis and non-stasis, and narrative and nonnarrative, in the 1970s, Julião Sarmento plays within a concomitant scheme: photography and painting, photography and film, stasis and narrative are merged. What is at stake is the possibility of challenging the modernist tenets of photography canonically defined in opposition to painting and cinema. The perversity is not only in the content of some works but also in the very logic underlying the approach to the medium in Sarmento's oeuvre, whether through a perversion of the boundaries between the media or by the assertion of the medium itself as perversion. This paper presents a case study that reflects upon the replacement of a structural and negative system with an unsystematic difference (in the sense less of expansion than of the medium's deconstruction). New dimensions concerning the issues of contamination and hybridisation in contemporary art are also brought into play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to bring the world of mid-eighteenth-century British design in to fruitful conversation with contemporary art theory and practice. Taking the neighbourhood and milieu of the St Martin's Lane area in London as a starting point, Iinvestigate connections between British "rococo" design and William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty in terms of shared formal values and contemporary implications of "modernity". I argue for a mutual indebtedness rather than "art" directing "design". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its emergence at the international scene in the 1970s, installation has been one of the artforms central to the contemporary art system. Yet at the theoretical level the issue of its categorial framework remains unresolved, which in turn reflects the situation within contemporary art's categoriality in general. Concepts and terms such as "genre", "medium", "intermediality", "post-medium" and "postconceptual" condition have all been applied to installation art. This article attempts to analyze whether these labels are appropriate to the installation art phenomenon, especially with regard to the recent developments within genre, literary and media studies. Hence, the article provides the historical and modern definitions of the terms, while special attention is paid to their usage within art history and installation art discourse. The resulting conclusions are intended to situate installation art within a viable categorial framework and to shed light on several areas of contemporary art categoriality at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traveling exhibition entitled "The Steins Collect" (2011-12) again drew attention - and on this occasion in a manner perhaps more vivid than any exhibition to date - to the importance of the systematically canon-shaping work that took place in two tiny Parisian ateliers (one in the Rue de Fleurus, the other in the Rue de Madame) in terms of the new painterly movements that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Leo, Gertrude, and Michael, three siblings from the Stein family, a family of Jewish origin from San Francisco, along with Michael's wife Sarah, not only built within the space of a few years the most important contemporary art collection in Paris, but through their lively salons came to be the most influential shapers and propagators of universal modernism, making their influence felt to this day on assessments of avant-garde art. In the course of preparations for the exhibition and the publication of the accompanying catalogue, both of which provide a comprehensive survey of the Steins' activity, light was cast on the family's Hungarian connections as well. Consequently, one painting by the Hungarian Vilmos Pelrott-Csaba was included at the American venues (San Francisco and New York) of the exhibition, and a presentation on the family's ties to Hungary was held at the scholarly conference organized in connection with the exhibition. Despite the fact that several essays have been published on this subject, the written sources have not been collected - neither those dealing with the large number of Hungarians present at the Steins' Saturday evening gatherings, nor those covering the Hungarian pupils at the Académie Matisse, which was closely aligned with the Steins. This essay is a revised version of the presentation held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, supplemented with additional source-material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]