Search

Stephanie Rumpza's book, "Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image," explores the philosophical implications of the religious practice of icon veneration. Rumpza argues that previous treatments of icons in art history and patristic discussions have not adequately addressed the theological and philosophical aspects of the icon. She turns to phenomenology to examine the complex relationship between visibility and invisibility, and the finite mediation of the infinite. Rumpza also discusses the work of philosophers such as Gadamer and Marion to understand the role of icons in mediating an infinite God. She concludes that icons serve as a means of bringing believers into the presence of the icon's subject and facilitating a relational encounter with God. [Extracted from the article]

In the psychology of aesthetics, compared with appreciation, there are fewer studies on art creation. This study aims to examine the influence of art creation on appreciation using haiku poetry with reference to the Mirror Model—a process model combining creation and appreciation. Although the model has been primarily used to examine visual arts, we examine its applicability to linguistic arts. In addition, we use ink painting to examine whether a generalisation across artistic genres can occur. The 115 participants were divided into two conditions—creation and control. The former created haiku before and after appreciation, while the latter did not create any haiku. The results showed no improvement in evaluation through creation. Additionally, recognising the difficulty related to creation leads to aesthetic evaluation, and this relationship is mediated by awe. These results expand the existing information regarding the Mirror Model in terms of the different art genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called "lookism"). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three ways of responding to these questions: beauty advocacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal character. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revisionists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first‐personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity tolerance is an individual trait indicating low aversion to ambiguity that is closely related to creativity. Appreciation and discussion of art are known to improve ambiguity tolerance, but the effects of appreciation and discussion have not been studied separately. In this study, we used haiku poetry with the characteristic of ambiguity to confirm the effect of appreciation by separating it from the discussion. Additionally, we conducted haiku creation to examine the effect of creation. To this end, 137 participants answered the ambiguity tolerance scale at five time points: before and after haiku appreciation and creation, and 1 week later. We also used the Multidimensional Attitude toward Ambiguity Scale, which organizes ambiguity tolerance into three subfactors. These subfactors are discomfort with ambiguity, absolutism, and the need for complexity and novelty, which correspond to the affective, cognitive, and epistemic aspects of ambiguity attitudes, respectively. The results showed that absolutism, which is the cognitive aspect of ambiguity tolerance, decreased after the appreciation and creation of haiku, and this effect persisted after 1 week. This result indicates that cognitive changes such as the acceptance of ambiguity can occur through the appreciation and creation of haiku, which require various interpretations and choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research shows that consumers' experience of art, including artistic commercial products, enhances consumers' well‐being by inducing a sense of inspiration. Prior research in neuroscience and psychology has documented that participating in art and culture programs enhances individuals' well‐being, but there is a shortage of empirical evidence documenting the effect of consumers' art appreciation as products and services on well‐being or the cognitive mechanism underlying that effect. Our five studies, based on an administrative dataset (Study 1) and laboratory experiments (Studies 2a–2d), show that consumers' experience of art in daily life increases consumers' well‐being. Furthermore, consumers' experience of art induces inspiration, which in turn enhances subjective well‐being (Studies 2b and 2c), and consumer well‐being (Study 2d). Critically, that effect remained significant across various forms of art, including paintings, song lyrics, and sculpture, and extended to commercial products such as computer screen saver and handbags depicting artistic images. Special Issue: Consumer Well‐Being in Asia [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does trust play a significant role in the appreciation of art? If so, how does it operate? We argue that it does, and that the mechanics of trust operate both at a general and a particular level. After outlining the general notion of 'art‐trust'—the notion sketched is consistent with most notions of trust on the market—and considering certain objections to the model proposed, we consider specific examples to show in some detail that the experience of works of art, and the attribution of art‐relevant properties or characterisations to works of art, very often involves the notion of trust; in such cases—perhaps most or even, implicitly, all—the question 'Do I trust the artist (or art‐maker)?', is inescapable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uses of mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) are expanding and allow for more direct study of the neurophysiological signals associated with behavior in psychotherapeutic encounters. Neuroaesthetics is concerned with the cognitive and neural basis of art appreciation, and scientific correlations are being made in the field that might help to clarify theories claimed in the creative arts therapies. Yet, most neuroaesthetics studies are confined to the laboratory and do not propose a translation for research methods and clinical applications. The creative arts therapies have a long history of clinical success with various patient populations and will benefit from increased scientific explanation to support intervention strategies. Examining the brain dynamics and motor behaviors that are associated with the higher complex processes involved in artistic expression offers MoBI as a promising instrumentation to move forward in linking ideas from neuroaesthetics to the creative arts therapies. Tracking brain dynamics in association with behavioral change allows for more objective and quantitative physiological monitors to evaluate, and together with subjective patient reports provides insight into the psychological mechanisms of change in treatment. We outline a framework that shows how MoBI can be used to study the effectiveness of creative arts therapy interventions motivated by the 4E approach to cognition with a focus on visual art therapy. The article illuminates how a new partnership among the fields of art therapy, neuroscience, and neuroaesthetics might work together within the 4E/MoBI framework in efforts to advance transdisciplinary research for clinical health populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional and amateur artists seek inspiration from viewing the works of others to enhance their creativity. This paper focuses on inspiration for artistic creation through art viewing by reviewing psychology studies on what types of artwork promote individuals' inspiration for creation (inspiring artwork) and how they experience inspiration through their art appreciation (the appreciation process). In particular, we claim that a dual focus—that is a focus on both evaluating the artworks of others and reflecting on one's own art making—is a core mechanism for inspiration. Further, we present a theoretical framework to explain the types of creative outcomes expected in line with such a dual focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non‐contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non‐contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don't advance conclusive arguments for the affective view in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors' power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the affective view is worth serious reconsideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent development in tactile technology enables an improvement in the appreciation of the visual arts for people with visual impairment (PVI). The tactile sense, in conjunction with, or a possibly as an alternative to, the auditory sense, would allow PVIs to approach artwork in a more self‐driven and engaging way that would be difficult to achieve with just an auditory stimulus. Tactile colour pictograms (TCPs), which are raised geometric patterns, are ideographic characters that are designed to enable PVIs to identify colours and interpret information by touch. In this article, three TCPs are introduced to code colours in the Munsell colour system. Each colour pattern consists of a basic cell size of 10 mm × 10 mm to represent the patterns consistently in terms of regular shape. Each TCP consists of basic geometric patterns that are combined to create primary, secondary, and tertiary colour pictograms of shapes indicating colour hue, intensity and lightness. Each TCP represents 29 colours including six hues; they were then further expanded to represent 53 colours. Two of them did not increase the cell size, the other increased the cell size 1.5 times for some colours, such as yellow‐orange, yellow, blue, and blue‐purple. Our proposed TCPs use a slightly larger cell size compared to most tactile patterns currently used to indicate colour, but code for more colours. With user experience and identification tests, conducted with 23 visually impaired adults, the effectiveness of the TCPs suggests that they were helpful for the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how art makes impressions upon the perceiver has been a fundamental topic of philosophical interest since the time of ancient Greece. However, the extent of artistic perception and aesthetic appreciation has been the topic of empirical studies only recently, following the emergence of psychology as an independent field of science. The present study discusses the hypothesis that the impression created by artwork on the viewer can be predicted by examining activity of neuronal networks. In particular, we focus on neural activity evoked by abstract stimuli that matches elements of the viewers' previously learned conceptual dictionary. We show that artistic appreciation fundamentally depends on how easily the author's intent expressed in his or her artwork can be abstracted and decoded, on a neuronal level, into new or merged concept networks. More diverse intellectual and personal experiences—and their corollary neural networks—may facilitate the creation of new networks. These new networks, in turn, modulate the extent to which art can be apprehended and appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Polychrome alabaster carvings, representing religious scenes, constitute England's major contribution to European mediaeval sculpture. During the period between 1350 and 1550, large number of alabaster carvings were produced in the Midlands. Despite their massive destruction during the English Reformation (ca.1534), more than 2500 of them still survive, either legally exported or sold clandestinely to the Continent. With more than 100 panels still existing, the Bordeaux region holds one of the largest concentrations of these reliefs. Most of them have unfortunately lost their medieval polychromy, but 20 can still provide valuable information. They are currently studied in our multidisciplinary research program "ALBATRES" (Polychromie, pigments, perception: les albâtres anglais de la fin du Moyen Âge conservés sur le territoire aquitain. Labex LaScArBx project [2018‐2020]). Focused on the panels' polychromy, the project links art history, archaeometry, optical and 3D engineering, and experimental archeology. The first aim is to obtain complete information on the materials and techniques used by medieval painters. The second consists in studying the functions of polychromy and its perception, by determining and interpreting the selection criteria and aesthetic uses of colors and gilding. The polychrome remains of the Aquitaine corpus are studied by means of visual examination, macrophotographic documentation, and noninvasive portable spectroscopic analyses (reflectance spectroscopy by fiber optics in visible and infrared ranges, fluorimetry, etc.). They reveal, among others, the presence of cinnabar, red lead, red ochre, copper green pigments, yellow ochre, gold, lead white, and others. The results allow the production of model samples to help understand the medieval color organization before proposing the coloring of a real copy of one of the studied panels (Virgin's Assumption, Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux). The shape and the appearance of the color rendering could be improved thanks to a special device built at the IOGS to develop a shader that approximates as closely as possible the appearance of the panels. Finally, all information will be integrated on 3D model panels for better appreciation of the carvings and the artistic taste of medieval spectators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What I shall look at is questions concerning our ability, through engaging with filmic representations of dance performances that we have not attended or cannot attend, to appreciate those performances and the dance works of which they are performances. To see a film of a performance of a dance work is not to witness that performance, hence it is not to appreciate a dance work I in i performance, hence Should we then agree that an example of dance-screened provides mediated perceptual access to the thing that is fully qualified to play the experiential role - the dance performance - and that it may provide perceptual access to that performance that is just as legitimate as the access that is possible for those attending the actual dance performance? Are there appreciable properties of a dance performance that are not available through viewing a dance-screened of that performance, and to what extent is this counterbalanced by appreciable properties of the performance that are not available to those who see the performance in an unmediated way?. [Extracted from the article]

My concern, throughout, is with the appreciation of those dances that are artworks where, as Stanley Cavell ([6]/2002, xxxviii) notes: I Failure of concepts i : As above, one must master the appropriate concepts in order to deploy them in one's appreciation of a particular dance - both in recognizing the dance for the kind of artwork it is, and so as to use in its discussion (to whatever degree) the concepts from dances of that type. My problem is that, when engaged with dance-aesthetics at least, I cannot bring myself to care. I Perhaps i general ontologists in philosophy need to decide such questions but the cases for dance-aesthetics are instantiated in the dance performances; hence, again, danceworld considerations may trump general ontology, at least for us. 1 Here, I set aside the viewing of dances on film, better called "the viewing of films of dances": compare McFee ([35], 263-74), especially on "the revised situation" as a guarantee of replicating from such "indirect presentation" the features, and issues, from seeing dance performances. [Extracted from the article]

Calling it "experimental" or "avant-garde choreography" is too vague, and the time-indexing of the term "new dance" presents a further problem ("new dance" is also used to refer to contemporary dance of the late 1970s and 1980s, before the advent of "Conceptual Dance"). Here, it seems that choreography and dance pull apart: There can be choreography without dance, choreography that finds other means of physicalization (objects, words, different formats of presentation, say). So-called Conceptual Dance questions the medial function of dancing in relation to choreography, while also interrogating the idea that movement is the physical medium of dance. In email conversation with fellow choreographer, Boris Charmatz, Bel asserts that a conceptual dance is "a text, some words that indicate a dance", but goes on to query the label "Conceptual Dance" on the following grounds: "for the time being, we have never been able to reduce dance simply to an idea. [Extracted from the article]

In his famous Distinction, Bourdieu set forth musical and artistic taste as reflections of class positions developed early in life. With classical music as an explanatory tool, Bourdieu argued that cultural capital becomes deeply embodied and difficult to change. In temperance of Bourdieu's use of class, we suggest an affective theory of taste through the case of traditional music, based on a performance of possibilities inspired by our experiences in two pubs, one English and one Irish. Commonly played in pubs, traditional music can draw on rural lore to share its message with singing patrons of mixed class backgrounds. We use traditional music to argue that place shapes diverse social ties at all levels of economics, education, and age. We do not dispute that class powerfully shapes taste. But through what we term the joy of transcendence - formed through distinct and relative experiences, bonds, and friendships, enacted through place - participants can find pleasure in opening the cages of class and connecting across difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the cognitive processes underlying creative inspiration, we tested the extent to which viewing or copying prior examples impacted creative output in art. In Experiment 1, undergraduates made drawings under three conditions: (a) copying an artist's drawing, then producing an original drawing; (b) producing an original drawing without having seen another's work; and (c) copying another artist's work, then reproducing that artist's style independently. We discovered that through copying unfamiliar abstract drawings, participants were able to produce creative drawings qualitatively different from the model drawings. Process analyses suggested that participants' cognitive constraints became relaxed, and new perspectives were formed from copying another's artwork. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to styles of artwork considered unfamiliar facilitated creativity in drawing, while styles considered familiar did not do so. Experiment 3 showed that both copying and thoroughly viewing artwork executed using an unfamiliar style facilitated creativity in drawing, whereas merely thinking about alternative styles of artistic representation did not do so. These experiments revealed that deep encounters with unfamiliar artworks-whether through copying or prolonged observation-change people's cognitive representations of the act of drawing to produce novel artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetic evaluations are appraisals that influence choices in important domains of human activity, including mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and possibly even moral judgment. The nascent field of neuroaesthetics is advancing our understanding of the role of aesthetic evaluations by examining their biological bases. Here, we conduct a selective review of the literature on neuroaesthetics to demonstrate that aesthetic experiences likely emerge from the interaction between emotion-valuation, sensory-motor, and meaning-knowledge neural systems. This tripartite model can in turn be evoked to explain phenomena central to aesthetics, such as context effects on preferences. Indeed, context-dependent appraisals that focus on objects rather than on outcomes could be an important factor distinguishing aesthetic experiences from other kinds of evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses primarily on improvisation in the arts as discussed in philosophical aesthetics, supplemented with accounts of improvisational practice by arts theorists and educators. It begins with an overview of the term improvisation, first as it is used in general and then as it is used to describe particular products and practices in the individual arts. From here, questions and challenges that improvisation raises for the traditional work-of-art concept, the type-token distinction, and the appreciation and evaluation of the arts will be explored. This article concludes with the suggestion that further research and discussion on improvisation in the arts is needed, particularly in the areas of non-jazz improvisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the exhibition entitled "Albrecht Dürer: His Art in Context/ Dürer. Kunst-Künstler-Kontext," held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from October 23, 2013 to February 2, 2014, as well as the exhibition catalog "Albrecht Dürer: His Art in Context," edited by Jochen Sander, is presented.

The article discusses the visual proficiency of digital learners. Particular focus is given to a 2014 cultural image literary assessment given to college students in the U.S. southeast. According to the authors, college students identified an average of 75% of images and were most proficient at identifying instructional signs, while they were least proficient at identifying art. Other topics include image recognition, symbols, and political imagery.

Modern art curricula derive from the assumption that visual arts education can be of a high quality only if productive and receptive artistic activities are implemented. In art education practice, we are able to follow incentives for artistic expression but pay less attention to developing art appreciation that is based on developing as subtle perceptions of artwork as possible. Students have few opportunities to observe, enjoy and understand artwork. This discussion presents the results of a study that monitored the development of art appreciation abilities of 11-14 year-old students in Slovenian compulsory education. The level of art appreciation abilities is rather average and more developed with older students and girls. There were no statistically significant differences with regard to school stratum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to contemporary debates surrounding the outcome of culture-led redevelopment by exploring the tensions that arise when a broad application of 'culture' is used to theme space. I take as my focus the Distillery District, a private sector redevelopment in the City of Toronto, Ontario that draws on the arts alongside industrial heritage to heighten consumption. The article is divided into two main sections. I begin with a review of Toronto's shifting arts policies - from a focus on securing space for artistic production to a focus on arts consumption for interurban competition - to contextualize the planning framework underlying the redevelopment of the district. Second, I engage with how diverse and creative interruptions directed by the tenancy run against the unifying grain of the redevelopment process. While culture and creativity are drawn into a strategy of place-making for the purpose of place distinction, an incongruous festival and events season, and the tokenistic inclusion of cultural producers to satisfy a public appetite for the creative process, complicate these descriptors of space. Ultimately, the representation of the Distillery as a premier centre for 'arts, culture, and entertainment' is unravelled by multimodal ways of seeing and experiencing culture and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the style of American painter Thomas Kinkade. It examines the critical reception of his art, which has been labeled kitschy, simple, and idealistic, and explores the idea of Kinkade's commercialism. The author comments on the branding of Kinkade's art and commercial products inspired by his art. She also reflects on mass-produced art, commercial art branding, and Kinkade's contribution to art appreciation. The potential for art appreciation to be a site of class struggle is also considered.

We analyze how an artist's death influences the market prices of her works of art. Death has two opposing effects on art prices. By irrevocably restricting the artist's oeuvre, prices, ceteris paribus, increase when the artist dies. On the other hand, an untimely death may well frustrate the collectors' hopes of owning artwork that will, as the artist's career progresses, become generally known and appreciated. By frustrating expected future name recognition, death impacts negatively on art prices. In conjunction, these two channels of influence give rise to a hump-shaped relationship between age at death and death-induced price changes. Using transactions from fine art auctions, we show that the empirically identified death effects indeed conform to our theoretical predictions. We derive our results from hedonic art price regressions, making use of a dataset which exceeds the sample size of traditional studies in cultural economics by an order of magnitude. ( JEL Z11, J24, G12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that much of the meaning of artworks comes through metaphors, though we do not always recognise them as such. The argument draws on the work of Lakoff & Johnson, who assert a similar claim about metaphors in general (especially in language). It analyses the notion of a visual metaphor, gives a number of illustrations and claims that, contrary to linguistic metaphors, there can usefully be more than one visual metaphor ('mixed metaphors') active in a visual image and that visual metaphors can be interpreted in both directions. Verticality is presented as one basic metaphor in visual images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a common acceptance that contemporary schoolchildren live in a world that is intensely visual and commercially motivated, where what is imagined and what is experienced intermingle. Because of this, contemporary education should encourage a child to make reference to, and connection with their 'out-of-school' life. The core critical underpinnings of curriculum-based arts appreciation and theory hinge on educators and students taking a historical look at the ways artists have engaged with, and made comment upon, their contemporary societies. My article uses this premise to argue for the need to persist with pushing for critique of/through the visual, that it be delivered as an active process via the arts classroom rather than as visual literacy, here regarded as a more passive process for interpreting and understanding visual material. The article asserts that visual arts lessons are best placed to provide fully students with such critique because they help students to develop a 'critical eye', an interpretive lens often used by artists to view, analyse and independently navigate and respond to contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heinrich Heine's work "Französische Maler," ("French Painters") a piece of art criticism that he contributed to the Salon of 1831, is conceived as a meta-reflexive reaction to the July Revolution and to the multiplicity of values that was rife at the time. Instead of employing conventional norms to describe a new kind of art and thereby limiting the reception of that art, Heine considers the principal role of the critic to be to render the artwork in an innovative verbal representation that has a threefold result: to allow the observer to perceive the work of art anew; to make palpable the renewal of art through significant historical changes; and consequently to create a new mode of artistic perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the painting "A Letter From the Front," by Aleksandr Laktionov, a Stalin Prize laureate. It explores the significance of the painting in relation to the emergence of the social realism in art after World War II. The author claims that the art piece represented a miniature victory of socialism depicting an intimate view of a Soviet Russian family and neighborhood in a wartime provincial life. A brief historic overview of the art work is also provided. The artistic technique and theme of Laktionov is also explained.

In his account about reading novels, Wolfgang Iser argued that the work of art is not the text itself but the experience that emerges as a reader interacts with the text. Yet, he clarified that the aesthetic object is not based only on the subjective input of the reader but also determined by specific signs that a text presents. This article draws from Iser's theories to examine the process through which five teenagers discover meaning in an abstract sculpture by artist Isamu Noguchi. The author shows how the young viewers arrived at a series of readings that were elicited by the qualities of the work and that built upon each other in a sort of snowballing process. The article also illustrates how the sort of meaning that an artwork can yield stretches throughout the whole experience and can therefore not be translated into a discursive statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Views of what role convention plays in the creation and appreciation of art works gravitate towards two extremes. One view holds that works of art can be apprehended and appreciated as well as created with no reference to convention. The other claims that conventions fully determine how works of art are apprehended and are therefore necessary conditions for the creation of works of art as well as constitutive of appreciation. The former is a version of the Romantic view of art as something that appeals spontaneously to man's most profound emotions, to man's sentient nature, without making use of or needing mediating conventions. The conventionalist view denies that it is possible to respond spontaneously to art. All apprehension and appreciation of art are structured by conventions, and the reader/audience cannot go beyond these conventions because they constitute , the experience of the work of art. This paper explains the sense in which the constitutive view may be best understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarded for decades as a fallacy, intentionalist interpretation is beginning to attract a following among philosophers of art. Intentionalism is the doctrine that the actual intentions of artists are relevant to the interpretation of the artworks they create – just as actual intentions are relevant to the interpretation of the everyday words and deeds of other people. Although there are several forms of actual intentionalism, I defend the form known as modest actual intentionalism, which holds that the correct interpretation of an artwork is compatible with the author's actual intention, which itself must be supported by the artwork. Looking at literary works specifically, I consider criticisms of actual intentionalism – for example, the contention that such a stance substitutes paraphrase for a reading of the text. In particular, I argue against hypothetical intentionalism, which maintains that the correct interpretation of an artwork is constrained by the best hypotheses of the artist's intentions. As I show, the methodology of this position is in fact designed to track the author's actual intentions, and furthermore, hypothetical intentionalism does not accurately depict existing interpretive practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the claim that children are not able to judge artistic style when it conflicts with subject matter cues in paintings, using stimulus and methodological controls not employed previously. 6 and 9 year old children and adults were asked to judge which member of a pair of paintings looked like it was painted by the same painter as the target in a matching to sample task. Style choices were always possible and subject matter matches were either not possible because that dimension was controlled in the stimulus set (control), or possible but in conflict with style choices (experimental). The levels of discriminability of style and subject matter differences were varied. For control conditions, we found that performance was poor for all ages when style differences were low in discriminability and subject matter varied across the three stimuli; otherwise it was high. For experimental conditions, we found that irrelevant variation of subject matter was more detrimental if differences on that dimension were highly discriminable. Even the youngest children could make style matches and could do so even when a subject matter match was also possible, suggesting that they are sensitive to artistic style and can focus on that dimension in the face of irrelevant variation on other dimensions. The results are discussed as they relate to earlier claims that children are not able to judge artistic style and to the implications for training that follow from those claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shows how the modern languages integrate. Significance of the study of the works of French artists in Art Appreciation subject; Experiences which were enriched because of a contact with foreign language.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Yves Laberge on the novel and film "Berlin Alexanderplatz," one by Craig Bunch on a symposium in London, England, and an interview of curators Zhuan Huang and John Hyatt by Tongyu Zhou.