The Laocoon Moment

Although at least thirty-five women were buried in the earlier necropolis at Vron during the period between ca. 370 / 75 and ca. 435 / 45, only three of them were equipped with typically Germanic brooches or other elements of dress. Such a low proportion of women whose dress was secured according to the Germanic custom by means of brooches, is not unusual in the burial sites of Northern Gaul, and indeed clearly distinguishes these from the burial grounds on the right bank of the Rhine in free Germania, where practically all the women used one or more brooches to fasten their clothing, and were subsequently buried with them. The evidence from Vron, as from other comparable military burial sites to the west of the Rhine (e.g. Oudenburg, Vermand, Vireux-Molhain), attesting how few women were buried with brooch jewellery , may indicate either that in actual fact very few Germanic women had accompanied their men-folk into Northern Gaul, or that the majority of women of barbaric origin had, in the process of cultural assimilation, abandoned their exotic costume at a very early date and now favoured Gallo-Roman dress. Among the typically Germanic dress ornaments observed at Vron, one may distinguish five different brooch types and one hairpin type, analysed below: 1. Simple cross-bow brooches belong to the most frequently attested and geographically widespread group of Germanic women's brooches in the 4 th and 5 th centuries (mid-4 th to mid-5 th centuries) between the Elbe and the Loire (fig. 2). They are almost invariably made of bronze, as are the two examples from Grave 163A and Pit 9. The brooch from Grave 163A, worn as a single item, is remarkable for its greater length, its short spring, and upper chord. These rather unusual features appear most frequently in the simple cross-bow brooches from the Lower Rhine and Westphalia. There, this unusual form may be dated chiefly to the first half of the 5 th century. This corresponds to the chronology proposed by Cl. Seillier, who attributes, on other evidence, Grave 163A to his Phase 3 (= ca.415/20-435/45). 2. Cross-bow brooches with a trapezoid foot-plate represent a further typological development of the simple cross-bow brooch. The silver brooch from Grave 242A possesses in addition a beaded wire decoration on the bow, together with a stamped metal plaque covering the trapezoid foot-plate, features which enable it to be classed with the Vert-la-Gravelle variant (fig. 3). This form of brooch, known almost exclusively by the archaeological evidence from the left bank of the Rhine is probably to be interpreted as the product of workshops in Northern Gaul, which are known to have manufactured other types of Germanic costume ornaments for the wives of foederati (see below). Comparison with the very similar brooches from Grave 7 at Vert-la-Gravelle (Mame) enable this example from Vron to be dated at the earliest to the last third of the 4 th century or to the turn of the century. The location of the inhumation within the burial ground suggests a date within Seillier's Phase 2 (= ca. 390-415/20). 3. The bronze hairpin from the same grave, over 17 cm long, with a small round head, belongs to the Fecamp type (fig. 4), known chiefly from the Germanic female burials and other archaeological evidence found in Westphalia and the Lower Rhine.

Scholarship on modern and contemporary art has emerged as a significant subfield within the larger field of the art of South Asia, especially since the 1990s. Arguing against earlier historicist readings that presented Europe as the center from which modernism was transmitted to the rest of the world, scholars have critically examined transcontinental artistic encounters and radical aesthetic negotiations in the colony and the post-colony. Moving away from a center-periphery model that inevitably marks modern art in South Asia as merely derivative of its Western counterpart, recent scholarship has presented a number of methodological alternatives appropriate for examining the aesthetic and political imperatives of modern and contemporary art in South Asia on its own terms. Much of this scholarship has paralleled, intersected with, and drawn on the theoretical frames made available by postcolonial and subaltern studies. Thus, although a relatively new arena of inquiry, the methodological sophistication and academic rigor demonstrated by recent scholarship has very rapidly transformed the study of modern and contemporary South Asian art into a subfield with its own vocabulary and lexicon. While significant overlaps exist, the key concerns for the study of modernism, however, differ constitutively from the questions that are central to the study of contemporary art practices. Negotiations between traditional forms and modernist aesthetics, intersections between internationalism and national identity, and questions of authenticity and derivativeness have informed scholarly engagements with the art of the late 19th century and the 20th century. In contrast, globalization and its attendant cultural transformations, accelerated migration and the increased global mobility of both artworks and artists, the rise of new media and the reconfiguration of older aesthetic imperatives, and, in recent years, an alteration in the role of the artist and the audience have emerged as organizing themes for studies on contemporary art. Despite this divergence, the study of modern and contemporary South Asian art, nevertheless, shares a set of theoretical and methodological predilections that give this subfield conceptual coherence. Many of the entries in this article demonstrate that these predilections result from a broader interest in questions of anti-imperialism, marginality, difference, and otherness as articulated through visual representation. This perhaps is inevitable given that the genealogy of this new subfield can be traced to the anticolonial tenor of early-20th-century scholarship on modern South Asian art, citations for which have also been included in this bibliography.

As a nation grounded in the appropriation of Native land and the destruction of Native peoples, Christianity has helped define what it means to be “American” from the start. Even though neither the Continental Congress nor the Constitutional Convention recognized a unifying set of religious beliefs, Protestant evangelicalism served as a force of cohesion that helped Americans rally behind the War for Independence. During the multiple 19th-century wars for Indian removal and extermination, Christianity again helped solidify the collapse of racial, class, and denominational categories behind a love for a Christian God and His support for an American nation. Close connections between Christianity and American nationhood have flared in popularity throughout American history, particularly during wartime. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, the closely affiliated religious and racial categories of Christianity and whiteness helped solidify American identity. However, constructions of a white, Christian, American nation have always been oversimplified. Slavery, land-grabbing, and the systematic genocide of Native peoples ran alongside the creation of the American myth of a Christian nation, founded in religious freedom. Indeed, enslavement and settler colonialism helped contrive a coherence to white Protestantism during a moment of profound disagreement on church government, theology, and religious practice. During the antebellum period, white Protestants constructed a Christian and American identity largely in opposition to categories they identified as non-Christian. This “other” group was built around indigenous, African, Muslim, and sometimes-Catholic religious beliefs and their historic, religious, and racial categorizations as “pagans,” “heathens,” and “savages.” In the 19th-century republic, this “non-Christian” designation defined and enforced a unified category of American Protestants, even though their denominations fought constantly and splintered easily. Among those outside the rhetorical category of Protestantism were, frequently, Irish and Mexican Catholics, as well as Mormons. Enforced segregation of African Americans within or outside of white Protestant churches furthered a sense of Protestant whiteness. When, by the late 19th century, Protestantism became elided with white middle class expectations of productive work, leisure, and social mobility, it was largely because of the early 19th-century cultural associations Protestants had built between white Protestantism, republicanism, and civilization. The fact that the largest categories of immigrants in the late 19th century came from non-Protestant cultures initially reified connections between Protestantism and American nationalism. Immigrants were identified as marginally capable of American citizenship and were simply considered “workers.” Protestant expectations of literacy, sobriety, social mobility, and religious practice helped construct Southern and Eastern European immigrants as nonwhite. Like African Americans, New Immigrants were considered incapable of fulfilling the responsibilities of American citizenship. Fears that Catholic and Jewish immigrants, like African Americans, might build lasting American institutions to change the cultural loci of power in the country were often expressed in religious terms. Groups such as the No-Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Immigration Restriction League often discussed their nationalist goals in terms of historic connections between the nation and Anglo-Protestantism. During the Great Depression and the long era of prosperity in the mid-20th century, the Catholic and Jewish migrants gradually assimilated into a common category of “whiteness” and American citizenship. However, the newly expansive category of postwar whiteness also further distanced African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and others as perpetual “foreigners” within a white, Protestant, Christian nation.

An interesting subject that delves into the junction of spirituality, philosophy, and creative expression is the effect of Theosophy on contemporary painting. In the late 19th century, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky established the spiritual movement known as Theosophy. Theosophy is a belief system that seeks to discover the truth about the oneness of all faiths and delve further into the secrets of life, positing the existence of concealed realities beyond the material world. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Theosophy wielded a transformative influence on the field of contemporary art. Its principles were not just influential, but potent enough to reshape the work of even the most prominent painters. Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky is a testament to this; his journey was not just instrumental, but transformative in the ascent of abstract expressionism.Theosophical teachings resonated deeply with Kandinsky, echoing not just his profound spirituality, but his personal quest to uncover art's hidden significance. Theosophy posited the existence of concealed realities beyond the material world, placing not just a premium, but a profound importance on the spiritual facets of life. For Kandinsky, art was not just a portal, but a profound conduit for these higher realms, a conduit for the cosmic spirit to manifest. This profoundly impacted Kandinsky as he veered away from realistic imagery and delved into the realm of abstract painting. He aimed to articulate spiritual experiences and emotions through the medium of color and shape. For instance, in his painting 'Composition VII, 'Kandinsky used vibrant colors and dynamic shapes to convey a sense of spiritual energy and movement. Driven by the belief that art could convey profound, transcendent truths, his work progressively shed its symbolic nature. Famous for his geometric abstract paintings, Piet Mondrian was another artist impacted by Theosophy. Theosophy's principles of spiritual progress and cosmic oneness resonated with Mondrian's search for inner peace and a sense of cosmic order, which were crucial to his creative process. For instance, in his painting 'Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 'Mondrian used primary colors and straight lines to represent the harmony and balance he believed existed in the universe, a concept aligned with philosophical ideas. Beyond specific artists, the influence of Theosophy on contemporary art might be seen in more systemic currents like Abstract Expressionism and Symbolism. Some artists, like the symbolists, drew inspiration from the theosophical tradition's emphasis on introspection and mystical themes. Theosophy had not just a significant but a lasting impact on contemporary painting. It inspired painters to seek not just new ways but innovative ways of expressing themselves that went beyond traditional depictions. Modern painting's enduring legacy is not just profoundly rooted but intricately intertwined with theosophical ideas of spirituality, oneness, and inner change, which fostered not just the emergence but the flourishing of abstract and emotionally charged art forms, such as Wassily Kandinsky's abstract expressionism and Piet Mondrian's geometric abstraction, which aimed not just to convey, but to evoke spiritual and emotional experiences through non-representational forms.

The incentive for writing this book was another book published by the Chemical Society about 60 years ago, titled British Chemists [1] that completely ignored women—as if there had not been any women among the chemists of earlier generations. The authors felt that the early women chemists in Britain, quite a few of them working already as early as the late 19th century, deserve credit. The book wholly justifies this. As the Introduction tells us, these women chemists rarely received recognition; most of them were unmarried and could never play a leading role in the profession. But they were most enthusiastic about and dedicated to chemistry—this is what must have given them the strength to fight all barriers. The first of these barriers was getting a secondary education (Chapter 1, ‘‘Setting the Scene’’) and then being accepted to a university. In secondary schools— as the Rayner-Canhams argue—throughout the early 20th century, there was ambivalence about why girls need an academic education at all. It was assumed that most girls would become wives and mothers and only a small minority would be interested in pursuing a career. Who would then be the curriculum aimed at? This reminds us of the American movie, Mona Lisa Smile, set in the 1950s in a rich private New England liberal arts college for women, where even some of the most intelligent and interested girls thought that their role in life was to be a good housewife and mother—and only that. If this was still the attitude in the United States in the 1950s, certainly it was even more so in the late 19th and early 20th century probably everywhere. It is quite astounding to read how relatively early, already in the late 19th century, the demand for university education appeared among women. The authors ascribe this to several factors. In the second half of the 19th century, several women’s organizations were established that stood up for higher education for middle-class women. In fact, middle-class women started to look much farther than ever before when planning their future. Several magazines supported this attitude. One example from an article in 1914 [2]: ‘‘Woman is taking to herself a new significance. She is discovering that she, as well as man, has another M. Hargittai (&) Materials Structure and Modeling Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, P.O. Box 91, 1521 Budapest, Hungary e-mail: hargittaim@mail.bme.hu

Mechanisms in Anesthesia and Analgesia

The article is devoted to the issue of the continuity of the Russian pictorial tradition and the representation of spiritual meanings in contemporary Russian art. The authors aims to consider the image of the Virgin Mary as part of the cultural code of Russia. The object of the research is the materials of the visual art works by contemporary Russian artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, studied from the perspective of their Byzantine origins. The subject of this research is the image of the Virgin Mary in contemporary Russian visual art. The result of the research is an understanding of the forms of transformation of the canon of spiritual tradition in contemporary art.

What strategies are visual artists and filmmakers using to criticise the social and economic conditions shaping our particular historical moment? This question is answered by considering the methods and political implications of artists or filmmakers working in a contemporary western art context today. Leading into extended analyses of works by Frances Barrett, Claire Denis, Angela Brennan, and Alex Monteith, the book considers two forces that have informed contemporary artmaking: the economic conditions that began changing social realities from the 1970s forward; and the current tendency of the political aesthetic to move away from direct political content or didacticism to a concern for the sensate effects of materials. This is framed by Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ and Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. As historical ground for understanding the contemporary condition, Artmaking in the Age of Global Economics pays particular attention to the divisions that opened up between progressive writers, theorists and artists in the late 20th century. Suggesting an alternative approach to understanding art’s historical antecedents, it avoids received art-historical narratives or canonical figures, refuting both the autonomy of art as well as the separation of artist from the work they produce. It locates, instead, contemporary art in a worldly context of responsibility that opens up to an ethics of practice. [211]

Clay, as a material and ceramics, which is the technique of hardening it by firing, is a form of production as old as human history like other branches of art. However, ceramics started to be perceived as contemporary art in the 20th century, when famous artists such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro made ceramics. Before this period, ceramics was being mentioned as; pottery, handicrafts and industry. This process, which started with the production of ceramics by 20th century painters, allowed ceramics to be perceived as a contemporary art branch. In the years following this period in Europe, ceramics departments were opened within the academies, and with the contributions of those artists, who were educated in ceramics, as form and content, the style which is named as contemporary ceramic art today, has emerged. Thus, contemporary ceramic art, which was already born into modernism, has witnessed two periods until today; modernism and postmodernism. The subject of this research is the study of the state reached by ceramics, which has had a unique modernization process and has been exposed to many discussions about its identity, in contemporary arts. Keywords : Ceramic, Art, Craft, Identity, Art of Ceramics, Contemporary Art DOI : 10.7176/JSTR/6-10-10

Kola is a bitter, caffeine-rich nut indigenous to the West African forest zones. Across western Africa, kola’s use is wide-ranging: it serves as a stimulant, a dye, and a critical item in healing, childbirth, weddings, religious rituals, and in mediating disputes. Kola is also integral to western African trade. From at least the 11th century, kola was a primary commodity in long-distance commerce between the Sierra Leone–Guinea forests to the savannah. West Africans traded kola along the Upper Guinea Coast before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, who subsequently engaged in the coastal kola trade. In the 19th century liberated African women in Sierra Leone formed an important trading diaspora, conveying the nut overland to the savannah, within West Africa, and to Europe. Asante became the world’s leading producer of kola in the late 19th and early 20th century, exporting the nut to the savannah and later to Lagos, Brazil, and Europe. In southern Nigeria, kola featured in local commerce and was conveyed to Brazil, Europe, and the United States. In Lagos, liberated Yoruba returnees from Sierra Leone were instrumental in the kola trade between Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast to Lagos, and to Brazil. Technological advancements stimulated kola trade within West Africa, and by 1930s, southern Nigerian-produced kola surpassed other areas of West Africa. Afro-Brazilian returnees were critical in the expansion of this production. Trade was also significant from Nupe to the north. Kola also made its way across the Atlantic. By at least the 17th century, kola was conveyed from West Africa to the Circum-Caribbean on slave ships. It was employed by Europeans to induce backbreaking labor from enslaved peoples; enslaved peoples themselves used the nut medicinally to treat a range of ailments. From the late 19th century, kola was imported to the British Caribbean as an alternative economic crop following the decline of sugar. Botanical gardens in the British Caribbean cultivated the nut and distributed it locally as well as regionally. Kola produced in the Caribbean and West Africa was exported to Europe and North America, where the nut was first embraced as a medicinal tonic, notably in Coca-Cola. From the 19th century, a long-distance trade was established between West Africa and Brazil, supporting the use of kola by Afro-Brazilians. The kola nut is sacred to several African-derived religions in the Americas, including the Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería, and Grenadian and Trinidadian Orisa worship.

186Philosophy and Literature The Languages ofPsyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Clark Library Lectures 1985-1986, edited by G. S. Rousseau; 494 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, $55.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Michel Foucault'sMadnessand Civilization and Birthofme Clinic—first published in 1961 and 1963, respectively—encouraged a critical rethinking ofthe Western psychiatric and medical traditions emerging from the European Enlightenment as institutions fundamental to the modern world. The Languages ofPsycL·, consisting of papers developed in a lecture series on the mind/body problem in the Enlightenment—a series to which Foucault had agreed to contribute a theoretical framework before his untimely death—provides as good an introduction as any to the most recent work on the beginnings of modern medicine. The essays, emerging from the vantage points of a variety ofdisciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, and medical history, are arranged in roughly chronological order and trace the developments found in the late 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. The first important development was the increasing power of physicians, and decreasing significance of philosophers and religious figures, as arbiters of the mind/body problem. The second important development took place within medicine itself: the move on the part ofthe physicians from the mechanistic, body-oriented, and scientifically quantifiable approach of the early Enlightenment, characterized by Boerhaave and Hoffmann, for instance, to a psychological, mind-oriented, and much more humanistic approach in the late 18th century (exemplified by Battie, Pinel, and Reil), which in the early 19th century lost ground to positivism. Although these broad themes are not particularly new, the essays provide much fresh evidence for their validity. Several ofthe papers deserve special commendations. Flynn makes a thoughtprovoking attempt to find similar patterns of thinking and rhetoric in 18thcentury physicians and such novelists as Richardson, Sterne, and Smollett. In a way reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Naphta, Schaffer intelligendy undercuts the polarities which grounded the 18th-century self-understanding, linking, for instance, the rational Enlightenment with the occult via such favorite secret societies as the Illuminati. Morris shows how Sade relied on medicine for much of his anatomical and biological thinking, while he rejected its value system, specifically its attempts to subdue pain. In the volume's final essay, Popkin studies the Enlightenment medical and scientific justifications for racism directed at Africans and Jews, justifications which at times relied on cultural factors related to conceptions ofmind and at times relied on physical differences in the body. If the collection of essays has any problems, it is the presence of Foucault's ghost. The papers, which frequendy cite Foucault and are dedicated, as he was, Reviews187 to examining institutional discourses which have too often fallen between the cracks of current academic disciplinary structures, are certainly of interest as New Historical documents. As such, they are in danger of descending into a Foucauldian epigonism which is nothing more than pedantry without a point. At times exaggerated claims are made for the importance of medical figures who have been ignored (perhaps rightly) for the last two centuries; at other times paragraphs full of arcane knowledge seem inserted only to prove the erudition and archival industriousness of the authors. Overall, however, these essays escape the danger ofbecoming New Historical parodies and contribute valuably to the field. The anthology's admirable bibliography and thorough index make it all the more helpful. TL· Languages of PsycL· should prove useful both to scholars who need an overview of the history of medicine and an introduction to the most recent work in the field and to specialists looking to polish their own work with the results ofthe latest research. Whitman CollegeRobert Tobin The Shades ofAeneas: The Imitation ofVergilandtheHistory of Paganism in Boccaccio's Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida , by James H. McGregor; ix & 133 pp. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991, $30.00. James McGregor's Shades ofAeneas is a detailed study of three lesser-known works of Boccaccio: Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida. Its aim is to clarify the range of Vergilian and Statian allusions within these works and, in the process, to develop a coherent scheme for interpreting them. According to McGregor, all three ofthese early romances are highly critical ofthe pagan world they...

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Medieval music generally refers to western European music between the late 8th and early 15th centuries, although topics concerning Christian liturgy and plainchant reach further back into history. The Latin-Christian realms considered here include Britain ranging from England to St. Andrews, Scotland, the Frankish Empire from France to central Europe, the Spanish territories of Galicia, León, Castile, and Catalonia, the Mediterranean region, Sicily, and the Italian peninsula. Questions of how the music of these peoples was composed, conceived, performed, and preserved during this lengthy period are as many and diverse as the backgrounds and interests of those seeking answers. During the early Middle Ages, music was transmitted orally and the churches of different regions had distinctive liturgies and chants. With the unification of the Christian Church under the Carolingians around the turn of the 9th century, chant came to be written down, early musical notation serving as a memory aid. The relationship of Frankish and other regional chant repertories to that of the papal city of Rome, various attempts to regularize Western plainchant, and the music theory that developed to comprehend it are among the most extensively studied topics of chant scholarship. Religious songs other than chant were also sung, often outside of Church services, in Latin or such vernacular languages as Galician, German, Czech, English, Italian, and Hebrew. Numerous love songs were written in Old Occitan, French, and German. Starting in the 9th century, polyphonic arrangements of chants called organum emerged. In the 12th century, one encounters polyphonic settings of strophic Latin poems called versus and conductus. Sacred polyphony was by then performed at a number of centers, although the organum and conductus composed for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in the late 12th and early 13th centuries were the most widely disseminated and stylistically influential genres of their time. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, new genres of polyphonic composition emerged, notably the motet, various French and Italian secular songs, and Mass Ordinary movements. Instrumental music had existed since earliest times but it came to be notated only in the late 13th century in the form of monophonic dance tunes. Most composers of medieval sacred monophony are unknown except for certain authors of hymns, sequences, and chants. The courtly troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesänger are however often identified in manuscript song collections. By the 12th century, composers of polyphony like Leonin and Perotin were known and praised.

This paper looks at the attempts to found marine stations in Britain during the late 19th century and seeks to show how a fuller understanding of these events, and their success or failure, can be gained by looking both at the scientific background to the movement and at the broadly similar problems that faced their founders. The survival of early marine stations depended largely on how successfully they balanced scientific objectives with the applied work which was the price of government support. Those stations that continued into the twentieth century did so mostly by abandoning pure research in marine zoology and by concentrating on fisheries problems; only these attracted the grants essential for their survival. This was a turn of events unforeseen when the foundation of marine stations was discussed in the 1870's but ideas changed rapidly in the early 1880's when it became apparent that progress could be made only by accepting a different orientation. This paper looks at how official policy towards science in Britain affected oceanography and other aspects of marine science during the late 19th century, and how scientists hoped that the foundation of marine stations would fulfil both a scientific and a practical need for institutional bases for marine research. However, competition for scarce resources created tension and rivalry between institutions from which few escaped unscathed. The underlying reasons for such problems cannot generally be dealt with extensively in the histories of individual stations but they contribute much to our understanding of how such institutions developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The paper concludes with a brief review of individual stations, particularly those in Scotland.

This thesis examines the character of Korean contemporary art. I argue that an intense time-space compression produced by communication technology and the information revolution of the late 20th century has meant that Korean society has experienced the symptom of 'schizophrenia', as theorized by Fredric Jameson, which understands the modern capitalist world as being a perpetual present and characteristically depthless. Facilitated by this flourishing media culture and the rapid diffusion of digital technologies, I claim that a new 'surface culture' emerged in Korean society as Korean society became accustomed to identifying information through images and adopting the concomitant superficiality that this engenders. The Korean art world has also been heavily affected by Western artistic and cultural content through various media and exchanges with the international world, largely as a consequence of the nation's 'globalization policy'. I assert that Korean artists have experienced a new type of visual sensation and stimulation amid the torrent of information and started to understand the world as raw material by registering the received content based on its surface and turning it into modules. However, instead of looking at the current situation in a negative way, I argue for a positive evaluation based on Mario Perniola's 'philosophy of the present', as the basis to propose a new paradigm in Korean contemporary art. According to Pernio la, contemporary society is a full world where everything is available, and what is important is to manage the data and use it appropriately. I argue that one-way communication and the actuality of mass media influence in Korea has reached its peak, and that Korean artists have begun to develop a new paradigm of accumulating data and have begun alTanging it according to their own criteria throughout the last decade. In conclusion, I propose an exhibition featuring the art practices which embrace this new paradigm, and which explore innovative ways of making inventories and classifying history and culture.