Authentic Art Research Articles

Effective and Scalable Data Access Control in Onedata Large Scale Distributed Virtual File System

Nowadays, as large amounts of data are generated, either from experiments, satellite imagery or via simulations, access to this data becomes challenging for users who need to further process them, since existing data management makes it difficult to effectively access and share large data sets. In this paper we present an approach to enabling easy and secure collaborations based on the state of the art authentication and authorization mechanisms, advanced group/role mechanism for flexible authorization management and support for identity mapping between local systems, as applied in an eventually consistent distributed file system called Onedata.

Use of infrared hyperspectral imaging as an aid for paint identification

Art authentication is a complicated process that often requires the extensive study of high value objects. Although a series of non-destructive techniques is already available for art scientists, new techniques, extending current possibilities, are still required. In this paper, the use of a novel mid-infrared tunable imager is proposed as an active hyperspectral imaging system for art work analysis. The system provides access to a range of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum (2500–3750 nm) which are otherwise difficult to access using conventional hyperspectral imaging (HSI) equipment. The use of such a tool could be beneficial if applied to the paint classification problem and could help analysts map the diversity of pigments within a given painting. The performance of this tool is demonstrated and compared with a conventional, off-the-shelf HSI system operating in the near infrared spectral region (900–1700 nm). Various challenges associated with laser-based imaging are demonstrated and solutions to these challenges as well as the results of applying classification algorithms to datasets captured using both HSI systems are presented. While the conventional HSI system provides data in which more pigments can be accurately classified, the result of applying the proposed laser-based imaging system demonstrates the validity of this technique for application in art authentication tasks.

Sound matters: postcolonial critique for a viral age

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.

Beyond the performance framework. The creative work of Darek Foks in mass culture

The aim of article is to analyse the main artistic strategies in Darek Foks’ writing and to compare his works with the tradition and products of mass culture. In his latest composition, written in 2015 and titled Dad’s tablet, the author, as many times earlier, casts a critical eye over significant categories of mass culture, especially performance, stageability and, artistic authenticity. In this way Foks tries to leave his own, distinctively individual mark, a rebellious gesture against the rules governing contemporary culture.

Warden Oom, Regionalist: Authorial Ethos, Generic Functions

Abstract Recent scholarship in Dutch literature of the interwar years has revalued to an important degree the genre of regional or rural literature. Whereas existent research in this field mainly zooms in on the thematic motives and rhetorical structures of the regional text, this paper aims at combining a textual and contextual approach. It hopes to do so by linking the functions of the regional genre to the construction of the regional author’s ethos or authority outside his oeuvre. One author here functions as a representative case in point: Warden Oom (Edward Vermeulen), a once successful but now forgotten Flemish folk writer and regionalist. This paper analyzes how Vermeulen, in autobiographical documents and interviews, embodies both an encyclopedic and an artistic authority. These two forms of extra-literary authority are a means to guarantee, so the argument goes, the efficacy of the informative and documentary as well as the esthetic functions of Vermeulen’s regional oeuvre. In this way, this paper not only pays attention to the rarely documented and therefore highly neglected voice of the regional author himself but it also grasps these autobiographical writings to situate the regional text in its broader context. Moreover, this article’s focus on the esthetic ambitions and functions of the regional author and his oeuvre may shed a new light on a genre which is usually considered to be heteronomous in the first place.

Applying multi-touch technology to facilitate the learning of art appreciation: from the view of motivation and annotation

ABSTRACTHandheld technologies with multi-touch functions have been embraced by the young generation and become their important tool for social and learning purposes. The purpose of this study was to explore how the state-of-art devices could be integrated into authentic art appreciation courses to motivate and enhance students’ learning. It was conducted in a class entitled “Art and Society” at a university in northern Taiwan. A total of 118 college students participated in this study. They were divided into two groups instructed by two approaches: the experimental group used digital materials with multi-touch technology, and the control group used both slides and printed materials. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted in this study. The results indicate that there were statistically significant differences in learning motivation, with a higher level achieved by the experimental group than the control group. The interactive multi-touch operation allowed students to use annotation skills and graffiti to create visual comments that could be edited, reused, and shared easily among group members. This study further discusses the role of tablets, students’ special annotation strategies, and the features of the tablets as superior to the conventional approach.

Taking inspiration from Reggio Emilia: An analysis of a professional development workshop on fostering authentic art in the early childhood classroom

ABSTRACTThis article documents the implementation of a professional development workshop on the Reggio Emilia approach in early childhood art education. It describes how early childhood educators participated in a collaborative collage experience and how a similar art activity can be engaging for young children. It also highlights philosophies, strategies, and elements of the Reggio approach and elucidates how they can be easily integrated into early childhood classroom praxis.

Features combination for art authentication studies: brushstroke and materials analysis of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso

This work presents a tool to support authentication studies of paintings attributed to the modernist Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918). The strategy adopted was to quantify and combine the information extracted from the analysis of the brushstroke with information on the pigments present in the paintings. The brushstroke analysis was performed combining Gabor filter and Scale Invariant Feature Transform. Hyperspectral imaging and elemental analysis were used to compare the materials in the painting with those present in a database of oil paint tubes used by the artist. The outputs of the tool are a quantitative indicator for authenticity, and a mapping image that indicates the areas where materials not coherent with Amadeo's palette were detected, if any. This output is a simple and effective way of assessing the results of the system. The method was tested in twelve paintings obtaining promising results.

The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen

The Ethics and Politics of Negation:the Postdramatic on Screen Angelos Koutsourakis (bio) The Ethics of Spectatorship and the Postdramatic On June 22, 2008, in a television interview with Alexander Kluge, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke was asked to explain his ethical approach to filmmaking. His response was that the prerequisite for making films ethically lies in a filmmaking practice that takes the spectator seriously and stimulates the viewer’s imagination. Haneke’s raison d’être is grounded in the idea that unlike literature, film runs the risk of restricting people’s imagination by showing and clarifying everything. As he says, “one ought to work against this wherever possible…Film, like any other art, should produce a dialogue, not a monologue. Omitting explanation is one of the many ways of inspiring the viewer’s imagination.” Haneke’s argument provides a point of entry into thinking about cinema and ethics through the postdramatic lens; according to Hans-Thies Lehmann, the fundamental principle of postdramatic representation is the negation of strategies of dramatic concreteness and the Hegelian view of drama as the conflict of moral attitudes. The postdramatic resists the “Wholeness” of dramatic art and valorizes the idea of representation as a process; it postpones the production of meaning and this is an ethical representational approach, because it negates uniform interpretations and asks the audience to co-produce meaning rather than endorse predetermined conclusions (Postdramatisches 246).1 As also mentioned by Haneke, omitting explanation can be an ethical, but also a political act. Both Haneke’s and Lehmann’s comments recall critical theory’s privileging of an aesthetics of negation. From Adorno’s idea that authentic art does not simply produce “messages” to be consumed but is committed to an aesthetics of “enigmaticalness” and “determinate negation” (129), to Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt’s idea that “the domain of the irrational” in art is “the domain of protest,” there is a late Marxist tradition that privileges aesthetic negation as the sine qua non of social critique (239). The ethical implications of such an approach rest on the refusal to reproduce a reified reality and the desire to activate feelings of protest – what Kluge and Negt name “the antirealism of feelings” that assist individuals in renouncing a “reality that injures” them (414). [End Page 155] Such a valorization of aesthetic negation sits at the antipodes of the Cultural Studies turn to universalizing moral questions about the representations of the other, and the exploration of ethics in cinema via methodological approaches proposed by analytical philosophy. Activating a dialogue between the viewer and the object is a modus operandi that sits uneasily with the normative reproduction of moralist assertions and the unresponsive consumption of ideas. Yet recent work in film studies in the area of the ethics of representation seems to be content with more conventional, monological narratives and approaches to the question of cinema as a medium of ethical thinking.2 The determining context for much of this work is the understanding of representation as a communication model. David Bordwell aptly explains that such a model (and let me stress that he does not endorse it) presupposes, “that the plans and intentions of the filmmaker shape the movie, which becomes a vehicle for an embedded content” (Bordwell, “Part-Time Cognitivist” 1-2). Telling in this respect is the work of the moral philosopher Berys Gaut. Gaut goes to great lengths to explain the potential ethical benefits of the audience’s identification with either positive characters in a film or characters who might be deluded or mistaken but whose counter-example can help the audience “grow emotionally.” Gaut surmises that identification with characters can “teach an audience about correct emotional responses” (69). Ethics in this school of thought is invoked in a manner that does not reflect on the reduction of spectatorial labor to a reception of “correct values.” Such nuances are also overlooked by Noël Carroll, who has recently offered an analysis of the tropes and the emotional strategies employed by narratives aiming to overcome biases against homophobia or racism in order to produce moral change. The examples put forward by Carroll are the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the film...

The Paradigm of Decline-Metamorphosis-Rebirth in Fine Arts

The triad of decline-metamorphosis-rebirth constantly reappears in the history of civilisation, it is current in all historical periods and cultural environments, in different areas and the most diverse contexts. Its manifestations are countless and the same is true of its interpretations. They are especially frequent in the area of art, because the evolutionary model, grounded in the idea of cyclic development comes very handy for explanations and illustrations which seek to present complicated things in a simple and clear way. The history of art, mainly in the 19th century, advocated a tripartite development of art which seeks greater perfection and maturity and reaches its peak just to be then inevitably followed by a decline in artistic originality and power. Already for some time now the evolutionary model has been shown too ineffective in addressing scholarly questions, especially due to oversimplification and a priori classification of subject matter which cannot possibly be classified. The perception that the art of the Early Renaissance was a preliminary period for more mature and accomplished achievements of High Renaissance which at some point began to lose its drive and went into decline either by repeating outmoded forms or their decomposition, is not only naive, but simply wrong and represents a misunderstanding of the essence of art. In much the same way it would be equally wrong to label in advance the early works of a certain artist as not-mature-yet or possessing less artistic authenticity.

The Paradigm of Decline-Metamorphosis-Rebirth in Fine Arts

The triad of decline-metamorphosis-rebirth constantly reappears in the history of civilisation, it is current in all historical periods and cultural environments, in different areas and the most diverse contexts. Its manifestations are countless and the same is true of its interpretations. They are especially frequent in the area of art, because the evolutionary model, grounded in the idea of cyclic development comes very handy for explanations and illustrations which seek to present complicated things in a simple and clear way. The history of art, mainly in the 19th century, advocated a tripartite development of art which seeks greater perfection and maturity and reaches its peak just to be then inevitably followed by a decline in artistic originality and power. Already for some time now the evolutionary model has been shown too ineffective in addressing scholarly questions, especially due to oversimplification and a priori classification of subject matter which cannot possibly be classified. The perception that the art of the Early Renaissance was a preliminary period for more mature and accomplished achievements of High Renaissance which at some point began to lose its drive and went into decline either by repeating outmoded forms or their decomposition, is not only naive, but simply wrong and represents a misunderstanding of the essence of art. In much the same way it would be equally wrong to label in advance the early works of a certain artist as not-mature-yet or possessing less artistic authenticity.

Geometric tight frame based stylometry for art authentication of van Gogh paintings

This paper is about authenticating genuine van Gogh paintings from forgeries. The paintings used in the test in this paper are provided by van Gogh Museum and Kröller-Müller Museum. The authentication process depends on two key steps: feature extraction and outlier detection. In this paper, a geometric tight frame and some simple statistics of the tight frame coefficients are used to extract features from the paintings. Then a forward stage-wise rank boosting is used to select a small set of features for more accurate classification so that van Gogh paintings are highly concentrated towards some center point while forgeries are spread out as outliers. Numerical results show that our method can achieve 86.08% classification accuracy under the leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. Our method also identifies five features that are much more predominant than other features. Using just these five features for classification, our method can give 88.61% classification accuracy which is the highest so far reported in literature. Evaluation of the five features is also performed on two hundred datasets generated by bootstrap sampling with replacement. The median and the mean are 88.61% and 87.77% respectively. Our results show that a small set of statistics of the tight frame coefficients along certain orientations can serve as discriminative features for van Gogh paintings. It is more important to look at the tail distributions of such directional coefficients than mean values and standard deviations. It reflects a highly consistent style in van Gogh's brushstroke movements, where many forgeries demonstrate a more diverse spread in these features.

State of the Art Authentication, Access Control, and Secure Integration in Smart Grid

The smart grid (SG) is a promising platform for providing more reliable, efficient, and cost effective electricity to the consumers in a secure manner. Numerous initiatives across the globe are taken by both industry and academia in order to compile various security issues in the smart grid network. Unfortunately, there is no impactful survey paper available in the literature on authentications in the smart grid network. Therefore, this paper addresses the required objectives of an authentication protocol in the smart grid network along with the focus on mutual authentication, access control, and secure integration among different SG components. We review the existing authentication protocols, and analyze mutual authentication, privacy, trust, integrity, and confidentiality of communicating information in the smart grid network. We review authentications between the communicated entities in the smart grid, such as smart appliance, smart meter, energy provider, control center (CC), and home/building/neighborhood area network gateways (GW). We also review the existing authentication schemes for the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communication network along with various available secure integration and access control schemes. We also discuss the importance of the mutual authentication among SG entities while providing confidentiality and privacy preservation, seamless integration, and required access control with lower overhead, cost, and delay. This paper will help to provide a better understanding of current authentication, authorization, and secure integration issues in the smart grid network and directions to create interest among researchers to further explore these promising areas.

Carelessness or curatorial chutzpah? On controversies surrounding street art in the museum

SummaryTaking the exhibition Art in the Streets, which was shown at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 17 April to 8 August, 2011, as its main point of departure, the present article discusses street art's association with the institutions of the art world. Art in the Streets sparked a lot of debate before, while and after it took place. The article primarily focuses on two aspects of the controversies connected with the exhibition. First, it looks at the reaction of conservative American commentators, who saw Art in the Streets as problematic because of its apparent validation of vandalism as art. The article argues that this critical response should be understood not just as the result of pre-existing animosity towards graffiti and street art, but also as an expression of a particular idea about the role museums play in society. Second, the article considers the reaction to Art in the Streets of street art aficionados, who saw the museum's representation of street based artistic expressions as problematic. The criticism from within the street art world was fuelled by the removal of a commissioned artwork by the Italian artist BLU from the façade of the museum building prior to the opening of the exhibition. On the one hand, it is argued that this curatorial decision can be seen as symptomatic of the show's failure to integrate a non-institutional form of expression in an institutional context. On the other hand, it is argued that the removal can be related to the whitewashing process which takes place in the street every day, thus effectively reproducing in the institutional environment the conditions under which street art is produced. With an outset in a number of artistic responses to Art in the Streets, the article is concluded by a more overarching discussion about street art's relationship with the institutional art world. Here it is argued that the relevance and perceived authenticity of street art is challenged by the interest from excluding and conservational art institutions, which street art to some extent exists in opposition to. Given the unsanctioned nature of street art, as well as street art's connection to the street, it is further argued that while institutions can create shows that document and discuss the history of art in the street, and can show artworks derived from this context, street art proper cannot exist in an institutional context.

Fake or Fortune? Art Authentication Rules in the Art Market and at Court

Abstract:This article analyzes the dichotomy between the practices of the art market and of court judges when it comes to the authentication of works of art. While judges very much rely on experts acting in the art market, they may not necessarily pursue the same examination methods and conclusions, which can have serious repercussions on the art object and for its owner. The dichotomy unavoidably leads to the questions of what the correct assessment is and whether court judges should be conducting such examinations.Taking account of the difficulties judges and legislators face in attempting to interfere with established art market practices, it is suggested that courts are not an adequate forum to resolve authenticity disputes. Instead, scholars and art market actors should adopt improved authentication standards and, in the event of a dispute, refer to alternative means of dispute resolution.

Variations V: “Escaping Stagnation” Through Movement of Signification

Variations V, a collaborative event by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and composer John Cage, premiered on July 23,1965 at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as part of the New York Philharmonic's French-American Festival. Following Edgard Varese's Hyperprism, Pierre Boulez's Improvisation sur Mallarme II, and Elliot Carter's Second String Quartet, Variations V contrasted greatly in composition and media with the pieces of the first half of the Philharmonic's program. Instead of orchestral instrumentalists performing live on their trumpets, cellos, and violins, recorded and radio sounds filled the concert hall through six speakers "distributed around Philharmonic Hall" (Hughes "Leaps" 1965:10); the choreographed movements of seven dancers occupied the stage; and filmed images projected on a screen behind them. The performance was an over­ whelming multimedia display, with no immediate connection between the various modes of artistic expression. This was not the case, however, as performances of Variations V in the 1960s depended on a complex interface for the production of simultaneity between visual and aural media, as woven by multiple voices of artistic authority. This interface may initially be traced to Cage and Cunningham, and their shared desire to create a performance in which movement on stage set sound into motion. However, multiple collaborators contributed their electronic designs to make performances of Variations V possible. To begin, a team of sound engineers created technology to mediate between motion and sound. The first piece of equipment was a fifty-channel mixer built by Max Mathews-an innovator in the field of computer and electronic music-one year prior to the French-American Festival in 1964, for Cage's New York Philharmonic premiere of Atlas Eclipticalis. Cage then called on a Swedish research scientist at Bell Labs, Wilhelm (Billy) Kluver, to construct a series of photocells. Whenever a dancer passed in front of a light source on stage and interfered with a cell's reception of that light, the interruption would trigger a change in sound. To add to this method of electronic sound activation were twelve high capacitance antennae constructed by Robert Moog, yet another innovator of electronic music; each one taken into consideration by Cunningham when he devised his choreographic design. Sounds emanated primarily from two types of sources: tape recorders and radios. All of the tapes were created by Cage before the premiere and

Conservation and authenticity: Interactions and enquiries

The possible meanings in conservation of the word authenticity are discussed and some different definitions are briefly evaluated. Recent research showing the brain reacts differently to the concepts of copy and authentic is reviewed. The relationship between cultural heritage charters and how authenticity has been employed in them is explored with examples from the Athen's Charter, The Venice Charter, The Nara Document, The San Antonio Declaration, and the UNESCO World Heritage Documents. Several examples are discussed in the text concerning the interactions between authenticity and restoration, employing the examples of ancient buildings and old master paintings. Some of the important writings on the subject of authenticity by scholars and art historians are reviewed. Criteria which could be used to evaluate the concept of authenticity in different cultural settings are discussed and these are illustrated with case studies taken from restoration carried out on ancient marble sculptures, the Sistine Chapel frescoes by Michelangelo, and the artwork of several prominent forgers. Given that concerns about the authenticity of art are multi-dimensional, it is important that the present fragmentation of the arguments concerning authenticity across the disciplines properly take into account the conservation field and are aware of the debates within conservation concerning this topic. The questioning of the relevance of authenticity is a healthy process, and may now be framed quite differently from the way in which it was discussed even 20 years ago.

Covering Performers, Discovering Femininities: US Hip-Hop Journalism and Female Artists

This paper examines female performative identities as portrayed in the hip-hop press. The research approach is based on discourse analysis of selected texts in US hip-hop magazines, as well as of qualitative interviews with their main editors. On this basis, the paper investigates the editorial practices that appear to inform hip-hop female performative identities in relation to the commercial strategies of artists and record companies. Female artists occupy scarce and hyper-sexualised space within the hip-hop press. This suggests the existence of underlying editorial and marketing agendas which perpetuate mythologised discourses of gender and race. The evidence shows that hip-hop editorial strategies are co-opted by interdependent commercial interests of the press and music industry. Significantly, female performers appear to be complicit in their journalistic positioning through the mediation of femininities which jeopardise their artistic authenticity.

Covering Performers, Discovering Femininities: US Hip-Hop Journalism and Female Artists

This paper examines female performative identities as portrayed in the hip-hop press. The research approach is based on discourse analysis of selected texts in US hip-hop magazines, as well as of qualitative interviews with their main editors. On this basis, the paper investigates the editorial practices that appear to inform hip-hop female performative identities in relation to the commercial strategies of artists and record companies. Female artists occupy scarce and hyper-sexualised space within the hip-hop press. This suggests the existence of underlying editorial and marketing agendas which perpetuate mythologised discourses of gender and race. The evidence shows that hip-hop editorial strategies are co-opted by interdependent commercial interests of the press and music industry. Significantly, female performers appear to be complicit in their journalistic positioning through the mediation of femininities which jeopardise their artistic authenticity.

A lightweight identity authentication method by exploiting network covert channel

The state of art authentication schemes are tightly linked with encryption or crypto systems, which provides concrete foundations to move towards the concept of access control by confirming the user identity. However the openness of the computer network makes the identity credentials vulnerable even transmitted as cipher text especially in lots of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The malicious attackers can possibly steal and fake the user identity by eavesdropping, hijacking, cryptanalysis and forging. In this paper, a novel identity authentication mechanism is proposed based on the reverse usage of the Network Covert Channel (NCC) which is originally designed by attackers to create stealth communication. Different from NCC, where the packet intervals can be exploited as the data carrier to transmit the unauthorized information, we exploit such capability in Network-Covert-Channel-based Identity Authentication (NCCIA) to transmit the identity tag. By validating user identity in a covert manner, we provide a more secure authentication method compared with many existing approaches. A NCCIA demo system is designed on a FTP Platform to verify our method. The experiments demonstrate the NCCIA can prevent the attackers from eavesdropping while maintaining transmission efficiency.