Works Of Art Research Articles

Neutron tomography studies of buddhist bronze sculptures

AbstractWe have developed neutron tomography as a new tool to study the interior of ancient works of art. The present paper details the principles of the method and summarizes also some of the latest results, particularly concerning Mongolian Buddhist statues of the 17./18th century. It is shown that offering deposits made of organic and ceramic materials, even when fully enclosed in a cast metallic statue, can be examined in a non-invasive way. Within certain limits this concerns composition, size, structure and position of the interior deposits. Such studies can contribute to understand the history of ritual practices and their goals. They can also contribute to evaluate whether a statue has been properly cleaned and filled during consecration and is therefore fit for religious service. Such studies can also help to form an opinion of whether a statue is genuine.

War, art, and sanctions: social network analysis on the NACP’s databases of sanctioned Russian individuals and art collectors

AbstractUntil March 2024, Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) was tasked with maintaining databases of individuals sanctioned for their support of Russian military action in Ukraine and monitoring works of art owned by these individuals to prevent their being sold in violation of sanctions. The present study gathered data from the NACP’s War & Sanctions and War & Art databases through a combination of web scraping and API requests. These data were then examined using measures of network analysis (including degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, and clustering coefficient), which allowed the visualisation and statistical analysis of the network of Russian elite. This research is the first that has conducted scientific analysis on these datasets. Investigation determined that the social network of individuals in the upper strata of Russian society is vast and moderately centralised, with over a dozen clusters around influential Russian oligarchs, politicians, and celebrities. It also determined that art collectors have a more central role in this network than non-collectors of art. The network exhibits a clear presence of hubs and nodes with high degree centrality and a high degree-betweenness centrality correlation, indicating that information can flow quickly and efficiently. However, the network’s dependence on a few key individuals could constitute a vulnerability, with the extraction or isolation of these figures potentially disrupting the network’s function and coordination. This research also identified inconsistencies in the imposition of sanctions, creating grey areas that could allow the continued trade of cultural goods, potentially bypassing international restrictions.

The Aesthetics of Jordanian Place in the Novel The Flood Notebooks by Jordanian Writer Samiha Khrais

This research studied and analyzed the aesthetics of the Jordanian place in the novel The Flood Notebooks by the Jordanian writer Samiha Khrais. The importance of this novel lies in the fact that it is a social-historical novel that depicts a Jordanian place in the 1930s. Its writer was able to combine truth with imagination to present an artistic work whose events are derived from history, yet it is not a historical document; rather, it is a work of art, and the writer excelled in its construction. The two researchers studied the place in this novel within the framework of specific dualities of both the historical and contemporary place, the open and closed place, and the real and symbolic place. The study of duality, or opposites, is at the heart of the structural studies of meaning, which took as its starting point the duality of phenomena, claiming that it is a characteristic of human thought. However, the present study will not stop at these dualities alone; rather, it will benefit from the current semiotics due to the interest they provide in structure and meaning and the ability to interpret texts according to the context in which they appear.

Color Models in the Process of 3D Digitization of an Artwork for Presentation in a VR Environment of an Art Gallery

This study deals with the color reproduction of a work of art to digitize it into a 3D realistic model. The experiment aims to digitize a work of art for application in a virtual reality environment concerning faithful color reproduction. Photogrammetry and scanning with a LiDAR sensor are used to compare the methods and work with colors during the reconstruction of the 3D model. An innovative tablet with a camera and LiDAR sensor is used for both methods. At the same time, current findings from the field of color vision and colorimetry are applied to 3D reconstruction. The experiment focuses on working with the RGB and L*a*b* color models and, simultaneously, on the sRGB, CIE XYZ, and Rec.2020(HDR) color spaces for transforming colors into a virtual environment. For this purpose, the color is defined in the Hex Color Value format. This experiment is a starting point for further research on color reproduction in the digital environment. This study represents a partial contribution to the much-discussed area of forgeries of works of art in current trends in forensics and forgery.

Murdered and missing: description, art, and human rights

AbstractThe aim of the article is to explore how describing works of art and artistic practices enables a deeper understanding of the political dimensions and effects of art. Drawing on visual and documentary analysis, the article explores two artworks: Azúcar Rabiosa (‘Rabid Sugar’) (2018) by Cerrucha which addresses the justice system’s inaction regarding femicides and transfemicides in Mexico and Remain (2018) by Hoda Afshar, which documents the experiences of a group of stateless men who were left to languish when the Australian government closed its offshore immigration detention centre. Two key arguments emerge. First, making visible through description different aspects of artistic objects and practices helps account for what these artworks do politically. Second, taking description seriously enables us to understand how these artworks make claims to human rights.

ПРИОБЩАВАНЕ НА ДЕЦАТА КЪМ ОБЩОЧОВЕШКИТЕ НРАВСТВЕНИ ЦЕННОСТИ

Practice in kindergarten shows the expediency in the application of the situational approach in organizing the work for the perception of the art work. This approach creates rich opportunities for organizing the process of perception of the literary work as a communicative process, as an aesthetic activity. The variety of methodological techniques provokes children's creative initiative and creates conditions for the child's active attitude to the literary work both in the process of perception and in the moments of independent creativity. The child's imagination is unlocked, thinking activity is activated, resulting in a whole chain of associations and emotions. Fiction satisfies the pre-school child's need to act, to take part, albeit imaginatively, in interesting and appealing events, identifying his or her personality with the characters of the work.

Analysis of the Arab singer Shadia’s lyrics

AbstractIn this work, we analyze the lyrics of one of the most famous and influential Arab artists in the twentieth century, namely "Image missing" (Shadia). Lyrics analysis provides a deep insight into the artist’s career evolution and her interactions with the surrounding environment including the social, political, and economic conditions. In order to perform such analysis, we had to collect and compile the lyrics of Shadia accompanied with the necessary meta-data into an organized and structured form. The data are preprocessed by removing stop words and doing some normalization operations over the songs prose. We did not perform any lemmatization or stemming as the original form of the tokens conveys much more information than the source words. We performed a lexical analysis in order to study both the lexical diversity and density over the course of Shadia’s career life. We have as well studied the most significant words, idioms, and terms played in the songs using tools such as word clouds and more quantitative measures such as term frequency–inverse document frequency. We have divided the career life of Shadia into sub-decades of length 5 years, and all analyses are done both in a yearly fashion and more coarsely over such sub-decades. Our quantitative analyses show strong correlations between the artistic lyrical work of Shadia and the state of affairs in Egypt and the Arab World during her time. In particular, Shadia’s lyrics reflect the radical changes in all aspects of the social, political, and economic conditions. This is especially relevant knowing that Shadia is very much truly considered the daughter of the generation of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. The significance of Shadia and her lyrics stem essentially from being contemporaneous to radical changes in Egypt across all sectors including political (support of liberation movements across the world and the conflict with Israel) and socioeconomic (especially changing the social class structure in Egypt). We also investigated the potential effectiveness of PoS (Part-of-Speech) tagging in genre analysis and classification.

Art, Magic and the Corruption of Consciousness

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief account of part of Collingwood’s philosophy of art, in particular that dealing with the relationship between art, craft and magic, in relation to the corruption of consciousness, and to consider some of the implications for the aesthetic evaluation of ‘works of art’ produced as moral or political propaganda. I shall try to do this by drawing on the work of Matthew Kieran in relation to art and morality. I will not so much analyse or criticise Collingwood’s conception of the corruption of consciousness as presuppose it as the conception which makes sense of Collingwood’s understanding of the relation between art and morality.

A.S. PUSHKIN’S CREATIVITY AT THE RECEPTION OF A.I. ERTEL

The article comprehends the reception of A.I. Ertel of hotel images, ideas, themes of A.S. Pushkin. The relevance of the work is connected with the lack of knowledge of Ertel’s heritage, with the lack of research on the artistic continuity of Ertel’s works in relation to the Russian classics. Special attention in the article is paid to the image of a real aristocrat, the folk theme of Pushkin and Ertel. Key parallels in the themes and components of figurativeness in the article are considered using the example of various artistic works of Pushkin and Ertel, in addition, the image of Pushkin in Ertel’s letters is analyzed. A key difference is noted in the views of Ertel’s heroes and the narrator in his works; it was the latter who was close and understandable to Pushkin’s position. It can be argued that the revolutionary sentiments of the last third of the 19th century. Ertel was associated with the image of the Russian rebellion, that it was precisely after Pushkin that Ertel depicted the poles of the Russian soul.

Badiou’s encounter with art: a condition or a latent philosophy?!

ABSTRACT This article, after explaining Alain Badiou’s views on the position of art as one of the ‘conditions’ of philosophy, aims to assess the particular relationship of his philosophy with art. Analysing his encounters with works of art (specifically poetry) raises doubts about his purported claim that art is an indelible ‘condition’ the ‘truth’ of which philosophy is supposed to name, while not dictating to the conditions, what their truths should be. By scrutinising a wide range of Badiou’s texts on this topic, this article presents some evidence that indicates his ontological investigations into art never go beyond the level of manifesting a latent philosophy whereby his own predefined concepts correspond to some artistic works. Badiou’s philosophy presumes that it allows art to speak for itself and derives concepts from it; however, the role of art in the formation of this philosophy bears no resemblance to what Badiou names a ‘condition’.

Considerations in Acquisition of 3D-Printed Art

ABSTRACT 3D printing (also known as Rapid Prototyping or Additive Manufacture) is increasingly common and technically sophisticated, and is utilized in art and design, industry, and consumer applications. Museums and collectors are now acquiring works made using this technology though their preservation needs are not fully understood. This article provides an overview of the technology and related terminology, review of related conservation literature, and introduction to current efforts for the care of these works. Discussion includes the formulation of collaborative working practices, documentation during acquisition, and consideration of periodic reprinting. Case studies include a pre-accession checklist developed at SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and the reprinting of select components from Altar/Engine (2015) by Tauba Auerbach at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. Though 3D-printed works may be found in science, history, and other collections, this study will focus on works of contemporary art and design.

How deep is your art: An experimental study on the limits of artistic understanding in a single-task, single-modality neural network.

Computational modeling of artwork meaning is complex and difficult. This is because art interpretation is multidimensional and highly subjective. This paper experimentally investigated the degree to which a state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), a popular Machine Learning approach, can correctly distinguish modern conceptual art work into the galleries devised by art curators. Two hypotheses were proposed to state that the DCNN model uses Exhibited Properties for classification, like shape and color, but not Non-Exhibited Properties, such as historical context and artist intention. The two hypotheses were experimentally validated using a methodology designed for this purpose. VGG-11 DCNN pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and discriminatively fine-tuned was trained on handcrafted datasets designed from real-world conceptual photography galleries. Experimental results supported the two hypotheses showing that the DCNN model ignores Non-Exhibited Properties and uses only Exhibited Properties for artwork classification. This work points to current DCNN limitations, which should be addressed by future DNN models.

The promotion strategy of artificial intelligence on students ' creativity and critical thinking in college art education

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, its application in art education is becoming increasingly widespread, providing students with new ways to enhance creativity and critical thinking. This paper analyses the specific application of artificial intelligence in art education and explores how it fosters students' creativity through innovative teaching methods, personalized learning, and thinking guidance in artistic creation. At the same time, the study also reveals the positive role of artificial intelligence in helping students to screen and criticize information, analyze and evaluate art works, and encourage innovative thinking and critical thinking. The research demonstrates that artificial intelligence significantly enhances students' independent thinking and critical appreciation of art, improving their artistic literacy and innovation while supporting the modernization of art education.

Analyze the Cultural Efficacy of the Ancient Shipwreck Hailao Porcelain in the New Era from the Perspective of Culture

The presence of Hailao porcelain in the world is widespread, with historical, economic, practical, artistic, and other functional attributes, so its comprehensive benefits cannot be underestimated. The development of modern science and technology, and the reasonable and effective development of Hailao porcelain in different times, are conducive to the development of China’s cultural construction. Because Hailao porcelain is different from the traditional ancient porcelain (handed down and unearthed), it is a new cultural research field. This marine wealth has great economic, cultural, and historical value, and plays an important role in the cultural construction and social development of the country in the new period. The cultural efficacy covered by the ancient shipwreck Hailao porcelain includes the functions of inheritance, cognition, education, communication, and so on, which is conducive to the current cultural development. People can use the new perspective and new concept of cultural and creative thinking to make these cultural relics “alive”, give play to the new cultural value, promote the economy of cultural relics and works of art, serve the spiritual and cultural life, and strengthen the cultural exchanges and cooperation between China and other countries in the world.

Critical Aesthetics Between American Pragmatism and the Frankfurt School

Abstract The publication of Art as Experience in 1934 marked a theoretical turning point away from the disinterested spectatorship of Kant towards an aesthetics of everyday life. Dewey’s major claim therein is that “aesthetic experience” is privileged and ought to be taken as paradigmatic for all experience because it is controlled by an affective unity that he calls “pervasive quality” which harmonizes thought and action with its social and environmental context. In 1935 Walter Benjamin argued that pre-industrial works of art have an “aura” that exerts an affective lure on consciousness, and that the remnants of this aura in the post-industrial age may lead to the abandonment of critical thought and seduce the masses into the sway of fascism. This paper considers John Dewey’s aesthetic theory in light of the critical perspective developed by his contemporaries in Frankfurt School. I will consider whether Dewey’s reliance on the qualitative dimension of experience undermines the critical reflection that, theoretically, prevents the “aestheticization of politics” that leads to the spread of fascism, and propose that pragmatist aesthetics would benefit from greater tolerance for the “negativity” exemplified by the critical theorists.

A Perényiek nyalábvári reneszánsz központja

The Ugocsa estates of the Perényi family, Korolevo and the castle of Nyaláb, became Renaissance monuments of national importance in the 16th century. The era was defined by ominous events: the Dózsa Rebellion, the invasion of Ottoman Turks, and the country’s division into three parts. As a result of political events, manorial centres on the periphery of the Kingdom of Hungary paradoxically sometimes had more opportunities for development than the central areas of the country. The battles raged, but the wealthy Perényi family, which gained national influence and played a decisive role in the north-eastern counties, donated to literature and art because they wanted to develop the Hungarian language. It was important for them to be the first ones to read the letters of Saint Paul in print in their native language; they encouraged and sponsored the publication of Benedek Komjáthy’s Bible translation; and they supported the intellectual activity of the first Reformers. In addition, the traveling singer Péter Ilosvai Selymes also started and finished his career with them, and even Bálint Balassi was connected to the Perényi family. Support for the publication of psalms, religious songs, secular poems, and stories is connected to the family. In addition to the men of outstanding individuality and charity (Gábor Perényi, János P., István P., etc.), there was the caring mother, a woman who also dealt with economic matters in her widowhood: Katalin P. Frangepán. In addition to supporting literature, the activities of this noble family in supporting the fine arts cannot be neglected either. Stone carvings and stove tiles with the Perényi coat of arms or Renaissance flower motifs made in the castle of Nyaláb can be compared to the works of art in Sárospatak and elsewhere. Thanks to the activities of the Perényi family who donated to art and science and tolerated the culture of other ethnicities in addition to the Hungarian, such unique spiritual treasures as, for example, the Gospel of Korolevo – one of the oldest written records of Transcarpathia and Ukraine, were able to survive to this day. It can be said that Korolevo and the castle of Nyaláb became one of the cradles of Hungarian literature born at the beginning of the 16th century during the time of the Perényi family.

Features of teaching Russian in educational institutions in Sri Lanka: the linguistic and cultural aspect

Introduction. Russian as a foreign language (RKI) is a basic element of the formation of linguistic and cultural competence of foreign language students and contributes to the improvement of their speech skills and the expansion of ideas about Russian culture, which determines the relevance of the undertaken research. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the importance of a linguocultural approach in the methodology of teaching Lankan students the Russian language by reading the works of Russian writers, in this case – on the example of the work of M.A. Bulgakov "Towel with a Rooster", as well as in the development of linguistic didactic material for teachers of the Russian Language in preparing students for the exam at the A2-B1 level of proficiency in Russian. Materials and methods. To achieve this goal, the authors use the following methods: the method of analyzing the collected data, the method of testing, the method of comparative analysis and systematization, the method of observation. The approbation of the developed linguistic didactic material based on artistic works was carried out on 150 Lankan students of the Gampaha Vikramarachchi University of Folk Medicine of the Republic of Sri Lanka, who took offline courses on learning the Russian language of the I.Ya. Yakovlev Chuvash State Pedagogical University (I.Ya. Yakovlev CHSPU). The effectiveness of taking courses using the developed linguodidactic material was proved by comparing the test results before and after the training courses. Results. The methodological development consists in the fact that on the basis of the adapted text of the work of art, exercises and test tasks have been compiled, focused both on analyzing the content of the work of art and on improving the skills of using linguistic units in speech. The exercises are accompanied by the necessary theoretical material (materials for reference) for both the student and the teacher. The system of exercises pays attention to the most common communicative situations in order to develop active Russian language skills in accordance with its norms. In addition to the linguistic material contained in the literary text, the exercises also use words and expressions related to the lexical and grammatical theme of the text, which contributes to an active increase in the lexical stock and understanding of the grammatical features of the Russian language. This method of writing assignments based on works of art allowed students to increase their interest in new vocabulary, develop their skills in using explanatory dictionaries, and also contributed to the development of studied grammatical rules not on artificially composed sentences, but through real text and communicative situations. The effectiveness of this technique is confirmed by the high results of passing the certification exam: out of 150 people who completed the training, 100 people successfully passed the exam and received state-issued certificates. Conclusion. The conducted research contributes to the teaching methodology of RKI. The developed didactic materials, taking into account the linguistic and cultural approach, have applied significance and can be used in teaching foreign language students the Russian language and in the system of their comprehensive preparation for the A2-B1 certification exam.

Issue Information

Front cover: Fine cracks in the glaze on the surface of ceramics, known as crazing. The delicate crazing, created through the meticulous work of a skilled ceramic artist, resembles epithelial tissue. This piece was inspired by a microscopic image taken by Dr. Fumiko Matsukawa‐Usami and Professor Toshihiko Fujimori (National Institute for Basic Biology). Designed by TRAIS Co., Ltd. (Kobe, Japan). image

On the Dynamism of Paintings Through the Distribution of Edge Directions

The digitization of artworks has recently offered new computational perspectives on the study of art history. While much of the focus has been on classifying styles or identifying objects, the analysis of more abstract concepts, such as the perception of motion or dynamism in still images, remains largely unexplored. Semioticians and artists have long explored the representation of dynamism in still images, but they often did so through theoretical frameworks or visual techniques, without a quantitative approach to measuring it. This paper proposes a method for computing and comparing the dynamism of paintings through edge detection. Our approach is based on the idea that the dynamism of a painting can be quantified by analyzing the edges in the image, whose distribution can be used to identify patterns and trends across artists and movements. We demonstrate the applicability of our method in three key areas: studying the temporal evolution of dynamism across different artistic styles, as well as within the works of a single artist (Wassily Kandinsky), visualizing and clustering a large database of abstract paintings through PixPlot, and retrieving similarly dynamic images. We show that the dynamism of a painting can be effectively quantified and visualized using edge detection techniques, providing new insights into the study of visual culture.

The comedy "Oh, time!" by Catherine II: author's strategies and tactics

The ways of Catherine II's influence on the reader, stated through the prism of the author's strategies and tactics that characterize the consciousness of the writer and her focus on forming the model of Enlightenment based on gallant discourse is the subject of the article. The play "Oh, time!", being the first "noble" comedy, becomes the ideological message of the empress addressed to her subjects in order to introduce them to the Enlightenment. Comedy sets the parameters of what to pay attention to, what vices are condemned and how to perceive the reign of Catherine II. The communicative approach, expressed in the study of the author's interaction with the reader, is complemented by a comparative historical, cultural-historical and a method of holistic analysis of the work of art. The research methodology is based on the work of V. V. Sipovsky, P. N. Berkov, Y. Stennik, O. B. Lebedeva, A. Evstratov, Carrer d'Encausse E., K. Sharfa O. I. Eliseeva. The novelty of the research is determined by a new approach to the study of the comedy of Catherine II, which consists in a systematization of author's strategies and tactics, the consideration of which allows us to imagine the regulation of the domestic literary process of the second half of the XVIII century, to see the features of Catherine's Enlightenment, as well as to trace the birth of the author's own thinking, departing from the previous rhetorical system. During the study, three author's strategies were identified: ridiculing the vices of the older generation, supporting the younger generation and approving the model of Catherine's Enlightenment, each of which is implemented through three author's tactics: using speaking surnames within the framework of a traditional comedy of manners, pointing out the discrepancy between words and deeds, condemning domestic tyranny, introducing helper characters, liberation from Domostroi model of behavior, the need for young girls to understand their hearts, ridicule of the previous unenlightened rule, approval of the model of gallant behavior in the family-state, mythologization of their own rule. This not only characterizes the author's consciousness as enlightening, but allows to isolate the image that the writer wants to assert in the perceiving consciousness of the viewer and present the formation of the comedy genre "from within" as the interaction of the author and the reader.