Elite Art Research Articles

Современное искусство в контексте массовой культуры

The primary purpose of this article is to analyze the state of contemporary art in the context of mass culture: the phenomena of mass and elite art are characterized, the relationships between and mutual influences of various factors of mass art are determined, and the significance of the commercial aspect in the development of contemporary art is revealed.

Paradigms of rock music and jazz: comparative discourse

Paradigms of rock music and jazz: comparative discourse

Transcending utility? The gendered conflicts of a contemporary creative identification

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have been described as an age of creativity in affluent Western societies because of the increased popularity of the visual arts and the expansion of the global sector of the creative and cultural industries (CCI). The psychology of creativity has contributed new conceptualisations of creativity and creative processes, challenging associations that derive from the elite arts. This article investigates the implications of these changes for the gendering of creativity and creative practice. It asks if contemporary reconceptualisations of creativity open new possibilities for women to identify as creative practitioners. The article presents a critical discursive study of interviews with UK women maker-artists. The analysis shows how the women emphasise the practical applications or utility of their creative practice. A claim of utility can function to justify the practice. In addition, a claim of therapeutic utility, for others and for the artist herself, potentially addresses the neoliberal priority that people take responsibility for their personal well-being. However, the justification of utility contrasts with the creative vocation associated with the masculine elite artist who pursues “art for art’s sake”. The justification can therefore be seen to undermine the women’s creative identifications, reinstating the conventionally masculine status of creativity and the arts.

Participation as policy in local cultural governance

ABSTRACTThis article takes on participation not as taking part in cultural activities per se but in cultural policy-making, by studying the transformation and institutionalisation of participatory processes. Focusing on Switzerland, a federalist country where local and private actors play key roles in cultural policy, several processes by which different actors participate in local cultural policy-making are explored. Top-down procedures, such as formalised mandatory consultation procedures or the inclusion of cultural actors in administrative expert committees, coexist with bottom-up grassroots initiatives that can complement or even supplant traditional participatory processes. Furthermore, certain alternative modes and concepts of participation, such as the “cultural council”, circulate between different cases, across levels of state and in time. Participatory processes in cultural policy-making need to be seen as public policies in their own right, which can aim to depoliticise policies and procedures. Furthermore, actors need certain resources in order to participate, and venues aimed at opening participation do so in a restrained framework, focusing mostly on artistic and cultural elites rather than encourage larger citizen participation.

Black Artists and Elite Taste Culture

Patricia A. Banks on the uneven unfolding of racial and gender diversity in elite art markets.

L'Émigration Musicale Polonaise À Paris Pendant L'Entre-Deux-Guerres: Artistes – Événements – Contextes

In the nineteenth century, the French capital was a travel destination for Polish musicians, especially in the 1830s and '40s, when, after the fall of the November Uprising, nearly the entire political, intellectual, and artistic elite of the Congress Kingdom made its way there. A second important wave of emigration was during the interwar period (1918-1939). There was a large group of Polish artists in Paris at this time—composers, singers, instrumentalists. In 1926, they founded the Association des jeunes musiciens polonais, whose aim was to organise artistic events, as well as provide material aid to its members. An entire corps of distinguished musicians passed through the Association, and honorary patrons included, among others, Nadia Boulanger, Robert Brussel, Maurice Ravel, and Albert Roussel. The Association's activity was an unprecedented campaign that permitted the younger generation of Polish musicians to emerge in the international arena.

Consumption as Assimilation:New York TimesReporting on Native American Art and Commodities, 1950–1970

The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examinesNew York Timesreporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming “Indian” products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as “Indian” shifted from an elite art collectors’ activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless,Timesreporting shows that throughout this era shopping for “Indian” items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity.

Trend versus Cultural Context in Medieval Art. The Case of the Kirants Paintings

Do modern interpretations of medieval artifacts reflect how donors and contemporary viewers perceived these works? Was elite art necessarily dominated by the metropolitan aesthetic standards as m...

On the narratives of French railways in the construction of the memory of the Great War, 1914-1918

The Great War generated the construction of many narratives and memories of the war, including a contested interpretation of the performance of French railways during the conflict. The French railways played a key role in the history of the First World War; French trains delivered ammunition, food, letters and a myriad of other items to the troops to ensure the functioning and morale of the troops. At the same time, the French artistic elite had transformed the images of trains departing to the battlefields into the symbols of the merciless war that had taken the youth to be sacrificed. Georges Duhamel's Civilization, 1914-1917 with its story of sixty trains running over the body of a soldier embodied the devastating effect of technology on humanity. In addition, some military historians presented their critique over the performance of French railways during the first days of the war and suggested that French railway companies could not abide to timetables to deliver troops to destinations. To counter this negative perception, the highly placed officials in the French railway companies, such as Paul-Émile Javary, A. Marchand, and Marcel Peschaud, published the detailed accounts on the contribution of French railways to the victory. They emphasized how many railway workers had lost their lives in the war and how essential the efforts of these companies were for the cause of victory. Moreover, railway companies organized train tours to former battlefields to educate the French about the scope of devastation in areas affected by the war. In conclusion, the article shows that French railway companies needed to take an active role in the construction of the memory of the Great War to avoid the false accusations of being among the perpetrators of the war.

Интертекстуальность как инструмент моделирования метатекста в творчестве В. Набокова

<p>Предметом исследования в статье является интертекстуальность как художественный прием игровой поэтики русского и американского писателя В. Набокова (1899–1977). Определены эстетические особенности интертекстуальности в творчестве писателя, принципы ее художественного воплощения. Анализируются произведения: «Машенька» (1926), «Король, дама, валет» (1928), «Отчаяние» (1930), «Подвиг» (1932), «Дар» (1937).</p><p>Интертекстуальность выводит произведение литературы из сферы классического искусства в направлении постмодернистской эстетики и позволяет автору пародийно играть разными культурными кодами, отойти от миметической системы в сферу иррационального искусства. В постмодернизме интертекстуальность становится способом деконструкции произведения, моделирования текста по принципу ризомного разветвления. У такого текста отсутствует единый смысловой источник (корень), поэтому читатель, чтобы получить удовольствие от прочитанного, должен находить интертекстуальные источники. Вовлеченный в интертекстуальную игру художественный текст лишается серьезности, присущей серьезному искусству, и превращается в артефакт, делается театрализованно-зрелищным и комическим.</p><p>Интертекстуальность не только реконструирует произведение, но и переводит его в статус пародии — мениппеи с целью унижения и искажения классического канона. Поэтому нельзя говорить, что Набоков использует цитацию для диалога с русской литературой. Прием интертекстуальности позволяет Набокову создавать тексты-мозаики, в которых парадоксальным образом сосуществуют художественные коды разных произведений, что позволяет ему расширить коммуникативную связь между писателем и читателем, выводя текст из сферы элитарного искусства в направлении игровой избыточности как способ борьбы с приемами реализма.</p>

КОНСОЛІДАЦІЯ УКРАЇНСТВА ЯК ПРІОРИТЕТНЕ ЗАВДАННЯ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ ЕЛІТИ УКРАЇНИ

It is shown, that for the further development of the Ukrainian Statehood the feeling of the national unity of all elitist groups and agreement by them about strategical perspectives of the nation’s progress is necessary. The powerful factors of consolidation of Ukrainianess are forming presence of national elite that must instance public unity. Influence of national elite on development of all spheres of life of the state, on introduction and efficiency of functioning of democratic reforms in a country, on the level of economic and spiritual stability in society does not cause doubts. Consolidation of Ukrainianess depends on ability national of economic, intellectual and other political elites to produce strategies of development of the state protect her interests directly. The process of consolidation is protracted and heavy, he presents a main socio-political task to development of society. And as exactly a national elite forms reference points for advancement of the state, then it is necessary, that she, first of all, was of interest all society, was highly skilled and enjoyed a confidence among a population, successive and open in the actions, shut out internal conflicts and squabbles, that will become the mortgage of rallying of all Ukrainianess. As elites play in the society certain social functions, so the different elite’s groups are marked out. Each of these groups realizes its own complex of duties, so that the criteria, determining the belonging to some of the elitist group are different. In this study the condition of the modern Ukrainian artistic elite is analyzed. The result of artistic and practical activity of the artistic elite is art which appears as a specific means of influencing public consciousness. The art represents significant and value dimension of the national being of the Ukrainianess, gives a vision of historical being of the Ukrainian national, reflects spiritual links between a personality and the national, spiritual unity and succession of generation. That is why purposeful usage of art in modern conditions the can be a powerful factor of consolidation of Ukrainianess. The artistic elite of Ukraine creating artistic works offering cultural and artistic programs and projects should lay the ideas of national unity and patriotism in them.

From pain to pleasure: The troping of elegy in the renaissance Italian madrigal

In the Renaissance period, melancholia emerged as a dramatic cultural phenomenon among the intellectual and artistic elites, with a locus in elegy it gave form to the Renaissance poetics of loss, pain and shedding of tears, expressing essentially the fantasy about death as a prerequisite for revival. The possibilities of confronting the threats of death were being found in its very nature whose inherent ambiguity was determined by the principles of Thanatos and Eros. The creative act of the troping of elegy proved to be an effective literary and musical strategy for the transcendence of death including the procedures of homeopathization, pastoralization, heroization and erotization of elegy. The elegiac tropic transcendence of death found its most complex expression in the madrigal which in turn added to its basic polyphonic procedure the opposing stylistic elements of the pastoral genres (canzonettas and villanellas) or heroic solo or choral recitations and it consequently acquired a hybrid form in the last decades of the 16th century, and thereby proved to be a cultural trope itself. The aim of this article is to examine the musical implications of the tropic strategies of facing death within Francesco Petrarch?s, Torquato Tasso?s, and Battista Gurini?s poetic models of the art of loving death, using the remarkable examples of the Italian madrigal practice of the late Renaissance.

Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green

Reviewed by: Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green Klaus Neumann Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future. By Stephen Green. London: Haus, 2014. Pp. xiii + 338. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1908323682. Stephen Green, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, has had an illustrious and varied career. He served as chief executive officer and group chairman of the world’s third-largest bank, HSBC. From January 2011 until December 2013, he was minister of state for trade and investment in the first Cameron government. He is chair of the Natural History Museum in London. When it comes to the writing of German history, however, he is, in his own words, an “amateur without any claim to be an academic specialist” (321). While Green may lack training as a historian, he is exceptionally well read, as his account of some two thousand years of German history demonstrates. Drawing on historical scholarship and his knowledge of literature and music, he tries to explain fascism as well as contemporary Germany’s reluctance to assume the role of Europe’s political leader. Green is at pains to caution against interpreting the past through the prism of the twentieth century—and particularly, the years from 1933 to 1945. However, his history is Whiggish in that he is clearly interested in the past as a necessary precursor of the present. That becomes most apparent in his account of postwar Germany. Telescoping the past through the present, his narrative proceeds from Adolf Hitler via Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel. In Green’s reading, the East German experience—including the specific hopes and anxieties of East Germans—becomes a minor detour. Unsurprisingly therefore, when writing about the end of the German Democratic Republic, he only recalls the slogan “Wir sind ein Volk” as if the East German civil rights movement’s earlier “Wir sind das Volk” had no relevance for the events of 1989. Green’s history is immensely readable. It is elegantly written and has a narrative that keeps the reader’s interest alive. Yet his book is unlikely to hold much interest for scholars of German cultural studies. The culture in which he is interested is high-brow German Kultur: from J.S. Bach to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Jürgen Habermas, and from H.J.C. Grimmelshausen to Günter Grass. He wants to provide a “deeper history of the German lands” (xi), a history of ideas and mentalities that found their emblematic expressions in music, literature, [End Page 232] and painting. It is this deeper history that, in his view, is sorely needed in order to understand contemporary Germany. The author’s strong opinions and his particular brand of history will not be to everyone’s liking. This reviewer, for one, was troubled by the fact that Green’s views of Germany’s past are colored by his unadulterated admiration for the country, its people and, most importantly, its Kultur. Perhaps only a contemporary British writer could get away with statements such as “There is no culture on the planet greater than that of Germany” (xi) or “the contribution of Germany to human cultural enrichment … is unsurpassed by any of the great Eurasian cultures” (85). For all his knowledge about German Kultur, Green shows no sustained interest in what “new” cultural historians have had to say about twentieth-century Germany. He frequently refers to German “consciousness,” “social psychology,” “self-awareness,” “psyche,” and “folk memory” as if these were unproblematic categories, and as if they could be deduced from the operas of Richard Wagner, the plays of Heinrich von Kleist, and the art works of Anselm Kiefer. He concludes a section in which he discusses the writings of Heinrich Böll and the music of Hans Werner Henze, among others, by saying: “this is the story of a society which was increasingly coming face to face with its past” (267). His is largely the story of an intellectual and artistic elite; in order to understand “society,” we need social and cultural history at least as much as an analysis of contemporary classical music and Nobel Prize winning literature...

From Primitivism to Pan-Africanism: Remaking Modernist Aesthetics in Postcolonial Nigeria

From Primitivism to Pan-AfricanismRemaking Modernist Aesthetics in Postcolonial Nigeria Jesse Weaver Shipley National independence struggles across Africa, and the formerly colonized world, were accompanied by artistic revivals that linked local expressive styles to Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and global anticolonial movements. Artists and intellectuals reimagined an aesthetic that would refract new political identities and challenge simplistic, racialized dichotomies between European and African, West and non-West. They reassessed notions of the modern, the popular, and the traditional in calibrating racial, cultural, linguistic, and class-based affiliations in new national terms. In the years around Nigeria's independence from British rule in 1960, the city of Ibadan, just north of Lagos, was at the center of one such artistic movement aimed at shaping the cultural terms of a new political sovereignty. This was an unusual moment of creative collaboration among rising visual, performance, and literary artists working across various media and genres from poetry to novels to painting to theater to television. Many earned national and international recognition as they challenged aesthetic norms. The high modernists, novelist Chinua Achebe, poet Christopher Okigbo, and dramatist Wole Soyinka, played with and debated the formal aspects of language use (Okeke-Agulu, 2015, pp. 263–265). Yoruba painter Twins Seven-Seven and composer-director Duro Ladipo blurred lines between elite art and popular music and theater. Cosmopolitan academic artists, such as African American Jacob Lawrence, Guyanese Dennis Williams, Ghanaian Vincent Kofi, and Sudanese Ibrahim El Salahi, came to exhibit and work with inexperienced artists in Ibadan and the nearby town of Osogbo.1 The development of new modes of curation, criticism, [End Page 140] and analysis reframed and valued these practices. Artists and critics came from across Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe to work with this rising generation. Nigerians were particularly tuned into the global resonances of black expression; as Chinua Achebe recalls, he was listening intently as Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah, borrowing the terminology of early Pan-Africanist Edward Blyden, called for a new "African Personality" at Ghana's independence ceremony in 1957 (Okeke-Agulu, 2015, p. 93).2 The reflexive development of a field of artistic production, then, was intricately tied to the expansive transnational energies of the independence era, in which reshaping aesthetic and moral values seemed urgent in developing a national citizenry and a Pan-African polity. In some measure, the efflorescent collective of artists and critics around Ibadan and Osogbo was initiated by the arrival in Nigeria in 1950 of an unusual European couple. Ulli Beier, a German Jewish refugee from Palestine via London, came to teach at University College, Ibadan, and reinvented himself as an art impresario and critic, creating spaces for art and literature to flourish. His wife, Austrian expressionist artist Susanne Wenger, dedicated herself to rebuilding the sacred grove of Ọṣun in Osogbo. Their art and criticism were indicative of a restless, rebellious spirit that permeated a small segment of European artists and intellectuals who fled the devastation after World War II, seeking new meaning and authenticity. They came to Nigeria with notions of art shaped by a European modernism that fetishized the primitive as a source of true creativity untainted by urbanization, capitalism, and mechanized war. Like an earlier generation of primitivist artists, such as Paul Gauguin (1985), who went to Tahiti in 1891 to find rejuvenation from the exhaustions and alienations of modern life, Beier and Wenger aimed to leave behind the failures of Europe; aesthetics provided the language of this journey. They sought something authentic and meaningful in a romantic elsewhere framed against a nihilistic landscape of devastating violence and the collapse of imperial rule. But the Nigerian social, political, and artistic world they entered was far more complex than they had imagined. In this paper, I explore how a rising generation of artists and critics in Nigeria reinvented an African modernism from the fragments of the contradictory projects of racist colonial art pedagogy and European modernist primitivism. In some measure, Pan-African contemporary art developed by transforming colonial-era art education, turning objectified primitive creative essences into celebrations of individual expression and intent. I [End Page 141] examine how a misguided European primitivist search for authentic African culture became...

КАРПАТО-ДУНАЙСКИЕ ЗЕМЛИ И ЮЖНОСЛАВЯНСКОЕ ВЛИЯНИЕ В ИСКУССТВЕ РУКОПИСНОЙ КНИГИ ДРЕВНЕЙ РУСИ

This article dedicated to the connections between Russian medieval art of bookmaking with the art of Southern Slavs, which infiltrated in Russia, coming from Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, through Walachia and Moldavia. In spite of influence of Southern Slavs’ literature even in the times of the Conversion of Russia, or some episodes before the Mongolian invasion, the author strikes on the period, taken place from the end of the 14th century. In this period Ottomans’ conquest of the territories of the Byzantine Empire and Balkans led to the emigration of some part of intellectual and artistic elite to the north – to Moldavia, Walachia, Southern and Northern Russia. The author mentions that not only oeuvres of those scribes and artists, but even creations, they took with themselves, were affecting actively on the one hand on the culture of books’ writing and illustrating, and on the other hand on the development of different

<i>International </i>Co-Production, Rent And Leasing In The Modern Art

The article is devoted to the identification and analysis of the new trends that characterize the development of art in the twenty-first century in the context of globalization and crisis. It analyzes the current challenges posed by the current Macromedia with respect to the elite segment of the modern art (classical and modern musical theater, visual arts). As a response to the increasing multidirectional competition, the elite art actively adapts and assimilates innovative forms and methods of the modern managerial business technologies: co-production, rent and leasing. Specifi c examples from the practical experience of musical theaters and visual arts of the USA, Europe, and Russia demonstrate the positive impact of these technologies. Co-production, rent and leasing ensure the competitiveness and sustainability of development of the modern art.

BUSINESS-COMMUNITY AS A SOURCE FOR RECRUITMENT OF POLITICAL ELITE IN POST-SOVIET LITHUANIA

The author analyzes the process of the formation of the political elite of theRepublicofLithuaniaafter the collapse of theSoviet Unionin the light of the growing presence of representatives of business in ruling circles. The influence of people from the business community in the political process is described through the concept of “inner circles”. The article claims, that although in the beginning of the 1990s the political life inLithuaniawas dominated by intellectuals, representing Humanities and artistic elite, through time business increased its impact on political process not only directly entering political establishment, but also through other channels, including sponsorship of parties.

Mythological Birds in the Culture of the Silver Age: Revival of the Archaic

Deals with some trends in Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century. The author argues that the Archaic revival of the Silver Age reflected the active denial of contemporaneity by the artistic elite. The national folklore and mythology representing the Indo­European roots of Russian culture became popular among the visual artists while the mythological birds Humayun, Sirin, Alkonost, the Swan Princess and the Firebird were pictured by Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel, and Ivan Bilibin; their images were created in the verses by Alexander Blok, in Igor Stravinsky’s music, and in choreographic masterpieces by Mikhail Fokine and Anna Pavlova.

Effects of menarcheal age on the anterior cruciate ligament injury risk factors during single-legged drop landing in female artistic elite gymnasts.

Although numerous studies have demonstrated the relationship between maturation and lower extremity biomechanics during landing in team sport athletes, we are presently uninformed of any research that examined the single-legged drop landing biomechanics of gymnasts. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the menarcheal age on the lower extremity biomechanics during a single-legged drop landing in female artistic elite gymnasts. Twenty-two female artistic elite gymnasts, between 9 and 36years of age, participated in this study. The participants were divided into two groups pre- (n=11) and post- (n=11) menarche and asked to perform a single-legged drop landing on top of a 30cm platform and land on a force plate. The statistical analysis consisted of the multivariate analysis with the level of significance set at p<0.05. The post-menarche group showed a decrease in their maximum knee flexion angle and increase in their maximum knee abduction angle, maximum internal tibial rotation angle, maximum knee abduction moment, and hamstring-quadriceps muscle activity ratio compared with the pre-menarche group during the single-legged drop landing. The post-menarche group showed an increased noncontact anterior cruciate ligament injury risk, due to their greater knee loads, compared with the pre-menarche group.

Literary canon and literary production: Awards and the critical judgement

The paper addresses the possibility of establishing connections between the procedure of awarding literary prizes on the one hand and the proper evaluation of a literary work on the other, focusing on The Man Booker Prize and The NIN Award for the Novel of the Year. Judging literary works is thought to influence both critical evaluation and achievement of media visibility, but the latter turns out to be more important in the new media environment, as the constant neglect for the elite art serves to move most respectable works to the margins of public interest.