Works Of Fine Art Research Articles

Complexity in the experimental audio/visual arts

This paper departs from the usual mode of presentation of scientific journal articles in that I address philosophical and conceptual issues related to nonlinearity and complexity as procedural determinants in art works rather than deal with statistical (or other) analyses of fine art works. I do not quantify, dissect, categorize, or otherwise rely on scientific methodology to prove or support the validity of anything I postulate in this writing; nor do I devote attention to those who are insensitive to the profound difference between art and science. The views presented herein represent my current thinking on the creation of multimedia art forms and are empirically unverifiable.

Jugendo stilistika lietuvių ir latvių prozoje

Jugendstil left an imprint in both Lithuania and Latvia. Blocks of original buildings appeared in Riga; in Vilnius several architectural ensembles can also be found. The style is closely connected with the tradition of exhibition holding. Special mention should be made of the Paris Exhibition in 1900, in which Lithuanian artists took part, and the 1901 exhibition in Riga. The style had a great impact on the art of printing since a great number of ornate books and albums were published in Lithuania and Latvia. Thus Jugendstil, found in West and Central Europe, influenced the Lithuanian and Latvian culture life as well. In prose, Jugendstil is reflected in worldviews and ideas. The ideas expressed in fine art were adopted in literature - the same themes and motifs can be traced there. Art and literature are united by the vision of the unity of the world, exaltation of nature, and admiration of fantasy. The adoption of Jugendstil from German litera ture was a creative process, adapting the ideas to the experience of Baltic culture. Still, Latvian prose was more influenced by the German tradition. The influence of the new style can be found in the search for new forms. Rhythmical arabesques and ornamental arrangements make Jugendstil stand out from other styles of the time. Works of fine art are marked by curvilinear motifs and flat colour patches while works of prose stand out for theii rhythm and special attention given to the forms of expression. The writers were seeking to rehash the traditional mode of narrating, which resulted in hybrid poetry and prose forms, especially admired by younger writers. The results were not always mature; however, they reflected the general European tendencies and had impact on the further development of Baltic literature. The Latvians were more bold in their experiments while the Lithuanians (with the exception of I.Šeinius) tried to adapt their works to the cultural tradition and folklore.

In situ colour measurement on works of fine art using a non–destructive methodology

Colours in paintings are one of the means by which artists express their feelings. The determination and the interpretation of these colours are very important for art historians because they lead us to a deeper understanding of the artist's cultural background. Even if the pictorial colours are subjectively selected by the artist, they can be objectively determined through physics by a total of interrelated factors which are calculated by the help of appropriate mathematical methods. In the present research study a non–destructive methodology for in situ colour measurement on fine art paintings is suggested using a 3CCD colour detector. From the results obtained, it is suggested that the approach employed is sufficiently accurate for it to be applied in the investigation of works of fine art.

If Art is Resold, Should the Artist Profit?

This paper analyzes the market adjustments to pending Federal legislation that would impose mandatory royalties on resales of works of fine art. The pending legislation is ostensibly motivated to confer economic benefits on artists who have not yet established themselves in the market. An important provision of the legislation is that it forbids the artist to waive his right to the re-sale royalty. The paper conducts a partial equilibrium welfare analysis to measure the allocative effects of the statute. Three propositions are established that demonstrate that the pending legislation will induce a net welfare loss as well as effect a redistribution of income from artists to a subset of purchasers. The policy implication of the proposition is that if the pending legislation is enacted, it will pervert the legislative intent.

The Oxford guide to classical mythology in the arts, 1300-1990s

This unique work of reference offers a topically classified chronology of more than 20,000 artworks from c.1300 to the present day that take as their theme the subject of Greek and Roman mythology. Alphabetically arranged by subject and covering all the mythical events and beings of antiquity, entries list in chronological order how they have been represented in painting, sculpture, music, dance, opera, and literature over the last six centuries. There is also a wealth of information about the pertinent myth, the names of works and their creators, and the present location of works of fine art. Fully cross-referenced, and complete with bibliographies and an extensive artist index, this will be an invaluable tool for the study of the history of the arts in the Western world.

L’affiche publicitaire et le gurafikku dezain au Japon (1854-1960)

Advertising posters and gurafikku dezain in Japan, 1854-1960. The world of commercial advertising was already well organised in Japan by the middle of the nineteenth century. The printed commercial forms most frequently to be found are bills for plays and other spectacles, advertising posters and tracts. They have the same format and use the same techniques and colours as the xylographic print (nishiki e). At the same time authors and publishers of prints began to engage in commercial publicity, destined for a bourgeois public rather than a popular one. Such commercial prints lasted longer than the traditional nishiki e prints, surviving up to about 1910. Lithography was introduced to Japan only in 1872, chromolithography and offset printing becoming more widespread from 1914. The Americans played a vital role in the introduction of these new techniques. The author of the present article looks at the parallel development of other advertising forms, with the rapid growth of the newspaper press from 1870 and the appearance of advertising agencies in Tokyo and Osaka. The products concerned were generally of western origin, and the styles of the advertising images tended to follow western graphic styles. Techniques of lithographic printing, called « applied drawing », were taught at the Tokyo Fine Arts school from 1896. From the 1920s, the poster gave rise to several aesthetic and social debates in Japan, whilst techniques improved thanks to the introduction of the HB process (colour photo-engraving). The author goes on to examine the principal events which mark the history of « artists’ posters » from 1925. In 1926 the activity was sufficiently professionalised for an association of commercial artists to be formed. The inspiration was still primarily of western origin and commercial artists tried to find ways of giving their creations the same status as traditional, fine art works. The expressions « design » and « graphic design » began to appear in Japan during the 1950s.

Pleasure: Reflections on Aesthetics and Feminism

For much of this century two questions governed formulation of theory in aesthetics: What is aesthetic experience? and What is a work of art? Theories of perception and appreciation were framed in response, along with correlative concepts of objects of appreciation, notably works of fine art. The more specific questions of field-involving topics such as expression, criticism, interpretation, and ontology-were cast as corollaries to these two basic questions. The overall result was a collection of theories that by 1951 John Passmore found dreary in its attempt to generalize about experience and impose unity upon diverse riches available from actual works of art. I Whatever justice of Passmore's original complaint, as century nears its close, one can hardly object that there is too much uniformity in subjects addressed by aesthetics. Only remnants of interest in aesthetic experience remain, and questions about nature of art have been transformed by an interlude of Wittgensteinian skepticism about definability. While some would laud diversity present in aesthetics today, others might decry its cost. Indeed field presently displays such variety that it is hard to discover any obviously central questions defining it at all. Unified theory has given way to an anarchic if fascinating assembly of concerns perhaps only loosely related. One of most obvious signs of breakdown of confident, systematic theorizing is prevalence of suspicion that quest for a common foundation for taste and critical appreciation that had propelled philosophy of art for centuries is in principle not a fruitful endeavor. This doubt has arisen from multiple sources, though surely one of strongest has been feminist scholarship: its challenge to claims about universal human nature, its support for pluralist interpretations of art, and its own brand of skepticism regarding the canon of great works. For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philosophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives provide a vantage from which appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony between feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in second section I shall focus on one of subjects that has all but dropped from view in reshuffling of theoretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or pleasure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evident when we consider feminist alternatives to traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.

The Image of Duplication

This author discusses the theoretical perspective behind the production of his artworks, which stem from the ambiguous relationship between the terms ‘original’ and ‘duplicate’. His ‘originals’ are mass-produced newspaper images. Conversely, his ‘duplications’ are handcrafted one-of-a-kind fine artworks that challenge viewers’ notions of reality and appearance.

Atmospheric optics in art

A brief historical overview of the atmospheric optical phenomena that appear in works of fine art is presented. It is shown that artists have recorded many features of the color and brightness of the sky and clouds, aerial perspective and visibility effects, and phenomena, including crepuscular rays, rainbows, halos, and coronas. Artistic biases resulting from prevailing styles and societal influences are noted. Attention is drawn to a number of phenomena recorded by artists that have not yet been explained or modeled.

The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design

W ITH all the renewed attention given in the last decade to Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) as not only America's foremost practitioner of landscape design but as an important visionary critic of urban planning as well, he has still not been properly situated in American intellectual history. Because his chief legacies-parks and park systems-do not belong to the rigidly defined discipline categories of American education, being neither works of fine art, literature, or political or military history, they have remained outside the canon, untaught and unstudied except in specialized, professional contexts like landscape architecture or urban history. If we look at Olmsted's masterpieces, such as Central Park or Prospect Park in New York City or the Boston park system, within the broader context of nineteenth-century cultural history, however, Olmsted's contribution emerges as clearly central to any consideration of the period. Moreover, by viewing his achievements against the interrelated currents of romantic/transcendentalist attitudes toward nature, liberal Protestant reform, and the woman's moral influence movement, we can understand the ways in which his works continue to enrich us as expressions of a vision at once democratic, reformist, and, indeed, feminist.

Frames of Reference: “Table” and “Tableau” in Picasso's Collages and Constructions

In the spring of 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oilcloth printed with a trompe-l'oeil chair-caning pattern to the surface of a small oval canvas representing a cafe still life (Fig. 1). This work, which he also framed with a coarse rope, has acquired legendary status in the history of art as the first deliberately executed collage; the first work of fine art, that is, in which materials appropriated from everyday life, relatively untransformed by the artist, intrude upon the traditionally privileged domain of painting. Picasso's Still Life with Chair-Caning challenged some of the most fundamental assumptions about the nature of painting inherited by Western artists from the time of the Renaissance, including our understanding of how works of art exist in the world. This paper will address the ways in which Picasso's collages undermine both classical and “modernist” models for understanding the ontological status of works of art, by instituting an ambiguous play with frames and framing motifs, as well as ...

Northern Ireland 1968–1988: Enter an Art Historian in Search of a Useful Theory

Publications and museum or art-gallery displays have tended to separate the visual images related to the Northern Ireland troubles into illustrations of history, works of art and media imagery. These distinct categories to some degree reflect the growing specialisation of art workers in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. But in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict visual images patently cut across such distinctions. Fine art works have direct political and therefore historical impact; media images use and are used by the producers of popular emblems; visual styles are held in common by all categories of imagery. The perpetuation of the separate history illustration/artwork/media picture categories when dealing with Northern Ireland imagery is therefore attributed to the formal and informal training of British and Irish historians and art historians. An alternative theoretical basis for examining the images related to the Northern Ireland conflict is suggested, in which those images are seen as parts of visual language codes, whose constant use and re-use simultaneously adds further layers of meaning to them, ensures their real impact on social, political, economic and religious developments, and modifies the overall visual language of their producers/users. This approach is related to the work of German and Austrian art-historians and their successors, American media studies focusing on the links between institutional organisation and visual style, anthropological analyses of ritual symbols and recent sociological use of linguistic theory.

Analyzing the market of works of contemporary fine arts: An exploratory study

Analyzing the market of works of contemporary fine arts: An exploratory study

Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death

TN House of Mirth Revisited Diana Trilling observes parallel between Bart's decline and the inevitable defeat of in a crass materialistic society.' Trilling does not develop all of implications of this statement, though she goes on to remark that Lily herself possesses quality of a fine work of art and that own ambitions are those of art.2 Certainly new New York's reduction of all values-emotional, ethical, artistic-to questions of portable property was a consistent object of Wharton's scorn and satire; yet at least insofar as problem of is concerned, Lily's role in The House of Mirth is a more complex one than Trilling's observation can describe. Within world of novel, both and her friends perceive her confusedly: she is an uncertain blend of and nature with a streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality.3 Often neither she nor her closest observers can distinguish between merely spontaneous and studiedly affecting (the careless lack of definition in her suicide is of a piece with rest of her behavior). Indeed, it is not too much to say that this consistent confusion between ideal and real as it is manifested by all characters in novel-and resultant depersonalization of chrysalid character that is Lily's only inheritance-leads directly to heart of tragedy. Before we begin a detailed examination of effect on Bart of confusion that attends her attempts at self-definition, we must digress to examine notions of visual and artistic expression that pervade The House of Mirth. (It is important throughout course of this discussion to be clear that we are not examining Wharton's own notions of art, but artistic environment that surrounds Bart.) During this period newly wealthy

Art as Language

The doctrine that there are of that works of fine art are to be construed somehow as utterances in a language, is an attractive doctrine, judging from the steady inclination of interested theorists to revive it in one way or another. For instance, in a fairly early publication of contemporary aesthetics, T. M. Greene argued that a work of art, in expressing something about the world, could be taken as a proposition, whether or not linguistically paraphras able.1 Interestingly enough, Greene did not linger to articulate suffi ciently clearly the sense in which works of art could be said to be propositions; though in ascribing truth to them, in a respect proper to explicit statements, it is (apart from difficulties in his theory of truth and of ascribing truth) clear that he meant what he said to be taken quite literally. Again, Susanne Langer has sustained a notably unsuccessful effort to explicate the defensible sense of her much debated thesis that Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.2 In a relatively late adjustment, she concedes that artistic import is expressed, somewhat as meaning is expressed in a symbol, yet not exactly so. The analogy is strong enough to make it legitimate, even though easily misleading, to call the work of art the art symbol.3 What Langels thesis comes to, then, is the denial that works of art may be construed literally as linguistic utterances or as symbolic utterances that behave in ways formally similar to the uses of language. The analogy between art symbols and genuine sym bols may, of course, be conceded benignly enough, once the ulterior philosophical claim is dismissed. Of course, the elementary question posed by the thesis that there are languages of art or that works of art are linguistic or quasi linguistic utterances of some sort is just this: What are the minimal requirements of a language? Admittedly, the question is controversial

Artistic Verisimilitude (II)

We are now in a position to answer the question of importance or relevance : the question, namely, whether it is true, as it is often claimed to be, that works of fine art which are ∼ AN, in particular tragedies and novels, should be AV; and, if so, why. Briefly, it seems to me that the claim is true for a variety of reasons which I shall now detail.I pointed out earlier that a literary work is not a tragedy or a work of fiction at all unless it is ∼ AN. (Subsecs. 2.1.1., 2.1.3.) But if it is AV, then it is of course ∼ AN, so that this condition is met. Moreover, it is met n i the most satisfactory way; for, although a work is also ∼ AN if it is ∼ AV, it is evident that the better way of being ∼ AN is to be AV.

A History of Cytology

In August, 1961, my wife and I paid a long-planned visit to Cambridge (England) to see Arthur Hughes and his famous movie of nerve cells displaying pinocytosis. 1 I chanced to ask if he was the same A. Hughes whose A History of Cytology had recently been published. He was, and we were promised a copy should we visit Arthur and his wife Marjorie in their Essex home on the following Sunday. We did, and we marveled at their dwelling (a medieval mill modernized), their friendliness, and their combined scholarship. Arthur Hughes has written some 60 papers on various aspects of embryology and cell culture, and 3 books including that modestly called A History of Cytology ; quite recently he has edited a new edition of Joseph Needham's History of Embryology . It is a pity that, at the very time Hughes was completing his fine work of art and scholarship, the

Artistic Verisimilitude (I)

Some affirm, but others deny, that works of fine art, or at any rate certain sorts of them, should be true (T) or probable (P). This is the question which I investigate in the present essay. It has been debated by philosophers from Plato on, and much can still be learnt from earlier writers, particularly Aristotle. But I have found some recent discussions especially helpful; namely, what Strawson and Hart say about and in connexion with presupposition; Hospers' and Harris' remarks about truth-to and plausibility respectively; and Beardsley's treatment of these matters in his admirable survey of the problems of aesthetics.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY CRADLE

Cradles go back to the earliest times, and there have been many different designs, chiefly differentiated into those which rock and those which do not. The accompanying illustration shows an excellent example of a cradle which is a fine work of art. It is in the Museo Civica in Saluzzo, one of the towns of Piedmont. The museum was formerly the Palazzo Cavasso, while the cradle came from the Castello dei Lagnasco. The cradle is carved, and on the back is depicted the Holy Family receiving the blessing of heaven, while below is a design reminiscent of the art of Pompeii. The legend above the Holy Family reads: Gloria in excelsis et in terra pax. The baldachin at the top does not extend out as far as is sometimes seen, but far enough to serve as a support for the curtains. This form was much in vogue in the Tyrol

Notes

THE statue of Darwin will be unveiled in the great hall of the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, on Tuesday, June 9, at 12 o'clock, when Prof. Huxley, President of the Royal Society, on behalf of the memorial committee, will formally transfer it to the care of the Masters of the Museum, who will be represented by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Places will be reserved for the committee and subscribers to the memorial, but the greater part of the hall will be open to the public during the ceremony. The statue, which has been executed by Mr. Boehm, R.A., is of marble, and seated, rather larger than life-size; it is pronounced by those who have seen it to be an admirable likeness as well as a fine work of art.