Art Ideology Research Articles

The Significance of Art Ideology in Ekphrasis: Marianne Moore’s “The Camperdown Elm”

This study examines the relationship between the genre of ekphrastic poetry and art ideology. It provides a theoretical argumentation on this innate association in continuation with James W. Heffernan’s observations in the field. The study argues that ekphrasis is theoretically related to the practice of art criticism, which, in its turn, stands on art ideological grounds. Two hypotheses about the nature of the relationship that combines ekphrasis and art ideology are generated from this theoretical investigation. The first is that art ideology is a sine qua non to ekphrasis, and the second is that art ideology especially contributes to the thematic structure of ekphrasis. The validity of this proposition is tested through analyzing Marianne Moore’s poem “The Camperdown Elm,” in which Moore’s own art ideology as explicated in her non-poetic works is utilized. As a result, this study aims to contribute to both the theoretical and analytical studies of ekphrasis genre.

Discursive Construction of Art as a Subject of Politics: Selected Notes on Polish Aesthetic Thought

ABSTRACTThe study seeks to capture and explore the dynamic relationship between aesthetics and broadly understood politics as a cultural phenomenon. The entanglement of art in sociopolitical contexts (“politicization of art”) is discussed from the institutional perspective (development of Marxist thought in Poland after 1945) and within the domain of social activity – the structure of the ordinary (realization of aesthetic postulates of Marxism). The main objective is thus to analyze the effect of Marxism on the twentieth-century aesthetics in Poland with a special emphasis on the postwar period (after 1945), when the basic patterns of that school of thinking took shape. The main focus is on the approach to the Marxist concept found in the theory of Polish Socialist realism. The analysis also involves reflections on the reduction of Marxism to the ideology of Socialist realism and the ideology of art which is associated with it.

Interdisciplinary Art Education

Image orientation, art education, biography orientation or aesthetic researches which of the concepts are effective and useful in school contexts? Didactic discourses do not need an ideology of art, but the empirical evaluation and further development of these models in practice. In my opinion, the effects of such different concepts should not only be maintained but mainly detected – parallel to other important empirical sciences such as brain research or communication psychology. This step of action is needed to internally optimize the concepts, but also to make them practicable externally. At the present time, evaluation research is expected and required when the subject of art is to be taken seriously in an interdisciplinary discourse (Burn 2003). Apart from some empirical studies, art education, however, ist still far from this dimension of research.

‘Life in the Whole’: Goethe and English Aestheticism

This article argues that the 1870s constituted a distinctive and important phase in the English reception of Goethe. In and around this decade, writers affiliated with the Aesthetic Movement read the German author as a precursor of the ideology of art for art’s sake that they were trying to promote. Writers such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds looked to Goethe’s Hellenism in order to argue for artistic freedom and the free expression of homoerotic desire in the present. Goethe’s appropriation by the English Aesthetic writers centres in particular around the surprising afterlife of a motto from his poem ‘Generalbeichte’, ‘Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben’.

팝아트를 활용한 레트로디자인 연구

본 연구는 팝아트를 활용한 레트로디자인 작업 시 어떻게 컨셉을 표현할 수 있을까를 이론적 고찰과 사례로 조사하고 작품제작에 응용할 수 있도록 제안하는 것을 목표로 진행하였다. 사례조사 결과 대중적인 이미지를 반영한 컨셉과 대중의 영웅을 표현한 컨셉에서는 팝아트의 특징을 단순하게 재현하였고, 정치적 삶에 드러난 상처를 표현한 컨셉은 조사된 사례가 없었다. 디자인의 각 영역에 대한 사례의 가장 큰 특징은 팝아트의 이념보다는 팝아트의 표현양식에 주로 치중한 점을 알 수 있었다. 원색을 사용하여 밝고, 경쾌한 분위기로 표현하거나, 반복적인 표현, 컴바인과 콜라주 기법, 실크스크린, 만화, 과장된 오브제로 표현하는 것 등이 다양하게 재현되었다. 그러나 팝아트를 활용한 레트로디자인은 팝아트의 단순한 재현이 아니라 팝아트의 이념과 조형적 재해석이 디자이너의 창의성과 만나 현대적으로 표현되어야 한다. 따라서 글로벌화 되어 있는 미디어나 이미지의 홍수 시대에 대중의 일상에 대한 탐색, 대중의 여가나 오락 및 환상의 결합을 활용하여 컨셉을 설정하고 팝아트의 표현양식을 적용하는 것이 필요하다. This study is considered how retro design concepts that are used pop art can be expressed through overview of theories and cases, and suggested applying to retro design. As a result, we found first, concepts reflecting popular image, second, popular hero concepts simply represented pop art's feature. Third, there were no cases that are expressing the wounds made by political life. The most of cases expressed retro design with pop art representation techniques rather than reflecting of pop art's ideology or spirit. Pop art's retro design should be expressed as a modern style not only with reproduction of pop art, but also with designer's creativity and pop art's ideology and reinterpretation of formative meaning. Thus, it needs to set a concept by exploring of modern globalized mass media or daily life of people. Also, it should applying people's entertainment, spare time and fantasy to bright cheerful mood of pop art to express each area of design.

Doing Without the Ideology of Art

My invited comment on Steven Connor’s essay, “Doing Without Art,” proposes that a fuller understanding of the implications of my notion of “making special”—referred to by Connor in his essay as somewhat relevant to his own position—would expand his view of the human art impulse and allay some of his disaffections. Rather than contributing to aesthetic theory, the ideology of art, my work proposes an ethology of art: it suggests why members of the human species, in all times and places, made and otherwise engaged with the arts (plural). An ethology of art requires a new way of regarding its subject, not philosophically as an entity or essential quality but as a behavior, something that people everywhere “do.” What characterizes all instances of “doing with art,” from prehistory to the present, is making something (a rock surface, face or body, implement, sound, space, place, movement, utterance) special. A summary of the development and ramifications of the concept of “making special”—called “artifying” in my most recent work—answers Connor’s three questions and suggests that placing our modern ideology or ideologies of art in the wider and deeper context of artification enables an understanding of the arts as intrinsic and even necessary to human lives everywhere.

The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music

Multiple factors contributed to the elevation of jazz as "high art" in mainstream media reception by the 1980s. The stage was thus set for hip-hop groups in the late-1980s and early 90s (such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets) to engage in a relationship with jazz as art and heritage. "Jazz codes" in the music, said to signify sophistication, helped create a rap-music subgenre commonly branded "jazz rap." Connections may be identified between the status of jazz, as linked to a high art ideology in the 1980s, and the media reception of jazz rap as an elite rap subgenre (in opposition to "gangsta" rap and other subgenres). Contemplation of this development leads to larger questions about the creation of hierarchies, value judgments, and the phenomenon of elite status within music genres.

Comment: World without Art

Comment: World without Art

Ezra Pound and the Ideology of Art

Ezra Pound’s significant engagement with visual art and artists makes him a natural subject for visual culture studies. As a young poet, Pound worked under the spell o f Pre-Raphaelite painters and the impressionist James Abbott McNeill Whisder; later, as he “modernized,” Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (among others) showed him the way. Throughout his London years (1908-20) Pound worked closely with artists, collabo­ rating with them on projects such as BLAST, sitting for them (resulting in portraits by Lewis, Gaudier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn), “booming” them in his reviews (as in the art criticism he wrote for the New Age from 1917 to 1920), debating with them, and of course frequendy infuriating them. The impact of vorticism, along with futurist painting, cubism, and collage on the “open form” of the Cantos has long been a central topic of Pound scholarship, from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Timothy Materer’s Vortex through Maijorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment, Charles Altieri’s Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, and Vincent Sherry’s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. In this well-documented field it is not easy to find an opening for an original critical intervention, but in Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism Rebecca Beasley offers new research findings and detailed analysis of Pound’s engagement with the milieu o f artists, art criticism, and the ideas driving contemporary art during Pound’s formative years in London and Paris. W hat distinguishes her approach from earlier stud­ ies of Pound and the visual arts, she claims, is her focus on the “shifting ideological significance” of the arts for him (2), “an insistence that the visual arts be seen as part o f the ‘argument’ o f Pound’s work, providing a model that is not restricted to the formal” (7). In the current critical parlance, “visual culture” usually refers to all cultural artifacts and activities with a visual component (including advertising, new and old media, toys, fashion, landscape, etc.). Beasley’s scope is restricted, however, by Pound’s

Mimicry against Mimesis in "Infant Sorrow": Seeing through Blake's Image with Adorno and Lacan

And Divine Appearance was & similitude of Los ... So saying Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder Albion stood in terror: not for himself but for his Friend Divine, & Self was lost in contemplation of faith And wonder at Divine Mercy & at Los's sublime honour--Jerusalem (1) Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind.--Jacques Lacan (2) CULMINATING VISION AFFORDED ALBION IN THE FURNACES OF affliction (E256) at end of Jerusalem leads to an apocalyptic dream (All was a Vision, all a Dream E256) in which, famously, All Human Forms [are] identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone (E258), a consummation reasonably described as an ideology of art, one which is realistic in some platonic sense. But it is not sufficiently remarked that this consummation is only made possible, as quotation above clearly shows, by a skewed or avoided mimesis. A few plates earlier in poem Los has been reminding Blake's readers in stentorian tones that insofar as identification might involve assumption of Universal Characteristics (curiously described as characters in Bible even beyond the Lord) it is a very bad thing, perhaps even root of all evil (they become an Eternal Death E250), and so when poem approaches its final identitarian rapture it only does so in a dream by virtue of a peculiarly controlled and distanced identification, almost a parody of real (platonic) thing. Albion sees Lord as likeness and similitude of Los, and--in an even odder translation of crucifixial sacrifice--Jesus allows an opacity (the Cloud) to screen him, even in this disguise, from Albion, making his identification even more (literally) difficult, even more a matter of faith. My purpose in this discussion is not to interpret Jerusalem but to use these few lines of it as a kind of template for constructing a warning against identitarian tendencies in interpretation of Blake. These tendencies seem relatively innocent in themselves, since they express themselves often by repeating poet's own propaganda mythos about clarity and image, but taken in conjunction with current antiquarian/archival taste for locating Blake in context of his contemporary dissident protestantism (at expense of Northrop Frye's effort to make him a contemporary), they are contributing to image of a Blake who has little to say to imagination, especially that theoretical imagination which associates apocalyptic totalization with Terror and with Holocaust and with Jonestown. In this discussion, therefore, I am concerned to restore Blake's dialogue with a modernism one can decently take an interest in, but my local target is specifically undivided image so dear to whole tradition of Blake scholarship, arguing that, whatever this means to interpreters, to Blake its clear function is to divide and separate--that is, to prevent identification--rather than platonically to mean. In criticism I analyze I want to uncover an anxious dialectic not only in poet but also in some of his most faithful readers between a tendency to apocalyptic totalization of meaning (which I understand as identitarian) and something much more radical, something that shakes meaning fundamentally, that perhaps only dangerous approach of totalization would pave way toward in Blake's historicized vocabulary. The opposition to totalization, according to terms of this dialectic, is therefore not mounted by ambiguous or uncertain meanings (though I believe Blake suffered much more from uncertainty than is usually allowed) but by an idea of expression closer to mimicry than mimesis. I believe this idea--which permeates every aspect of his writing and illustrating--is one significant thing that is modern about Blake, and I invoke it to license my attempts to align him more generally with thought. …

Book reviews

Book reviews

Artistic creativity across the adult life span: An alternative approach

The foregoing discussion attempts to present a preliminary exploration of the relationship between selected aspects of creative activity and life span developmental processes. It proposes some degree of synchronism between the maturational needs of the creative individual and both the forms of expression available to the artist through his/her selected artistic idiom and the predominant art ideology (or ideologies) of his/her cultural milieu. I believe this synchronism is necessary for the maintenance of creative effectiveness during certain definable life transitions, such as the approach to midlife, to which I refer in some detail in the discussion of Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode” and, more briefly, in the case of other distinguished Romantic and Victorian authors.

Composer, Performer, and Marx

The premiere of the post-modern symphony I recently attended was not an exercise in with-it-ness. If anything, it lacked modernity-not in the music, of course. The music was abreast of the times, indeed brilliantly so. However, there is more than music to music. At least there is now. I do not know about the earlier days. But for a man with a twentieth-century consciousness, the perception of music includes, in addition to the substantive core of sound, such more peripheral yet equally indispensable dimensions as the art's ideology and culture, their socialization and politicization, possibly even-I am thinking of Werner Henze's latest pronouncementsl-their marxification. The contemporary ear is tuned in to all of these. At the concert the message they sent came through rather early onafter I had taken my seat, glanced through the program notes, and the conductor's downbeat set things afoot. There is a reason why it did not take long. I had, earlier that day, re-read sections of Marx's The German Ideology.2 They put me in a receptive mood, albeit at first a nonserious one. Upon a mind all set to commune with the Muse, the discovery of Marx's ghost haunting the proceedings was so bizarre a shock of recognition that the only way to deal with it was to consider it funny. That is what I did, and with a vengeance. For a while everything that passed through my mind seemed funny. It transmogrified the scene down on the stage. Instead of an orchestra in action, I saw power in action: a composer