Visual Artworks Research Articles

ArtStory Beats: Highlighting interactions between visual arts and music with storytelling

In this article, we present the use-case of ArtStory Beats, a mobile application that aims to reflect the creative dialogue between visual arts and music, offering stories about the vibrant interactions that take place within the artistic communities over time. The app use is quite simple: it scans physical copies of visual artworks and provides audio-enhanced stories. However, the audio is not intended to be background or supplementary informative material. It is a music song that somehow relates to the visual artwork, and the stories tell you how. First, we describe our content creation process along with the design of the mobile application. Then we present the results from a qualitative user study with 15 participants, investigating the role and effects of music over several dimensions: overall experience, user satisfaction, and most notably, cultural engagement. The outcomes of the study reveal the potential of the approach to foster curiosity, capture the user's attention and support a deeper, reflective connection of the user with the combined artworks. Finally, we discuss the potential use of ArtStory Beats in different contexts, as a remote but also onsite experience, elaborating on related challenges and future directions.

Imagination of humanity’s future: representation and comparison of female cyborg images in generative AI paintings

ABSTRACT This article explores the representation of the female image in the visual artwork of generative AI and the gender issues in it, using eight different generative AI systems, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, Shuhua, and Yihui from China and Nightcafe, Fotor, Jasper Art, DALLE and Deep dream generator from the West, as comparative cases. In this paper, female cyborg is selected as a representative of female images, using the theoretical framework of posthumanism. This paper first provides research background about generative AI and cyborg. By inputting the same text in these eight generative AI systems, this paper obtains 107 images in different scenarios of basic images, home, work, and fighting. By comparing and analysing these images horizontally and vertically, this paper explores how Chinese and Western generative AI systems perceive female cyborg. In conclusion, by choosing female cyborg as a representation of the female figure, this paper explores how generative AI imagines the future of humanity and how this imagination echoes with the human imagination in a paradoxical way.

Ekphrastic Poetry on the Venus de Milo

Within literary studies, the interaction of ekphrastic poetry and painting constitutes a frequently examined topic, but the intermedial relationships between poetry and sculpture have been more rarely explored. Contributing to the scholarship on literary ekphrasis and on the interrelations between poetry and sculpture, the paper focuses on strategies of description and narrativization, paying homage and developing a rivalry, and the account of the viewer’s activity and their aesthetic evaluation. The essay examines these issues via the case study of the ekphrastic lyrical tradition of the Venus de Milo. Firstly, it lays out a sketch of nineteenth-century art historical and lyrical approaches to the Venus de Milo. Secondly and predominantly, it analyses some examples of twentieth-century ekphrasis (such as the Hungarian Gyula Juhász’s “Milói Vénus,” the Romanian Alfred Moşoiu’s “Venus din Milo,” the British Alfred Noyes’s “The Venus of Milo,” and the Hungarian György Rónay’s “A milói Vénusz”), which all respond to the statue of Venus de Milo, and either continue or break the art historical and lyrical traditions developed during the 1800s. Therefore, on the one hand, the study demonstrates how ekphrastic literary traditions, while participating in the canonization of visual works of art, show the traces of the changing approaches and appreciations of their artistic object (in this case study, the Venus de Milo) over a long period of time, and, on the other hand, it sheds light on how the ekphrastic literary tradition itself is shaped.

Digital Rebirth and Design of China's Cultural Heritage

This paper discusses the rebirth and design of China's cultural heritage in the digital era, focusing on the concept and characteristics of digital virtual products and their application in cultural heritage. Digital products are defined as contents exchanged based on digital formats or transmitted via the Internet, characterized by immortality, mutability, rapid distribution and high replenishment. Video plays an important role in digital virtual products by combining visual and audio elements to create a rich experience for consumers. The field of design has experienced a shift from traditional physical design to virtual product design, which utilizes digital technologies and virtual reality to create a virtual objective presence. Digital technologies have shown great potential for cultural heritage preservation, such as the Dunhuang Research Institute's use of AR technology to provide immersive experiences for tourists. The rise of the meta-universe concept has further expanded the digital world, with blockchain and NFT technologies providing uniqueness, traceability and authentication for digital assets. The Dunhuang Research Academy has begun exploring digital NFT to transform mural elements into traceable and collectible visual artworks, promoting the global dissemination of Dunhuang culture.

Communicating the dialog between painting and music with a mobile application

Contemporary visual artists often collaborate with musicians and composers to enrich their artworks and provide multisensory viewing experiences by leveraging the power of digital technology. In this paper, we present our approach to follow in their footsteps by creating a mobile application that provides “mixed-media interpretations” for a variety of visual artworks and music pieces, spanning over different time eras, with the objective to reflect the creative dialog and multifaceted interaction between their creators through time. Targeting the broader public, we attempt to capture a variety of interconnections between works of visual arts and music that may be of interest and are comprehensible to people with varying levels of knowledge on art or music, including not only inspirational but also personal and social relationships among the artists. We provide a six-layered conceptual model to ease the description of the content produced to that end while reporting several concrete examples. Then, we focus on how to communicate and digitally mediate the intertwined and often intricate interconnections in a concise way, proposing a “three-act” story scheme to progressively display short narratives on screen, combined with music reproduction on the mobile device. Finally, we explore the potential of the proposed approach through a user study with 15 participants and report a series of promising key findings, whereas also discussing future directions and pointing out open issues.

Did the Solicitor General Hijack the Warhol v. Goldsmith Case?

The main dispute between Lynn Goldsmith and the Andy Warhol Foundation (AWF) between 2017 and 2022 was whether Warhol’s 1984 creation of sixteen works of visual art based on Goldsmith’s photograph of Prince under an artist reference license was fair use or infringement. Even though the trial court and the Second Circuit disagreed about whether these creations were fair use, the Court did not address that dispute at all because it interpreted Goldsmith’s merits brief as having abandoned that claim. This Article considers the influence of the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG)’s brief on the reframing of the Warhol case as only concerning the transformativeness (or not) of a 2016 license granted by the AWF to Condé Nast to the use of one of Warhol’s Prince Series works on the cover of a commemorative magazine. After reviewing the evolution of this copyright litigation and the lower court decisions, this Article speculates about how and why OSG may have chosen to narrow the question presented in the Warhol case and why Goldsmith might have acquiesced in this. The OSG’s reframing of the issue enabled the Court to avoid addressing a largely invisible issue in the Warhol case: the implications of § 103(a) of the 1976 Copyright Act for AWF’s claims of copyright in Warhol’s Prince Series works. Even though the Court only ruled that AWF’s 2016 license grant was nontransformative, the Article suggests that much of the Warhol decision’s dicta is nonetheless likely to influence future fair use analyses. It also considers the viability of AWF’s claim of copyright in the Prince Series and suggests alternative ways the Court could have resolved the Warhol case.

Figuring Displacement: Spaces of Imagination in Early Modern and Postmodern Intertextual Transmissions

This essay examines, ecocritically, geocritically, and comparatively, the metaphoric spaces represented in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters—seas, mountains, islands, jungle—to show that these spaces allow for different interpretations, yet they are spaces of individual imagination in both the play and the novel, suggesting transformation and metamorphosis. I argue that these literary spaces show a common feature of displacement, which allows human language to re-imagine other worlds—in literature and in visual arts. The spaces of imagination proliferated through Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Barnes’ novel have suffered a transformation in time and space, as they speak to past and present audiences and readers. The sea in Barnes’ chapter entitled “Shipwreck” symbolizes danger but also hope, as does the sea in the storm scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Mountain in Barnes’ eponymous chapter represents an isolated and inaccessible landscape on Mount Ararat, at the intersection of three cultures (Armenia, Turkey and Russia), but it also represents the biblical language of faith and hermitic isolation. Similarly, the island in The Tempest, which is—geologically—a mountain above the water, represents metaphorically the island of the mind. The jungle in Barnes’ chapter “Upstream” is a remote place in the forest on the Orinoco River, where Europeans and native Indians interact while making a movie; this movie is a work of visual art, represented in a novel; so is any one of the many productions of The Tempest, which reiterates the island’s imaginary space in various directorial interpretations. All these locations are metaphoric spaces of imagination, transmitted through different media, in which reality is transformed into literary representation by means of fictional description or theatrical action.

Applying A/r/tography as a creative community resilience strategy in response to the climate emergency

ABSTRACT This paper connects arts education creative practice and the rise of climate emergency discourse with community resilience policymaking. We apply a creative-relational approach informed by the principles of a/r/tography to position community stories as central to place based transformation. Through our Guattari-inspired conceptual model, we apply the a/r/tographic method to critically explore its suitability for identifying and mapping hidden community stories — traces of a new ecosophy — as a local resilience response. Our research took place in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, as part of a creative programme commissioned to address inequalities through the arts. We entered into artistic dialogue with community creative practices that occurred at two ecological sites, creating reflective textual and visual artworks to produce alternative representations of place that challenge dominant narratives within local resilience policymaking. These mutual creative engagements informed our findings while remaining within their artistic context rather than reduced to categorised themes. This work offers a new local resilience strategy to strengthen community representation of their places.

“When I go back to painting, I am ‘Alice in Wonderland”: older women coping with age-related crises through visual artmaking

ABSTRACT Background The creative process of visual artmaking provides an opportunity for older women to express themselves and explore their emotions, thoughts, and experiences. This study examined the roles of visual artmaking in older women’s lives in general and in relation to the ongoing challenges of aging. Methods The sample was composed of 21 Israeli women aged 60-90, who indicated that they produced visual artworks on an ongoing basis. The participants’ artworks were collected, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. Results A thematic analysis of the interviews revealed 4 themes: visual artmaking to address the challenges of older women’s lives, artwork as a framework for doing, visual artmaking to support the wellbeing of older women, artwork as channel of communication and stronger ties with family members. Conclusions The findings contribute to a better understanding of the roles of visual art in older women’s lives, especially in times of crisis.

Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night": A Poetic Response to Van Gogh's Masterpiece

Ekphrastic poetry is a poetic reinterpretation of a visual artwork. There are numerous poems, songs, and lyrics written with inspiration from paintings, sculptures, or photographs. An ekphrastic poem can immortalize a work of art adding a new perspective to it. This paper looks at the tradition of Ekphrastic poetry as a genre and explores Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night through the light of Anne Sexton’s popular ekphrastic poem “The Starry Night”. It observes how Sexton’s poem artfully attempts to capture the spirit of Van Gogh’s painting through words. It also suggests how combining poetry with visual art can enrich both art and literature.

What’s Art Got to Do With It? Using Visual Thinking Strategies to Develop Critical Thinking Skills

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is an experiential exercise readily adapted to the management classroom. Through this exercise, instructors use a structured process to help students develop and apply critical thinking skills, with a focus on clearly articulating a concept, explaining their reasoning and use of evidence to inform their claim, interrogating assumptions, and exploring a range of perspectives. The exercise involves guiding students to interpret first visual artwork and then other texts through the use of guiding questions and specific facilitation strategies, followed by a practice and a debriefing. Additional adaptations discussed in the appendix, such as using VTS with graphic organizers from a course text, the landing page of a multinational company website, a SWOT analysis, or quantitative datasets, are a testament to the versatility and flexibility of this strategy in building students’ critical thinking skills across management contexts.

Motivation and experiences of studying creative arts therapy among Chinese doctoral students in South Korea

Chinese students accounted for 40.4% of international students in South Korea in 2022. Universities in China require doctoral degrees to teach art. Creative arts therapy has increasingly gained attention. This study investigated the experiences of six Chinese students in a study abroad program for creative arts therapy in South Korea. We gathered data from visual artworks and interviews. The analysis yielded six themes: No doctoral degree, no job position for art educators in university, China; Expectations for the development of CAT in China; Despite majoring in art, CAT is a new discipline; Study abroad while unprepared in terms of language ability; Wanting to escape due to academic pressure; Motivation to continue studying abroad. Findings revealed that psychological and emotional support programs would help international students across different nationalities and cultures. Students’ study abroad experience and how it contributes to their lives beyond obtaining a degree requires further consideration.

Sensuousness and Intermediality as Stylistic Dominants in Jasmina Musabegović’s Works

This paper explores the two key features of Jasminina Musabegović's style – sensuousness and intermediality. These two features can be regarded as stylistic dominants in the works of this writer, essayist, critic, and editor, where orientation on language is always strongly present. Intermediality is in some cases realized as ekphrasis (verbal representation of a visual work of art, i.e. a painting, photograph, piece of architecture), whereas in other cases verbal devices create filmicity. so that some of the scenes in her novels look like movie frames. It is argued that there exists unity of style in all works of this author, whereby her novels contain elements of essays and other genres, and lyricism and sensuousness occupy a central place in all her texts.

Cross-cultural comparison of beauty judgments in visual art using machine learning analysis of art attribute predictors among Japanese and German speakers

In empirical art research, understanding how viewers judge visual artworks as beautiful is often explored through the study of attributes—specific inherent characteristics or artwork features such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness. These attributes form the basis for subjective evaluations, including the judgment of beauty. Building on this conceptual framework, our study examines the beauty judgments of 54 Western artworks made by native Japanese and German speakers, utilizing an extreme randomized trees model—a data-driven machine learning approach—to investigate cross-cultural differences in evaluation behavior. Our analysis of 17 attributes revealed that visual harmony, color variety, valence, and complexity significantly influenced beauty judgments across both cultural cohorts. Notably, preferences for complexity diverged significantly: while the native Japanese speakers found simpler artworks as more beautiful, the native German speakers evaluated more complex artworks as more beautiful. Further cultural distinctions were observed: for the native German speakers, emotional expressiveness was a significant factor, whereas for the native Japanese speakers, attributes such as brushwork, color world, and saturation were more impactful. Our findings illuminate the nuanced role that cultural context plays in shaping aesthetic judgments and demonstrate the utility of machine learning in unravelling these complex dynamics. This research not only advances our understanding of how beauty is judged in visual art—considering self-evaluated attributes—across different cultures but also underscores the potential of machine learning to enhance our comprehension of the aesthetic evaluation of visual artworks.

Visual communication design students’ self-perception of their visual literacy competency in determining, retrieving, interpreting, and evaluating visual materials

In today’s world, visual competence plays an increasingly important role. Proficiency in visual literacy is an essential competency in various fields, including marketing, design, education, and journalism. The competency to convey messages effectively, attract audiences, and promote engagement is crucial for success in these industries. At the university level, visual literacy is an essential competency for university students studying visual communication. A lack of sufficient visual literacy leads to several key challenges. Research indicates that most university students in China do not have sufficient visual literacy competencies. However, there has been a dearth of scholarly inquiry looking specifically into the visual literacy competency standards of students studying visual communication design in China despite its close association with visual literacy. The study aimed to evaluate the visual literacy competency of students majoring in visual communication design in Shanghai, China, through interviews. The interview questions utilised in this study were developed based on four visual literacy standards created by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). This study includes the competencies to determine visual materials needed, efficient image retrieval, interpret visual materials’ meanings, and evaluate image credibility when performing visual artworks. The study’s results indicate that students face difficulties in analysing and evaluating images due to their limited exploration of images related information, background, technology, and design elements. Consequently, they encounter challenges such as an inability to distinguish authenticity and judge reliability. These findings are valuable for the curriculum development of students majoring in visual communication design.

From the Bedroom to the Moon: Tuning into the Relations of Children and Music through Spacetimemattering

Visiting family homes to intra-view children about their relations to music open doors into family houses, digitization of music and children, trampolines, composing songs to stop climate changes, and bodies dancing before the researcher’s, and iPhone’s gaze. Through stories and visual artworks, the phenomenon childmusicking is diffracted through Karen Barad’s concept spacetimematter. This article gives a taste of how spatial, temporal, and material agencies intra-acts within childmusicking. The article articulates how childmusicking is entangled with global matters such as the climate crisis, and it troubles binaries such as adult–child, nature–culture, humans–non-humans, matter-–meaning.

Neurodynamics of Relational Aesthetic Engagement in Creative Arts Therapies

Aesthetic experiences, emerging saliently in the arts, play a pivotal role in transformative learning and creative processes that elicit physiological, affective, and cognitive responses associated with mental health indices. Interactions between subjects and aesthetic objects (e.g., visual artwork, music, and moving bodies) often entail elements of surprise and uncertainty that drive the inference of the hidden causes in the subject’s internal and external environment. These generate dynamics that align with the action-oriented Predictive Processing framework of brain function. Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) harness these dynamics by cultivating relational engagement using the arts modalities, prompting affective and cognitive processing. In this manuscript, we offer a review and conceptual analysis of recent empirical findings and theoretical premises that underpin aesthetic experiences and their relation to the psychotherapeutic use of the arts with a broad spectrum of populations and mental health conditions. We present a neuroscience-based approach to aesthetic intra- and inter-personal experiences, integrating therapeutic change factors of externalization-concretization, embodiment, and symbolization with functional network configurations, and interpersonal brain-to-brain coupling, to support predictive processing, learning, and creativity. Present and future interdisciplinary collaborations are underlined to elucidate the neurodynamic mechanisms driving psychological transformations, bridging neuroaesthetics and CATs.

The Symbolic of Female Body in the Anti-Japanese War Painting in China

From 1931 to 1945, Japan launched a 14-year war of aggression against China and it had a profound impact on China’s politics, economy, and culture. One of the reactions or responses from Chinese society to this tragic event is through art, especially in painting. However, most of the paintings in the Anti-Japanese War are dominated by male subjects and females only appear as a supporting role in the composition. The objectives of this study are to describe the female body through Chinese Anti-Japanese War paintings from the 1970’s and to interpret the meaning of signs and symbols through a conceptual framework that has been built from relevant concepts. This study adopts a qualitative research strategy that makes use of observation and documents as its main research methods. This study shows that these visual artworks reflected the social transformation and changing gender roles in culture at that time. The female body in these visual works conveys multiple meanings such as bravery, tenacity, and sacrifice.

Design of a Music Stage Documentation Photography Book Tani Maju Band

Malang City is one of the cities in Indonesia that has a rich and diverse music history. One of the famous music groups from Malang City is Tani Maju. Established since 1999, Tani Maju continues to enliven the music scene in Malang City until today. This research is a project by the author who has also been a documentation stage photographer for Tani Maju since 2009 until now. This research will result in a photography book documenting Tani Maju's music stage as the main medium. Music stage documentation photography is a branch of photography that focuses on documenting music performances. This photography book will contain photos of Tani Maju on stage, taken by the author from 2009 to mid-2019, and has undergone photography quality selection and editing processes by the author. The design method applied in this research is using a qualitative approach. The general aim of this design is to create a photography book that contains documentation of Tani Maju's music stage, and the benefits derived from this research and design are to add one form of visual artwork for the author and Tani Maju Band in the form of a music stage documentation book.

The Venice Biennale, French porcelain and historical retrospective on marketing and expertise in the field of fine arts

The relevance of this article is based on shaping new modern world’s market relations one of which is the art market. The aim of the research is the analysis of the marketing interrelations and tendencies in the market of the 20th-21st centuries together with the previous historical periods. In order to hit the goal of the research, theoretical, empirical and comparative researching methods have been used. It sets theoretical foundations of the visual arts marketing and the ways of their practical application. Already before the modern art market as an element of a total capitalistic market came to exist, the movement of visual art works, in the ancient epoch, included elements of marketing approaches and technologies caused by the then-existing processes of sale and purchase of art works, their exchange and collecting. The article is about the expertise of their quality and originality; definition of the already existing methods of promoting art works in the society. It is worth paying a particular attention to ceramic products like porcelain (china) that, in its turn, occupies an important place among art works, together with paintings and sculptures. In the beginning of the 18th century, the porcelain arrived to Europe from China. Collectors have for three centuries admired porcelain products. It should be admitted, there is a particular category of the Venice Biennale visitors. They are porcelain collectors. The practical value of this research stays in the analysis of the marketing instruments in the modern art market for the benefit of not only modern artists but also of the managers of all levels who work in the field of visual arts, at exhibitions, for companies producing collection ceramics tableware, at auctions and in the world’s museums