Art history
art - art theory - contemporary art - expressionism - history - impressionism - modern art - music history - postmodern art
Definition
Art history usually refers to the history of the visual arts. Although ideas about the definition of art have changed over the years, the field of art history attempts to categorize changes in art throughout time and better understand how art shapes and is shaped by the outlooks and creative impulses of its practitioners. Although many think of Art history as purely the study of European art history, the subject encompasses all art, from the megaliths of Western Europe to the paintings of the Tang dynasty in China. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_history [Aug 2004]Human need for beauty
Upon reading about Venus in Exile (2001) and The Mechanical Bride (1951), it occured to me that beauty (simple beauty, as in a beautiful woman or man, or a beautiful landscape) had to go somewhere when, during the 1900s, it was banned from the visual arts. The human need for beauty wants to be satisfied and beauty needed a new place to reside. It also needed new patrons, or sponsors as they are called today. Beauty found its new home in consumer culture and cinema, and its new sponsors in Hollywood and the marketing and advertising divisions of consumer good manufacturers.
To summarize:
If - in the 20th century - beauty was exiled from the arts, it found refuge in advertising, fashion, cinema, product design and consumer culture.
see also: Venus - beauty - banned - 1900s
Gay men, fashion, art history and aesthetics
[w]hy is it that feminists have so much trouble dealing with beauty and pleasure, I said, to which gay men have made such outstanding cultural contributions?
[f]ashion magazines are part of the history of art. These are great photographers, great stylists--and gay men have made enormous contributions to fashion photography. Anyway, I made a huge statement that night--the whole audience gasped. I went, "The history of fashion photography from 1950 to 1990 is one of the great moments in the history of art!" And everyone went, "How can you say that?" Because obviously fashion is an oppression of women. --Camille Paglia, Crisis In The American Universities, September 19, 1991 at M.I.T. via http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html [Jul 2005]
see also: gay - aesthetics - Camille Paglia
Modern Art [...]
Modern Art is a general term, used for most of the artistic production from the late 19th century until approximately the 1970s. (Recent art production is more often called contemporary art). Modern art refers to a new approach to art where it was no longer important to literally represent a subject (through painting or sculpture) -- the invention of photography had made this function of art obsolete. Instead, artists started experimenting with new ways of seeing, with fresh ideas about the nature, materials and functions of art, often moving towards further abstraction. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art [Aug 2004]
As an art historical term, "modern" refers to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. -- http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/roots.html Chris Witcombe
Critical Terms for Art History - Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff
Critical Terms for Art History - Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This companion volume to Critical Terms for Literary Study contains scholarly essays that explore 22 terms commonly used by contemporary art historians. Terms such as representation, originality, appropriation, gaze, and commodity are treated within a historical context, and their influence on art criticism and aesthetics is shown. Here, critical visual theories that utilize the terms are applied to key visual images and objects. The diverse artworks cited include the bronze statue of "The Four Horses of San Marco," Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere," Walker Evans's photograph "Annie Mae Gudger," and Jeff Koons's "Vacuum Cleaner." Assuming a sophisticated level of art history scholarship, the erudite essays contain numerous bibliographic references. The essays are intended to promote research and debate. Recommended for academic and comprehensive art history collections.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago --From Library Journal
The nature of the visual has, over the past decade, moved to the center of debates in the humanities. No longer simply the study of timeless masterpieces, art history as a discipline is now addressing some of the most basic questions about cultural production, questions such as how images function and how expectations and social factors mediate what we see. The new scope of art history has required a major expansion and reassessment of methods and terminology.
Edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History is both an exposition and a demonstration of contested terms from the current art historical vocabulary. In individual essays, scholars examine the history and use of these terms by grounding their discussions in single works of art, reading each work through current debates and methods. This instructive combination of theory and practice allows readers to examine the terms as they are seeing them employed. In its wide representation of contemporary discourse, Critical Terms for Art History is a comprehensive effort to map historical and theoretical debates over the visual environment.
Like its companion, Critical Terms for Literary Study, this book will prove an invaluable resource both for those beginning to learn about the visual theory and for scholars and historians. --Product Description
The Painting of Modern Life - Timothy J. Clark [...]
The Painting of Modern Life - Timothy J. Clark [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds--the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute "modern life." Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T. J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives--be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, or petits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of The Painting of Modern Life is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny? The revised edition of this classic book includes a new preface by the author. --Book Description via Amazon.com
Not surprisingly, The Painting of Modern of Life has been negatively "reviewed" by every major writer (except Greil Marcus) who has devoted more than a paragraph to it. The manner in which The New York Times responded to it may be paradigmatic: it chose to publish two "reviews" of Clark's book, one devoted to Clark's "politics" and one devoted to his "aesthetics," precisely because his book is an attempt to supercede the contradiction between politics and aesthetics. In its "review" of the "politics" of The Painting of Modern Life, the NYT claimed that "ultimately [Clark] remains weighed down by the chains of ideology"; in its "review" of the book's "aesthetics," it claimed that Clark's book is "seriously flawed" in its lack of attention to the Impressionist painters' concern with "light and color." One isn't sure which is the more preposterous: the ridiculous content of the respective "reviews," or their spectacular separation from each other. --http://www.notbored.org/manet.html [Jul 2004]
Art in Theory [...]
- Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas - Charles Harrison, Paul Wood [Amazon.com]
Since it was first published in 1992, this book has become one of the leading anthologies of art theoretical texts in the English-speaking world. This expanded edition includes the fruits of recent research, involving a considerable amount of newly translated material from the entire period, together with additional texts from the last decades of the twentieth century. The features that made the first edition so successful have been retained: The volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories, which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is clearly structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern. The editors provide individual introductions to each of the 340 anthologized texts. Material new to this expanded edition includes texts on African art, on the Bauhaus and on the re-emergent avant-gardes of the period after the Second World War. Post-modernist debates are amplified by texts on gender, on installation and performance art, and on the increasing globalization of culture. --Amazon.comyour Amazon recommendations
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