The Aesthetics of Loss

The Aesthetics of Loss

Author: Claudia Siebrecht

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-09-19

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0191630675

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women's art of the First World War that locates the artists' rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and wartime loss. Drawing on a fascinating body of visual sources produced throughout the war years, Claudia Siebrecht examines the thematic evolution of women's art from expressions of support for the war effort to more nuanced and ambivalent testimonies of loss and grief. Many of the images are stark woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs of great iconographical power that acted as narrative tools to deal with the novel, unsettling, and often traumatic experience of war. German female artists developed a unique aesthetic response to the conflict that both expressed emotional distress and allowed them to re-imagine the place of mourning women in wartime society. Historical codes of wartime behaviour and traditional rites of public mourning led female artists to redefine cultural practices of bereavement, question existing notions of heroic death and proud bereavement through art, and to place grief at the centre of women's war experiences. As a cultural, aesthetic, and thematic point of reference, German women's art of the First World War has had a fundamental influence on the European memory and understanding of modern war.


The Aesthetics of Loss

The Aesthetics of Loss

Author: Claudia Siebrecht

Publisher:

Published: 2013-09-19

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0199656681

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An examination of German women's art produced during the First World War that places the artists' visual responses within the civilian war experience. Traces the thematic evolution of women's art from visual expressions of support for the national war effort to more nuanced and distraught representations of grief over wartime death.


The Crafting of Grief

The Crafting of Grief

Author: Lorraine Hedtke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1317416244

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many books on grief lay out a model to be followed, either for bereaved persons to live through or for professionals to practice, and usually follow some familiar prescriptions for what people should do to reach an accommodation with loss. The Crafting of Grief is different: it focuses on conversations that help people chart their own path through grief. Authors Hedtke and Winslade argue convincingly that therapists and counselors can support people more by helping them craft their own responses to bereavement rather than trying to squeeze experiences into a model. In the pages of this book, readers will learn how to develop lines of inquiry based on the concept of continuing bonds, and they’ll discover ways to use these ideas to help the bereaved craft stories that remember loved ones’ lives.


Magic and Loss

Magic and Loss

Author: Virginia Heffernan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501132679

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Virginia Heffernan gives a highly informative analysis of what the internet is and can be in an examination of its past, present and future.


Brutal Aesthetics

Brutal Aesthetics

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0691253080

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.


The Living Death of Antiquity

The Living Death of Antiquity

Author: William Fitzgerald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0192646222

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different media and periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Earlier and later versions of this aesthetic in the ancient Greek Anacreontea, the French Parnassian poets and Erik Satie's Socrate, manifest its character in different media and periods. Looking with a sympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealized antiquity, Fitzgerald describes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and is not with us.


The Aesthetics of Degradation

The Aesthetics of Degradation

Author: Adrian Nathan West

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2016-06-14

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1910924199

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pornography keeps getting more extreme. Manufacturers, defenders and consumers of porn rely on a mix of wilful ignorance and bad faith to avoid serious discussion. When we do talk about violence against women in the porn world, the debate all too often becomes technical, complicated by legalities and outrage. But what are the moral and psychological consequences of the mercantilization of abuse? In this studied and ruthless examination of the place of pornography in contemporary life, translator and critic Adrian Nathan West treads dangerous literary and social ground, transcending cliches about free expression and the demands of the market to look at the moral discomfort of violent pornography from the perspective of the viewer. Collapsing distinctions between novel, memoir, and essay, this book will not make for light reading. But at its core is an extraordinarily brave and honest concern for the women and men who have been hurt in the name of sexual gratification.


After the End of Art

After the End of Art

Author: Arthur C. Danto

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0691209308

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.


The Aesthetics of Disengagement

The Aesthetics of Disengagement

Author: Christine Ross

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780816645398

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reveals the artistic subjectivity of the scientific notion of depression.