The Arts from the Bottom Up
The Arts from the Bottom Up

Author: Marsha Schweitzer

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Published: 2019-05-10

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1480876941

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Author Marsha Schweitzer built a career as a professional musician, arranger, arts administrator, and journalist that has spanned more than fifty years. During that time, through her many roles, she saw vast shifts in the landscape of the arts. The Arts from the Bottom Up presents a collection of articles, letters, essays, and notes Schweitzer wrote between 1978 and 2017 as she journeyed through the nooks and crannies of the arts. Working in three parts, she begins at the bottom, with the mundane day-to-day aspects of the arts, and moves up to the organizational and spiritual aspects. "Power Play" explores the artistic workplace, with emphasis on unions and labor relations. "In Service to the Art" considers the arts from a broader perspective, addressing issues of organizational structure, governance, finance, and administration. "Peregrinations of a Pensive Artist" deals with the nature and meaning of the underlying and overarching art that ties artists, organizations, and audiences together. Throughout, she seeks to help artists break out of the deep ruts of tradition and conformity and look at problems from new and different angles.

English Gothic Misericord Carvings
English Gothic Misericord Carvings

Author: Betsy Chunko-Dominguez

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-03-06

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 900434120X

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English Gothic Misericord Carvings: History from the Bottom Up by Betsy Chunko-Dominguez is the first book to move beyond textual dependence and traditional iconographic analysis when examining misericords. It likewise builds the most thorough discussion to date of the relationship between the misericord’s several potential audiences – including patron, craftsman, occupant of the seat, and modern viewer. Beyond the bounds of misericord studies, there are implications here for study of the relationship between center and margin in late medieval art; and, indeed, what constitutes ‘center’ and ‘margin’ as conceptual realms. Ultimately, this book attempts both to re-integrate the study of misericords into the study of Gothic art in general, and to re-center them in relation to our understanding of late medieval culture.

Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China
Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China

Author: Meiqin Wang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0429853637

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This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China’s top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science

Author: Eric R. Kandel

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-08-30

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0231542089

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Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this new book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism—the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components—has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals. In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time—the brain—has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art. At the heart of the book is an elegant elucidation of the contribution of reductionism to the evolution of modern art and its role in a monumental shift in artistic perspective. Reductionism steered the transition from figurative art to the first explorations of abstract art reflected in the works of Turner, Monet, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian. Kandel explains how, in the postwar era, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin used a reductionist approach to arrive at their abstract expressionism and how Katz, Warhol, Close, and Sandback built upon the advances of the New York School to reimagine figurative and minimal art. Featuring captivating drawings of the brain alongside full-color reproductions of modern art masterpieces, this book draws out the common concerns of science and art and how they illuminate each other.

Takedown
Takedown

Author: Farah Nayeri

Publisher: Astra Publishing House

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1662600569

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Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics. For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people’s demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power? With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking and answering questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world.

Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up
Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up

Author: Anthony Flaccavento

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0813167361

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Introduction : Economic transitions in surprising places -- What's wrong with what we've got? Rising tides, trickle down, and other economic myths -- Renewing households and communities : from consumptive dependence to productive resilience -- Unleashing local living economies : from trickle-down problems to bottom-up solutions -- Building broadly based and durable prosperity : from concentrated wealth and widespread insecurity to worker ownership and community capital -- Taking sustainability to scale : from a thousand flickers of light to networks of learning, doing, and change -- Rebuilding a meaningful public debate : from debilitating corporate media to energizing civic conversations -- Transforming politics from the bottom up : unleashing a community-based politics of engagement to overcome the lobbyists and moneyed elites -- Conclusion : Creating a new story, from the bottom up.

Arts
Arts

Author: Maria Burguete

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9814324930

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This book treats arts as part of science, from the unified perspective of Science Matters. It contains 17 chapters, with 18 contributors who are prominent humanists, professional artists, or scientists. It consists of three parts: Part I: Philosophy and History of Arts; Part II: Arts in Action; Part III: Understanding Arts. The book is aimed at both research scholars and lay people, and is unique in two important aspects. It is probably the first and only book that academic professionals and practicing artists contribute to the same book, as equals, on the common theme of creating and understanding arts. (Artists here include Cristina Leiria whose huge Kun Iam (Goddess of Mercy) sculpture is an important landmark in Macau, and the famous movie director, Hark Tsui, who is publishing his first ever article on movie-making). Perhaps more importantly, a new understanding of the origin and nature of art is offered for the first time, which is more convincing than all the other hypotheses put forth in the last two thousand years.

SoulStirrers
SoulStirrers

Author: H. Ike Okafor-Newsum

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2016-01-19

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1626746370

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In SoulStirrers, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum describes the birth and development of an artistic movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, identified with the Neo-Ancestral impulse. The Neo-Ancestral impulse emerges as an extension of the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement, and the Black Arts Movement, all of which sought to re-represent the “primitive” and “savage” Black and African in new terms. Central to the dominant racial framework has always been the conception that the Black subject was not only inferior, but indeed incapable of producing art. The Neo-Ancestral impulse posed a challenge to both existing form and content. Like its intellectual antecedents, the movement did not separate art from life and raised a central question, one that the “soul stirrers” of Cincinnati are engaging in their artistic productions. Okafor-Newsum defines collapsing of the sacred and the profane as a central tendency of African aesthetics, transformed and rearticulated here in the Americas. In this volume, the artistic productions ask readers to consider the role of those creating and viewing this art by attempting to shift the way in which we view the ordinary. The works of these artists, therefore, are not only about the survival of African-derived cultural forms, though such remains a central effect of them. These extraordinary pieces, installations, and movements consistently refer to the cultural reality of the Americas and the need for political and intellectual transformation. They constitute important intellectual interventions that serve as indispensable elements in the redefinition and reinterpretation of our society. Featuring numerous color illustrations and profiles of artists, this volume reveals exciting trends in African American art and in the African diaspora more broadly.

Complexity and the Art of Public Policy
Complexity and the Art of Public Policy

Author: David Colander

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0691169136

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How ideas in complexity can be used to develop more effective public policy Complexity science—made possible by modern analytical and computational advances—is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists' policy models have not kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking away from creative, innovative policy solutions. Complexity and the Art of Public Policy outlines a new, more flexible policy narrative, which envisions society as a complex evolving system that is uncontrollable but can be influenced. David Colander and Roland Kupers describe how economists and society became locked into the current policy framework, and lay out fresh alternatives for framing policy questions. Offering original solutions to stubborn problems, the complexity narrative builds on broader philosophical traditions, such as those in the work of John Stuart Mill, to suggest initiatives that the authors call "activist laissez-faire" policies. Colander and Kupers develop innovative bottom-up solutions that, through new institutional structures such as for-benefit corporations, channel individuals’ social instincts into solving societal problems, making profits a tool for change rather than a goal. They argue that a central role for government in this complexity framework is to foster an ecostructure within which diverse forms of social entrepreneurship can emerge and blossom.

The Unification of the Arts
The Unification of the Arts

Author: Steven Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0198864876

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What are the arts? What functions do the arts serve in human life? There has been a surge of cognitive, biological, and evolutionary interest in the arts in recent years, most of it oriented towards individual artforms. However, there has been virtually no bridging work to integrate the arts under a single theoretical perspective. This book presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that unites visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music into a single framework, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics. Its comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what they share, shedding light on how the arts can combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While studies in the psychology of the arts tend to focus on perceptual processes and aesthetic responses alone, this book offers a holistic sensorimotor account that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book unifies a number of topics that have not previously been fully related to one another, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. A unique volume providing a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, for academics or general readers of the arts, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary studies.