专业教学中艺术思维训练的重要性

艺术设计专业近些年来发展迅速,正逐步走向成熟完善的阶段.在艺术设计专业教学过程中我们通常会把技法作为主要的教学内容,而忽视了艺术思维的训练.艺术设计专业的最终培养目标是实现专业技能与审美能力的同步提高.那么,艺术思维的开发与训练就成为艺术设计专业教学研究的新方向.     

间接语言与梅洛-庞蒂的艺术观

本文以法国著名哲学家,知觉现象学的创始人莫里斯·梅洛-庞蒂晚年未完成的著作《世界的散文》中专论艺术的一节——＂间接语言＂——为研究对象,通过阅读文本提炼大师梅洛-庞蒂的艺术观。在梅洛-庞蒂的眼里,艺术是实在性的展开,是存在者存在状态的彰显,是对生活世界的知觉显现的瞬间捕捉。对于＂生活世界＂的认识,以及艺术如何＂表达＂生活世界的观点,他迈入了前人从未涉足的领域。     

Managing the People: Art Programs in the American Depression

How do “classical” big art institutions (museums, the ballet, the opera, symphony orchestras) react to phenomena of globalization such as migration flows, the “denationalization” of artistic movements, the enormous growth of the number of artists, the trend of a global cultural branding of cities, etc.? And which cultural policies do governments develop to interfere in the relationship between those art institutions and their changing environments? Those were the central questions I asked while doing research about the position of art institutions in society today. The research concentrated on a very diverse sample of big art institutions in Europe. The research begins with the insights of Actor Network Theory and the political philosophy of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and leads to an ideal typical two-dimensional model to classify the possible strategies that such institutions and their responsible governments can use on the local, national and international level.     

The Intellectual and Cultural Dimensions of International Relations: Present Ironies and Future Possibilities

Reported is a study that focused on the Millennial Generation and potential differences in viewing an exhibition in person versus online. The exhibition featured the artwork of Paul-Henri Bourguignon, whose extensive body of work includes a variety of paintings and drawings that employ a wide range of styles. Some viewers traveled to the physical space of a museum gallery, while others viewed reproductions of the same works on the Internet. Informants engaged in reflexive self-interviews using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The authors compare viewers’ responses to works experienced in person versus online and discuss implications.     

Cultural Policy and Values: Intrinsic versus Instrumental? The Case of Romania

This article addresses cultural policy in post-Communist Romania, focusing on the justifications for support of culture and the arts. The objectives are to clarify values legitimizing public support and to determine their effect on the meaning and impact of cultural policy. The author argues that justifications of public funding—instrumental or intrinsic—depend on how successive governments represent the roles conferred to culture and the arts, as well as on the particular ideas of culture and art they promote. Policy discourse after 1989 has been characterized by its nourishment of a persistent instrumental ideology that gradually connected to the international debate and has been dominated by a traditional, narrow conception of culture and art, which conflicts with a modern conception. Until recently, the fluctuations and conflicts between different values and ideas of culture and art have worked to constrain cultural policy, disrupting its implementation and altering its effects.     

Radical exclusions,empty signifiers and an anti-war genre

Ernesto Laclau argues that Saussurean structural linguistics is one framework necessary for a post-Marxist understanding of political identities and new social movements. Disrupting the distinction between the discursive and the political, he provides insight into the formal properties of identity, difference, universality and particularity. However, this disruption means that his work is relevant not only to political theory per se but has retroactive value for understanding semiotics and signification. By considering methodological problems encountered during an analysis of an anti-war poster genre, this essay suggests that Laclau's concept of empty signifiers enables a novel understanding of genre. His schema complements approaches that emphasize the analysis of content and the analysis of audience reception, broadly conceived. Between the poles of content and reception, there are structural or relational properties enabling the contingent stability and meaningfulness of genre. These properties include the differential nature of a genre's identity, and a genre's discursive reliance on a radical exclusion.     

Philosophy and the History of Art

Abstract

Schelling’s philosophy of art between 1801 and 1807 can be defined as metaphysics of art. The object of that metaphysics is to deploy the absolute as the being of art and of the arts. Schelling has been criticized on the basis that this metaphysics of art represses the infinite diversity of existing works of art, while overlooking concrete aesthetic experience. Based on Schelling’s definition of the “philosophical construction” of art as an inseparably speculative and historical construction, the aim of this paper is to challenge such assertions. It will show that “historical construction” has to be understood in a twofold manner: first, as a transcendental history of the absolute’s artistic individuation and second, as a cultural history of both the ancient and modern worlds of art. Working within this twofold setting the paper argues that Schelling’s systematic approach, while exhibiting a unifying force, still remains open to the otherness of the real.     

The Baku 2015 European Games as a national milestone of post-Soviet Azerbaijan

The Baku European Games, the first multi-sport mega-event held at a European level, was a major public relations undertaking by Azerbaijan. The games were framed by a trend involving large-scale sports events promoted by the Ilham Aliyev government, based on the profits of the second oil boom in the twenty-first century. The sports event served to internationally portray Azerbaijan as a rapidly developing country and in this way to increase national consciousness within the society, which was lacking a collective narrative in the post-Soviet era. Nonetheless, the downturn due to the fall of international oil prices negatively affected the impact of the sports mega-event. Moreover, the sports competition symbolized the government’s commitment to impose reasons of state and nation-building over social needs and political freedoms in Azerbaijan. This article is based on empirical fieldwork carried out in Baku in the months following the multi-sports event.     

Defining Civil War by Examining Post-Soviet Conflicts

Great many violent events happened during 1991–2005 in the 12 states that emerged after the collapse of the USSR but only a few civil wars are registered in the major datasets. That brings up a number of questions about the operational definitions of civil war that generally point in the direction of shifting the research attention from refining the quantitative parameters to grasping the essense of the phenomena in question. It is proposed that civil war partially overlaps with several other type of violent crisis: inter-state wars, civil unrest and revolutions, internal repression, military coups and mutinies, banditry and organized crime, and terrorism. These overlaps create six ‘gray zones’ where only very nuanced examination rather than application of rigid criteria could help in distinguishing civil wars from other crises. Therefore, data collection based on a single “robust” definition, which incorporates several verifiable parameters, is not necessarily the only path to scientific knowledge about civil wars.     

Drawing maps: history and geography in contemporary black British art

For contemporary black British artists, history is a recurring and significant concept in their lives. This is the imperial and colonial history of the enslavement, exploitation, and oppression of non-white populations. Geography is conceptually twinned with history. European colonial enterprises necessitated the movement of people as well as goods across oceans and between continents. Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas were conquered, carved up, and mapped out by European powers. This geography is a legacy for those people whose ancestors and relatives were enslaved and/or displaced. It is equally important to those people directly affected by economic and political instability in their homelands, immigration, and/or racism. Artists Yinka Shonibare, Godfried Donkor, and Lubaina Himid appropriate centuries-old images and cultural as well as racial stereotypes to question accepted historical narratives with regards to black populations. Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, and Sokari Douglas Camp are more concerned with how history impinges upon them personally.