藏传佛教美术风格问题的反思——以西藏夏鲁寺美术为例

风格问题是美术史中的一个老话题,同样也是藏传佛教美术研究的主要话题。"藏传佛教美术风格"的理论研究架构借鉴于西方美术史学界,并无自身独特的理论系统支撑。部分西藏美术史学者提出的"夏鲁风格"欠学理性,这是目前西藏美术史研究对风格术语使用所存在的普遍性问题。以"夏鲁寺美术"为典型对藏传佛教美术的风格问题进行反思,对廓清目前藏传佛教美术史研究中的相关问题有重要意义。     

谈1990年代女性油画家创作特点及文化意义——以女画家喻红1990年代系列油画创作为例

1990年代女性油画家们的创作在理解框架、诠释结构、观察角度与价值标准表达等方面,表现出了显著的女性艺术特征。这种艺术现象与新时期以来的社会文化背景密切相关,具有鲜明的艺术个性与文化意义。     

延安知识分子群体的内涵及基本特征

准确把握延安知识分子群体的内涵及基本特征是进一步研究该群体的前提和基础。延安知识分子群体是指20世纪30年代中期至40年代初到过延安,以救国的革命理想为指导,并最终接受了中国共产党革命意识形态的知识分子的集合体。其基本特征是:来源面广,背景复杂;知识层次高,聚集了一批专家、学者;思想上接受了马克思主义、毛泽东思想的指导;初步实现了与工农结合以及由小资产阶级知识分子到无产阶级知识分子的转变;实现了延安各界知识分子的团结。     

The Value of Art and Culture in Everyday Life: Towards an Expressive Cultural Democracy

ABSTRACT

Ever since the earliest forms of mass media, the dichotomy of mass culture/high culture has been a topic of debate. The concept of cultural democracy has developed as a way to acknowledge a variety of cultural activities. Despite attempts to develop a broader understanding of culture, cultural policy still seems to reproduce the dichotomies, and to value one over the other. In this article, we would argue for an expanded understanding of cultural democracy, which may serve as a starting point for a turn of perspective of arts advocacy and cultural policy—the perspective we call an expressive cultural democracy.     

Art and Community Development in Santa Ana,California: The Promise and the Reality

The authors build on the summer 2005 The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society article "Muddy Waters: Consigned Artwork and the Vagaries of the Legal System in Massachusetts," which discussed the Consignment of Fine Art Law in Massachusetts. Since that time, revisions to the law have been enacted, in reaction to high-profile cases and a desire in the Massachusetts legislature to streamline the economics of the gallery system. The authors provide an update on the new statute in Massachusetts.     

African tourist art as tradition and product of the postcolonial exotic

ABSTRACT

Figurative art made in Central and West Africa for the global market is a form of tourist art – a category that has been plagued in art historical research by misconstrued concepts such as the authenticity of traditional/precolonial art. Following its categorisation as a commodity, studies focused on the decontextualisation of the object, thus marginalising the producing culture. In this article I investigate the role of the artist in preserving tradition and the role of the trader who, as cultural broker, exoticises the object. Since it can be argued that these are acts of decolonising, African tourist art can be regarded as a product of the postcolonial exotic, as defned by Graham Huggan (2001). Accepting the inescapability of postcoloniality, tourist art can be repositioned as a successful attempt to preserve and promote African cultural traditions and identity in the new era.     

Mao Zedond’s Xunwu Country Report of 1930: A Long-lost Document from a Critical Year in Jiangxi Reappears

From 1922 to 1927, an alliance between the Guomindang (GMD) and the Soviet Communists advanced a mass-media campaign aimed at wresting control from a regime dominated by warlords and unifying the Chinese nation. Soviet-inspired propaganda posters then flourished during the Northern Expedition as a novel approach to engage with the masses and facilitate the state's policy. By analyzing the symbolic expressions in these political images, this paper examines the differences and similarities between the earlier printed political images and later propaganda posters and argues that both the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regimes relied on propaganda networks and personality cults in order to maintain power. In the aftermath of the Qing dynasty, China endured instability and turmoil as warlords and political factions predominated. By the time of the Northern Expedition, the leaders of the GMD and CCP had become convinced that only rigid party organization with military discipline could achieve the goal of national unity.     

“David Byrne really does love PowerPoint”: art as research on semiotics and semiotic technology

This article presents a reading of David Byrne's Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, an art work created with MicroSoft's presentation software PowerPoint, as an instance of creative research on semiotics and semiotic technology. It reveals commonalities and differences between Byrne's ideas about PowerPoint and related ideas from linguistics and semiotics, and is intended as a contribution to research on PowerPoint, and on semiotic technologies generally, as well as to efforts aimed at developing criteria for evaluating art as research on semiotics.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork

Abstract

In this essay I want to show that while the concept of autonomy can hardly make a meaningful contribution to the understanding of contemporary artworks, the concept of the dignity of artwork can make such a contribution.