The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense

This essay constructs philosophical defenses against criticisms of my theory of the end of art. These have to do with the definition of art; the concept of artistic quality; the role of aesthetics; the relationship between philosophy and art; how to answer the question “But is it art?”; the difference between the end of art and “the death of painting”; historical imagination and the future; the method of using indiscernible counterparts, like Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo cartons it resembles; the logic of imitation—and the differences between Hegel's views on the end of art and mine. These defenses amplify and fortify the thesis of the end of art as set forth in my After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997).     

Critical artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands

Something about the apparent romanticism of islands prompts creative reflections such as those comprising visual artworks in the Dis-covery exhibition touring Australia for 2 years from 2011. The exhibition forms the basis for this paper, written by its progenitor and curator—an artist, and its essayist—a cultural geographer. The curatorial premise was that islands and island cultures are at risk from global and multinational forces, as well as from amplified local impacts internal to the limits of their boundaries. In turn, the exhibition's aim was to trouble the layered cultural clichés that represent island conditions especially in terms of the romantic. Participating artists—all of whom have lived on islands—were invited to explore how islands and romanticism are both containers for disparate yet overlapping ideas, among them references to imagination, projected desire, unsatisfied longing, rising tides, exoticism, resource mining, militarism and marginalization. Drawing on conversations with the artists, and on their writings and works, this paper captures insightful reflections about islands, arts and the geopolitical imagination; reveals significant artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands; and underscores the productive relations that derive from critical and creative engagements between geography and art.     

川端作品的艺术自我观照

川端康成最重要的作品——《雪国》、《古都》、《伊豆的舞女》,都表现了涉及艺术的主题,强烈地体现了作家关于艺术同生活、现代与古典的关系的理念。这类作品的意义,不仅在于故事本身的感染力,更在于其中包含的艺术理想对社会文化所产生的革命性影响。生活本身有很多产生意义的来源,艺术无疑是使生活产生最重要意义的高贵而艰难的来源,因为艺术不是虚幻的审美,而是富于深刻的意义、重大的价值、伟大的作用的人类活动。它的发生与成长需要生活为它提供不可或缺的土壤。艺术的真正价值在于为生活捉’乓模仿的对象和追求的理想。不是艺术模仿生活,而是生活模仿艺术。     

Gustav Metzger: iconoclasm and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) has been described as ‘the conscience of the art world’ for the consistently political content of his art and his commitment to political activism on the subject of nuclear weapons, capitalism and environmentalism. Metzger’s artistic output from the late 1950s onwards reflects a theory of art as both aesthetic form and social action and identifies him as a key precursor of activist art. This article considers the inherent interdisciplinarity of Metzger’s practice as it evolved during this early period between the late 1950s and early 1970s in relation to his agenda of social engagement.     

Motifs Utilitaires et Autonomie Artistique la Forme Architecturale et Ses Fonctions

In the late 19^th century, authors writing on aesthetics often referred to architecture to justify establishing a new hierarchy between things beautiful and things useful, a change underwritten by the rising sociological and anthropological perspectives on art. Meanwhile, architects debated the origins and evolution of artistic styles from the earliest forms of art to the most advanced monumental art works, a debate that fundamentally transformed the relationship between artistic expression and material determinism.     

From humour to fine arts and vice versa: Atlántida in the twenties

From its foundation in 1918 by the Uruguayan writer Constancio C. Vigil, Atlántida magazine kept a well-defined interest in images. The covers, a clear example in that sense, displayed colourful works on full pages while the content itself reflected that through cartoons, graphic sections, vignettes, illustrations and photographs. Conceived as a mass-market project, Atlántida worked with images and texts resorting to the popular and the cultured within the magazine’s layout. Thus, they implemented innovative strategies in the promotion of art, combining a humorous register with texts and images within institutional circuits. This essay is aimed at analysing that peculiar device articulating professional art reviews and reproductions of academic paintings linked also to the art market, with humorous illustrations and textual interventions which spoofed the artistic system. In this vein, the role played by cartoons will be studied, together with the criteria for choosing cover images and the introduction of professional criticism, to eventually focus on an emblematic case in Argentinean art history: Emilio Pettoruti’s exhibition of 1924 and its counterpart, the Salón Ultrafuturista [Ultrafuturistic Salon], a satire of avant-garde proposals and, in short, a questioning of the progress of modern art through humorous means. Our intention is then to reflect upon the artistic promotion strategies which had an impact on the development of consumption, and among which humour turned out to be a critical component. The magazine will be thus conceived as a device for the circulation of imaginaries moulding the sensitivity of the time and the readers’ artistic understanding.     

‘We don't do dots ‐ ours is lines’ — Asserting a Barkindji Style

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a ‘Barkindji style’ art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art‐making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the role of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to ‘belong to us’ is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art ‘styles’ and material culture from what is widely referred to as south‐eastern Australia.     

Cubism and the Fourth Dimension

This article revisits the historiography of Cubism and mathematics, with a particular focus on Pablo Picasso's uses of geometry at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In particular, I consider the artistic appropriation of the concept of the fourth dimension, and its pictorial uses as a conduit for a conceptual reformulation of pictorial space. I investigate Picasso's distinctive adoption of this geometric framework in relation to one of his 1909 experiments across painting and photography, and advocate the possibility of drawing novel historiographical lessons from Picasso's work — lessons that bring the historiography of Cubism in a closer dialogue with recent debates in the historiography of science. I conclude with an appeal to consider the continued relevance of this past experiment in art and science when assessing the contemporary drive toward art-science collaborations, and use the case of Cubism and the fourth dimension as a springboard for a critical reflection on the future directions of art-science collaborations.     

Art,Transformation, Liberation: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

Balzac's works about actual artists like Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu have long been studied to derive the author's ideas about the artistic creative process. Eugénie Grandet also deals with art, however, even though there is not a real artist in it. In telling the story of Eugénie and her cousin Charles, Balzac suggests his views on the effects of beauty created by artful arrangement as opposed to the beauty in nature uncrafted by human art.     

Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art—Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick—I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the ‘becoming’ of place.     

敦煌莫高窟早期雕塑源流

敦煌的雕塑是敦煌石窟艺术的主体部分,而其早期彩塑被认为从我国源远流长的雕塑艺术传统中获得了坚实的造型基础,形成了概括、含蓄、富有装饰性的鲜明风格。敦煌早期艺术家在本土文化语境中,以积极的姿态吸收并融合了外来佛教艺术的技法,开启了灿烂辉煌的敦煌莫高窟雕塑艺术的序幕,开创了新异而又民族化的风格。敦煌莫高窟早期的雕塑像莫高窟其他艺术一样,是一部中西艺术交流史,是中国民族艺术早期向西传播的图像见证。     

AN “UNVERGLEICHBARER LIEBHABER”

This essay deals with the Dutch art dealer and diplomat in Swedish service Peter Spierinck (c.1595–1652), discussing his involvements in the arts and in politics as well as his ability to let a political career gain from artistic endeavours, and vice versa. More than most of his fellow‐agents, Spierinck understood the versatility of art, which could be used as a diplomatic currency, as a pretext for illegal communications, and as an instrument in one's personal program. The article examines this relation between politics and art, both in Spierinck's life and in early modern times in general.     

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction,Refugee Survival,and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi,Cape Town,and Paris

Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.     

中国美学思想在书法中的表现

无论是在东方还是西方,美学思想都对各门艺术的创作与表现起着重要的作用。博大精深的中国文化孕育了完善而独到的中国美学理论,书法家运用了这些蕴含辩证思想的美学原理,在书法艺术表现中充分地展示出他们特有的审美意识,形成了书法独特的艺术风格。继承与创新书法艺术要懂得中国的美学思想,只有运用中国传统美学思想指导着书法的发展与创新,才能弘扬中国书法艺术,真正体现出书法特有的艺术魅力。     

Contemporary Iranian Art: The Emergence of New Artistic Discourses1

This article deals with the emerging discourses and concerns that have dominated the Iranian art community mainly since 1997. It discusses the existing, or rather conflicting, views of the current situation of the visual arts in Iran as expressed in recent artistic events, productions, and exhibitions as well as in critical reviews.² It does not fully discuss the variety of artistic genres in Iran, but examines the dominant ideas from the main opposing factions of cultural and artistic thought. It also aims at identifying the structural changes in Iranian art as well as the prevailing artistic policy of recent years.     

Governing Homo Subprimicus: Beyond Financial Citizenship,Exclusion, and Rights

The paper presents an alternative to scholarship on the distributional politics of finance that emphasizes citizenship‐based claims to new financial rights. To compensate for the dominance of exclusion‐based etiologies of financial marginality in financial geography, I reframe financial exclusion as a problem of financial government—that is, as a problem of conducting the conduct of risky populations without threatening the security and autonomy of financial markets. Drawing on Foucault's distinction between technologies of discipline and security, I describe how barriers to the extension of financial government create tiered processes of financial subject formation. The inchoate “subprime’ financial subject produced is the correlate of a specialized financial governmentality—a homo subprimicus eminently governable by financial means. I close by calling for greater attention to questions regarding the relationship between technologies for valorizing bare life, new systems of financially mediated value extraction, and emerging capitalist class processes.     

Wuming: an underground art group during the Cultural Revolution

The Wuming painting group opened its first public exhibition in Beijing in 1979. The hundreds of small paintings exhibited were accumulated through years of clandestine art practice stretching back to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. This article traces the history of the Wuming group and its art – describing the social identities of the artists, exploring the historical context of the group's formation, reconstructing the underground art and cultural activities, and contextualizing the group's artistic innovations. The history of this underground art group addresses larger debates over Chinese modernity, and over the interpretation of the history of the Cultural Revolution in today's global context.     

The Reappearing Masterpiece: Ranking American Artists and Art Works of the Late Twentieth Century

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the source of the pluralism, or stylistic incoherence, of American art since the late 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated. The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, often embodied in individual works, usually made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers. The monumental Spiral Jetty, made in 1970 by a young artist who was killed soon thereafter while in the process of making his art, brought together a remarkable number of the central themes of the advanced art of the time and has become a symbol for that art.