ART APPRECIATION

In Naive Girls, Zhang Nan portrays three country girls with brightly decorative colors commonly seen in Chinese folk art. Their individuality is portrayed with the contrasting colors of their clothing, yet the whole picture is harmonious. The naivete of country girls is distilled into art. Delight portrays a fishing girl drying fish in the open air. On her bamboo hat hang strings of fish. The background is painted with skills used in traditional Chinese water and ink painting.     

ART APPRECIATION

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THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF ART: VARIATION IN THE VALUATION OF ART WORKS IN A COMMUNITY ART MUSEUM*

This paper examines variation in the valuation of art works in a community art museum. It often is assumed that art objects collected and displayed by museums are treated as highly valued if not sacred objects. Research at a community art museum indicates that the value of art works varies. Frontstage at the museum, art works are treated with care by museum workers. Backstage, they may be destroyed, misplaced, lost, or stolen. In addition, when not engaged in playing the conventional role of museum visitor, visitors to the museum may disregard and even mistreat art objects. Data are based on observations and interviews conducted over a two-year period in a medium-sized community art museum.     

花开敦煌

以敦煌壁画为代表的敦煌艺术距今已有上千年的历史,很多人因而认为敦煌艺术离我们的生活很远。然而,著名艺术教育家和艺术设计家常沙娜所描绘的敦煌画作笔触细腻、当代而活泼。她一生致力于将敦煌艺术符号与生活应用设计相结合,让独特的敦煌之美“花开遍地”。     

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville's estimated 40,000 inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-representation, truth, knowledge and power.     

MASTERING THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Online communication has become a central part in the communication repertoires of political actors in Western mass democracies. In Switzerland, where broadband, internet use, and media literacy are amongst the highest in the world, all major political parties run their own website and are active on social media. This article seeks to show how Swiss political parties deal with social media, how they implement it and how they use social media. The study builds on empirical data from a structural analysis of party websites, the official Facebook sites, and Twitter feeds. These social media sites were analysed for their resonance, update frequency, and thematic clusters focusing on information, mobilization, and participation. A weekly assessment of the user numbers illustrates the development of user resonance throughout the 2011 election year. While political parties claim to appreciate the dialogue and mobilization potentials of social media, they mainly use social media as an additional channel to spread information and electoral propaganda. The overall resonance is still on a very low level. The data seem to sustain the normalization hypothesis, as larger parties with more resources and voters are better able to generate effective communication and to mobilize online than small and marginal parties.     

CRIME,ART AND PUBLIC CULTURE

Jane Alexander's ‘Security’ was installed at the 2009 Joburg Art Fair as a Special Project. This essay investigates notions of being guarded and fenced-in, which are implicit in this piece, in an attempt to breathe new life into a space that has all too easily been blanketed as a new form of ‘apartheid’ in contemporary South Africa. Rather, I suggest, what ‘Security’ allowed its publics to experience was a complex process of working through the everyday ingredients of the post-apartheid, and so to realize new connections between strangers. I argue that this work, at this time, probes at the nexus of a private–public sphere that allows for a real-time grappling with issues of a private nature in the public. The essay further positions this work in relation to some others by Alexander in an attempt to more fully grasp what ‘Security’ says about the present moment. Finally, the Joburg Art Fair is investigated as a setting richly suggestive of this moment in South Africa that simultaneously projects, and allows for, ambivalence in its art publics.     

资本力量助推艺术品市场

艺术品市场,尤其是国内的拍卖市场,究竟是一群人的狂欢,还是几个人的孤单？如果答案是后者,那就不难解释王中军、刘益谦等人对拍卖市场转守为攻的态度了。     

法国艺术家的北京艺术避风港

来自法国的安娜伊思·马田和玛丽安·达奎在北京的三里屯创办了一家艺术工作室。这家工作室致力于鼓励人们学习艺术,并架起东西方文化交流的桥梁。     

ART WORLD CULTURE AND INSTITUTIONAL CHOICES:

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the North American experimental film art world, which established an affiliation with academic institutions in the 1970s. Participant interviews, field observations, and primary written sources are used to examine how the material and cultural characteristics of experimental film influence what art world practices have and have not been institutionalized within the academy. The art world is materially characterized by small size, unprofitability, and lack of prestige in larger culture markets and culturally characterized by the importance it attaches to innovation, expression, and active engagement with art, values associated with its avant-garde identity. Its institutions thus emphasize the fostering of innovation and interactive participation (cf. Gilmore 1988), while de-emphasizing the roles of gatekeepers and critics as arbiters of legitimacy and meaning. Rather than promoting standardization and integration uniformly across art world functions of production, distribution, and evaluation, material and cultural factors interact to differentially support various institutional functions.     

REPUTATION BUILDING AND THE FILM ART WORLD

The change in Alfred Hitchcock's reputation from popular entertainer to distinguished auteur over the last 25 years is usually attributed to the efforts of some admiring European film figures. This article traces the reevaluation of Hitchcock's work beginning in the 1960s, but emphasizes in addition to the role of sponsors, Hitchcock's own part in orchestrating the transformation. Other factors that might speed up, slow down, or undermine altogether the reputational process are examined. The probable effects of Hitchcock's changing reputation on subsequent developments in the suspense thriller genre are also explored.     

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND GENERATIONS IN ART:

This study examines artistic innovations from the point of view of age structure and age stratification. Drawing on Mannheim's theory of generations, it describes and analyzes the history of the Hebrew theater, from its beginnings in 1917 to 1977, in terms of four theaters that were expressions of generation units. The study suggests that the crucial variable in explaining changes in artistic ideologies, contents, and styles of the Hebrew theater is Mannheim's concept of generation unit. The emergence and evolution of these generational theaters are explained in relation to changes in the demographic, political, and social structures of Israeli society during the historical era under consideration. Special emphasis is placed on the role of youth in originating artistic innovations and on the problems of maintaining and institutionalizing innovations.     

THE WORK OF (CREATING) ART

While engaging the process of artistic creation at the Creative Growth Art Center (CGAC) in San Francisco, California, Judith Scott produced numerous enigmatic three-dimensional fiber and mixed media sculpture pieces that subsequently received international attention. Approaching Scott's life and art from the perspective of Disability Studies – understood as an expressly political project – takes us beyond the limitations of the label of Art Brut/Outsider Art and of questions of artistic communication to properly situate her activities at the CGAC as work in both a social and economic sense. Judith's story – and her representation in a recent Spanish documentary film by directors Lola Barrera and Iñaki Peñafiel – suggests that in aspiring to achieve greater social and economic inclusion for such marginalized populations we must challenge the pervasive clinical paradigm that frames disability as lack and go further by cultivating sustainable, meaningful work experiences, such as that offered by the CGAC to people with developmental disabilities. Ultimately, creating art has the potential to be such a form of meaningful work.     

国内企业艺术品收藏优缺及未来走向

近几年,国内越来越多的企业和机构开始介入艺术品收藏和投资领域,机构收藏对国内艺术品市场甚至艺术生态的影响已经显现,不少业内人士均表示,由“散户市”走向“机构市”是国内艺术品市场未来的趋势,也是市场正规化、专业化的表现。     

REVEALING THE UNSEEN: TOURISM,ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Contemporary cultural criticism is increasingly recognizing the central place that tourism occupies in organizing interactions, both economic and social, between different peoples in the world today. In this paper, I take up the question of what role photography plays in determining the nature of touristic experience.By drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of modernity as the epoch of modern technology, I seek to articulate an understanding of touristic photography that goes beyond conventional critiques of its objectifying character and tendency to conform to predetermined semiotic markers. Instead, by considering the examples of the photographing of local peoples, and of attempts to photograph what I refer to ‘the unphotographable sight’, I develop an alternative perspective on both the dangers and the epistemic possibilities of touristic photography. Such a perspective, it is argued, allows us to move beyond the identification of photography with the ocularcentric discourses of Western modernity and towards a consideration of the possibilities of touristic photography as art. By foregrounding the role of photographic images in the production of memory and self identity, it is suggested that tourism can be understood in terms of what Michel Foucault refers to as the creation of one's life as a work of art. Finally, I argue that by attending to the limits of touristic photography, the potential to develop a new way of seeing may be fostered.