Art Research Articles

Humanities and Arts

Looking for Profundity (in All the Wrong Places)

It does not happen very often that one short paper opens an entire new subfield of a philosophical discipline. But this is exactly what Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper “The Profundity of Music” achieved. In a couple of years after Kivy’s paper appeared, all philosophers of music, who previously, like Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s novel (Proust (1913) 1992), would have found it difficult to ut...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

From Visions of Technological Progress to Technological Ruins: The Swedish Millennium Monument and the Challenges of Preservation of Digital Public Art

On December 20, 1999, the Swedish national monument, celebrating the turn of the millennium, was inaugurated by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf (Fig. 1).1 The monument was a collaboration between artists, architects, and engineers, and it was erected on behalf of the Millennium Committee set up by the Swedish government. The commission to realize the monument was given to Chalmers University of ...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

How Museums Make Us Feel: Affective Niche Construction and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting

Art museums are built to elicit a wide variety of feelings, emotions, and moods from their visitors. While these effects are primarily achieved through the artworks on display, museums commonly deploy numerous other affect-inducing resources as well, including architectural solutions, audio guides, lighting fixtures, and informational texts. Art museums can thus be regarded as spaces that are de...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Fictional Creations

Many people assume that fictional entities are encapsulated in the world of fiction. I show that this cannot be right. Some works of fiction tell us about pieces of poetry, music, or theatre written by fictional characters. Such creations are fictional creations, as I call them. Their authors do not exist. But that does not take away that we can perform, recite, or otherwise generate actual instan...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Hell’s Kitchen Paintings

I take photos on my phone. I use the photos as an atmospheric reference to go back to. Impressed with the empty streets of Hell’s Kitchen, my home for the last twenty years, I started taking photos as I walked my dog. Hell’s Kitchen had recently been overrun by Times Square and luxury apartments. Here was a chance for me to come to terms with the place through an emptied-out landscape. Despite...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

On ludic photography

This article explores “the play element in photography”, to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm that emphasises memory, death and mourning, at the expense of other practices and dispositions, not lea...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Art in Tights: Tableaux Vivants as Commercial Entertainment in Sweden and Finland, 1840–1860

In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artis...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformit...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s Disasters of War

Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, and ‘demonstrations’, thus blurring the boundary between art and life while affiliating artistic p...
2 years ago

Humanities and Arts

Man in the Middle: Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin at the Salon of 1833 and the Problem of the Juste Milieu

In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-riding knight who despatches a sea monster prior to rescuing her, but at a plump male figure resolutely o...
2 years ago

Art

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