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Scattering the Seed
A Guide through Balthasar's Early Writings on Philosophy and the Arts
Aidan Nichols
Catholic University of America Press, 2006

front cover of Scenes From Postmodern Life
Scenes From Postmodern Life
Beatriz Sarlo
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

front cover of Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Volume Two
Selected Writings of Richard McKeon, Volume Two
Culture, Education, and the Arts
Richard P. McKeon
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Richard McKeon was a philosopher of extraordinary creativity who brought profoundly original ideas to bear on more standard ways of thinking and learning. A classicist, medievalist, and revolutionary intellectual, he fashioned an approach to philosophy as a plural conversation among varied traditions of thought, epochs, and civilizations. This second volume of McKeon's selected works demonstrates his approach to inquiry and practice in culture, education, and the arts.

Together, the writings in this book show how McKeon reinvented the ancient arts of rhetoric, grammar, logic, and dialectic for the new circumstances of a global culture. In essays on creation and criticism, for instance, rhetoric is distinguished from grammar and shown to be the master art of invention, judgment, and pluralistic interpretation. Writings on themes of culture, meanwhile, explore the self-invention of mankind as justification for the arts, the development of the humanities, and the organization of the sciences. In the closing essays on education and philosophy, McKeon considers the implications of his ideas for the future of the liberal arts and higher learning.
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Sons And Daughters Of Los
Culture And Community In L.A.
David James
Temple University Press, 2003
Los Angeles. A city that is synonymous with celebrity and mass-market culture, is also, according to David James, synonymous with social alienation and dispersal. In the communities of Los Angeles, artists, cultural institutions and activities exist in ways that are often concealed from sight, obscured by the powerful presence of Hollywood and its machinations. In this significant collection of original essays, The Sons and Daughters of Los reconstructs the city of Los Angeles with new cultural connections. Explored here are the communities that offer alternatives to the picture of L..A. as a conglomeration of studios and mass media. Each essay examines a particular piece of, or place in, Los Angeles cultural life: from the Beyond Baroque Poetry Foundation, the Woman's Building, to Highways, and LACE, as well as the achievements of these grassroots initiatives. Also included is critical commentary on important artists, including Harry Gamboa, Jr., and others whose work have done much to shape popular culture in L.A. The cumulative effect of reading this book is to see a very different city take shape, one whose cultural landscape is far more innovative and reflective of the diversity of the city's people than mainstream notions of it suggest. The Sons and Daughters of Los offers a substantive and complicated picture of the way culture plays itself it out on the smallest scale—in one of the largest metropolises on earth—contributing to a richer, more textured understanding of the vibrancy of urban life and art.
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Speculation, Now
Essays and Artwork
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurty and Carin Kuoni, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Interdisciplinary in design and concept, Speculation, Now illuminates unexpected convergences between images, concepts, and language. Artwork is interspersed among essays that approach speculation and progressive change from surprising perspectives. A radical cartographer asks whether "the speculative" can be represented on a map. An ethnographer investigates religious possession in Islam to contemplate states between the divine and the seemingly human. A financial technologist queries understandings of speculation in financial markets. A multimedia artist and activist considers the relation between social change and assumptions about the conditions to be changed, and an architect posits purposeful neglect as political strategy. The book includes an extensive glossary with more than twenty short entries in which scholars contemplate such speculation-related notions as insurance, hallucination, prophecy, the paradox of beginnings, and states of half-knowledge. The book's artful, nonlinear design mirrors and reinforces the notion of contingency that animates it. By embracing speculation substantively, stylistically, seriously, and playfully, Speculation, Now reveals its subversive and critical potential.

Artists and essayists include William Darity Jr., Filip De Boeck, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Darrick Hamilton, Laura Kurgan, Lin + Lam, Gary Lincoff, Lize Mogel, Christina Moon, Stefania Pandolfo, Satya Pemmaraju, Mary Poovey, Walid Raad, Sherene Schostak, Robert Sember, and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss.

Published by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School
 
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front cover of Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
Edited by Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern
University College London, 2017
Sri Lanka has been at the center of far-flung networks for millennia—a key part of trade routes, the spread of religions, and Asian and European empires. This book sets out to use contemporary scholarship that focuses on that role as a crossroads to set Sri Lanka more firmly in the fields of Asian and global history. Contributors draw on the archaeology, history, literature, and art of the island from 500 BCE to 1850 CE to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. Showing the subtle ways in which foreign elements can be simultaneously resisted and embraced, the book presents a distinctive, but deeply connected, Sri Lanka, one that is defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.
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Strategic Planning in the Arts
A Practical Guide
Michael M. Kaiser
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Planning today is more important than ever. Both acquisition and allocation of resources are increasingly difficult for arts organizations as a result of emerging technologies, reduced arts education, aging donors, and the advent of new forms of entertainment. It is essential for arts organizations to take a coherent approach to these issues to remain vibrant over time. In fact, most arts organizations do periodically attempt some kind of planning exercise. But a review of hundreds of such plans suggests that most contain merely a wish list, rather than concrete plans for the future: “We will increase ticket sales!” is a common “strategy” expressed in too many arts plans. In the absence of details about how ticket sales will be increased, it’s an empty promise. In Strategic Planning in the Arts, Michael M. Kaiser, the former head of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and an arts management guru, has produced a clear, concise guide for staff or board members of not-for-profit arts organizations who are responsible for developing, evaluating, or implementing plans. Relying on real-world cases and examples, Kaiser shows how to conceive, assess, and act on every part of the strategic plan, from the mission statement to the financial statement; from managing the board to marketing. Praise for Michael Kaiser: “A rich yet tidy cornucopia of solutions for the challenges facing the American arts scene.”—Washington Post
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Surface
Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media
Giuliana Bruno
University of Chicago Press, 2014
What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world.
 
Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place.
 
Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.
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Switching Codes
Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts
Edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover
University of Chicago Press, 2011
 

Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion. 

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.

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