Results by title

3 books match the query 'Detail'

cover of Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music

Listening in Detail

Performances of Cuban Music

Alexandra T. Vazquez

Duke University Press, 2013

Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the 1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.
[more]
cover of Otto Dix in Detail: Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture

Otto Dix in Detail

Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture

James A. van Dyke

University of Chicago Press, 2026

How small details in the paintings of Otto Dix materialize the realities of a modern German artist.
 
Offering a fresh look at German art during a period of extraordinary transition and precarity, James A. van Dyke focuses on overlooked but critically significant details in works completed by Otto Dix between 1919 and 1936. A small lump of paint, a monogram, an almost invisible self-portrait, the verso of a drawing, a patch of discoloration, and a web of fine cracks—van Dyke reveals such details, hidden in plain sight, as coded dialogue through which Dix addressed audiences and art-world insiders amid the combative world of cultural production in Weimar Germany. Sly, cutting, and provocative, these are the material traces of social relationships between the painter and those who represented threats to his professional ambition: an avant-garde mentor and rival, an increasingly skeptical critic, a prominent bourgeois photographer, and a local Nazi authority.
 
Proving that small things offer insight into the big picture, this book highlights Dix’s satirical, transgressive work as nuanced and polyvocal, reflecting the complex fields of power and economics in which the field of art is located.
 
[more]
cover of The Lure of the Detail: Close Reading Today, Volume 14

The Lure of the Detail

Close Reading Today, Volume 14

Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney

Duke University Press, 0

[more]