Art

"If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.

The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.

Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.

Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.

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This paper, which is guided by pragmatist insights, provides a genealogical analysis of the concept of entertainment and its relation to aesthetics that offers some lessons for contemporary art and theory. In providing an aesthetic defense of entertainment's multiple values, the paper reexamines two concepts--pleasure and functionality for life--that have been used to condemn entertainment for triviality and narrowness but that are central to its value and to the value of art. (edited)

"The present article explores the ‘art bias’ or the pervasive association between creativity and art in implicit theories of creativity. It also attempts to connect creativity research in this area with literature on the theory of social representations. The data comes from an online survey completed by 195 participants mainly from the US and the UK. The survey included two main tasks: the first asked respondents to generate as many questions as they can to determine whether an object is creative; the second invited them to rate whether creativity is a key requirement for a list of 16 professions from four different domains and recorded the creativity score as well as reaction time. In the end, findings offer partial support for the existence of an ‘art bias’. While artistic professions were scored both the highest and fastest in terms of creativity, participants rarely formulated art-related questions and focused more on aspect, utility and audience features. This discrepancy is discussed in the end in relation to the polyphasic nature of social knowledge. 

Keywords: creativity, art bias, implicit theories, social representations, cognitive polyphasia."

"In this article I argue for an epistemology of music, stating that
dealing with music can be considered as a process of knowledge acquisition. What really matters is not the representation of an ontological musical reality, but the generation of music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. In order to do this, I have brough ttogether the epistemological claims of Jean Piaget, the biological methodology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the constructivistic conceptions of Ernst von Glasersfeld, stressing the role of the music user rather than the music. Dealing with music, in fact, is not a representational a€air, but is a process of semiotization of the sonorous environment that is the outcome of interactions with the sound. Hence the role of enactive cognition and perceptual-motor interaction with the sonic environment.
What I consider to be a central issue is the way how listeners as
subjects experience their own phenomenal world or Umwelt, and how they can make sense out of their sonic environment. Umwelt-research therefore is highly relevant for music education in stressing the role of the listener and his listening strategies."

"J. Latham follows around contemporary performance artist Hannah Raisin as she considers her work and its place:

"Raisin is nothing if not frank. Her work is honest and at times heart-wrenchingly so. Nothing is off limits and the explorations in her art are clearly the artist’s coming to terms with the world around her and her position in it. “Getting my period at 11 ruined my life,” she tells me, “sometimes I find being female really hard. I was always number one or two in all the sports in primary school and used to beat up the boys."

This essay explores questions of cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation when galleries display indigenous artefacts or artists appropriate religious symbols. In such cases, the work is not necessarily treated with disrespect, and yet can deeply concern or distress to people in the cultures that produce the representation. I suggest that what underlies this response is a different understanding of the metaphysics of art, and the relationship between the symbol and what it represents. Rather than being a 'mere' symbol and conventional sign, such symbols are thought of as participating in what they represent, and the work as externalising spiritual reality. From the perspective of this metaphysical framework, how we 'should' respond to these religious objects is with recognition of the nature of that reality, and that response should express our relationship to that reality, or the order of the world. Finally I argue that such a belief is recognisable to people who do not accept that the symbols have this metaphysical structure, a,s even in contemporary Western societies, people will treat with respect images of that which they hold dear.

This dissertation aims to explore the theoretical and metaphoric implications of intentional disruptions to the material surface of the photographic print. It will consider how interferences with the surface of the print alter the end product of the photographic process, thereby shifting it from the realm of mechanical reproduction associated with photography, forcing a reconsideration of the photograph as object. This will involve a discussion of photographic theory concerned with the verisimilitude of the image as well as the common philosophical understanding that photographs somehow embody a ‘contained’ space. It will also necessitate a study of notions of the surface, as boundary and as skin, and therefore the implications of a conceptual association between the image and the body. It is specifically concerned with embodied action on the surface of the print, exploring different forms and levels of interference, and considering these processes as bodily encounters with photographic representation, through the use of theories of fetishism, scarification, and power.

After showing how Bourdieu's social theory and critique of intellectualism can advance important lines of argument in ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism, this paper examines how Bourdieu's aesthetic theory reverts to an extreme intellectualism that rejects the notion of aesthetic experience to insist instead on the idea of a science of art. In arguing that this rigid form of aesthetic intellectualism is neither justified nor consistent with Bourdieu's general critique of intellectualism, I make a case for a pluralistic notion of aesthetic understanding.