Seeing and tasting the divine: Simeon Solomon’s homoerotic sacrament

Book synopsis: Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form

Is copyright blind to the visual?

This article argues that, with respect to the copyright protection of works of visual art, the general uneasiness that has always pervaded the relationship between copyright law and concepts of creativity produces three anomalous results. One of these is that copyright lacks much in the way of a central concept of 'visual art' and, to the extent that it embraces any concept of the 'visual', it is rooted in the rhetorical discourse of the Renaissance. This means that copyright is poorly equipped to deal with modern developments in the visual arts. Secondly, the pervasive effect of rhetorical discourse appears to have made it particularly difficult for copyright law to strike a meaningful balance between protecting creativity and permitting its use in further creative works. Thirdly, just when rhetorical discourse might have been useful in identifying the significance and materiality of the unique one-off work of visual art, copyright law chooses to ignore its implications

Combinatorics in the Art of the Twentieth Century

This paper is motivated by a question I asked myself: How can combinatorial structures be used in a work of art? Immediately, other questions arose: Whether there are artists that work or think combinatorially? If so, what works have they produced in this way? What are the similarities and differences between art works produced using combinatorics? This paper presents the first results of the attempt to answer these questions, being a survey of a selection of works that use or contain combinatorics in some way, including music, literature and visual arts, focusing on the twentieth century.Postprint (published version

Manifolds, patterns and transitions in a creative life

Using sculpture and drawing as my primary methods of investigation, this research explores ways of shifting the emphasis of my creative visual arts practice from object to process whilst still maintaining a primacy of material outcomes. My motivation was to locate ways of developing a sustained practice shaped as much by new works, as by a creative flow between works. I imagined a practice where a logic of structure within discrete forms and a logic of the broader practice might be developed as mutually informed processes. Using basic structural components of multiple wooden curves and linear modes of deployment – in both sculptures and drawings – I have identified both emergence theory and the image of rhizomic growth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) as theoretically integral to this imagining of a creative practice, both in terms of critiquing and developing works. Whilst I adopt a formalist approach for this exegesis, the emergence and rhizome models allow it to work as a critique of movement, of becoming and changing, rather than merely a formalism of static structure. In these models, therefore, I have identified a formal approach that can be applied not only to objects, but to practice over time. The thorough reading and application of these ontological models (emergence and rhizome) to visual arts practice, in terms of processes, objects and changes, is the primary contribution of this thesis. The works that form the major component of the research develop, reflect and embody these notions of movement and change

Architects, Artists, Photographers, Property Owners, the Public and Their Rights: Reconciling VARA, the AWCPA, and Copyright Fundamentals

Murals, sculpture, and other works of visual art have been parts of buildings, monuments and other structures for centuries, but copyright infringement litigation in the federal courts between artists, architects, photographers, and building owners is a relatively recent phenomenon. The outcome of these lawsuits has an impact on the public seeing works of visual art; experiencing works of visual art on buildings, monuments, and structures; and, looking at photographs of visual art on or in those architectural works. This article focuses on how the Copyright Act’s protection of artists’ rights in their works of visual art on buildings under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) relates to the Copyright Act’s protection of architectural works under the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA). VARA and the AWCPA were enacted in 1990 as amendments to the Copyright Act. There are several questions about the relationship between VARA, the AWCPA, and the rest of the Copyright Act. One concerns a visual artist’s rights against unauthorized photographs or other pictorial representations of a building that incorporates the artist’s work, such as a mural or sculptural work, when the artist’s work is visible in the photograph or pictorial representation. Another question concerns the visual artist’s rights in a work incorporated in a building when the owner of the building wants to remodel or demolish the building. Relatively recent litigation involving photographs of murals on buildings and sketches of floor plans, both posted on websites, and the whitewashing of highly acclaimed street art sprayed on a dilapidated warehouse, has required federal courts to interpret and apply provisions in VARA, the AWCPA, and the Copyright Act. This article recommends a way to interpret several provisions in these statutes in order to accommodate the rights and interests of artists, architects, photographers, building owners, and the public. It encourages courts to interpret and apply the pictorial representations exception in section 120(a) of the AWCPA to reach only works of visual art that are integral to the design of the architectural work, and not to pictorial, graphic, or sculptural elements that are conceptually separable from the architectural work, or are not visible from a public place. Section 120(b) of the AWCPA, dealing with a building owner’s right to alter or tear down a building embodying a copyrightable architectural work, should be interpreted the same way. This accommodates the rights of visual artists under VARA and the Copyright Act with the rights of building owners, architects, photographers and the public under the AWCPA and the Copyright Act

A Critique of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1989

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1989 (hereinafter Kennedy Bill), in general, amends the Copyright Act of 1976 to recognize the moral rights of authors of certain works of visual art such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, multiple cast sculptures of a limited edition of 200 or fewer, and photographs produced for exhibition purposes only

Wicked, Hard and Supple: An Examination of Suzanne Valadon's Nude Drawings of Young Maurice

This article examines the nude drawings Suzanne Valadon made of her young son, Maurice Utrillo. These drawings, depicting Utrillo from late childhood until adolescence, began Valadon's interest in the male nude, which she carried into her later career. Though children appeared often in her work, the drawings of Utrillo are complicated by the relationship between the artist and subject.Publisher allows immediate open acces

Life as Theater and Theater as Life:

Since media technologies have distributed visual narratives of popular culture to the masses, characters from popular narratives have appeared in the spontaneous drawings of youth. Over time, changes in the subject matter and aesthetic characteristics of these youth-produced drawings have reflected the evolution of popular tastes. However, due to a convergence of 21st century technological media; sociological influences; cross-cultural exchanges of aesthetic traditions; and natural inclinations for play, the spontaneous art works of contemporary youth now represent more than imitative appreciation of popular culture. Youth who are fans of particular phenomena of popular culture are projecting their understandings of the world through art expressions that function as ‘life as theater and theater as art.’ If art teachers and students are to engage in critical examinations of the new visual art forms, functions, and meanings of these works they must recognize concepts and terminologies appropriate to deciphering the works’ inherent characteristics.This project was supported in part by a Profitt Research Grant from the School of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington

Picasso, Matisse, or a Fake? Automated Analysis of Drawings at the Stroke Level for Attribution and Authentication

This paper proposes a computational approach for analysis of strokes in line drawings by artists. We aim at developing an AI methodology that facilitates attribution of drawings of unknown authors in a way that is not easy to be deceived by forged art. The methodology used is based on quantifying the characteristics of individual strokes in drawings. We propose a novel algorithm for segmenting individual strokes. We designed and compared different hand-crafted and learned features for the task of quantifying stroke characteristics. We also propose and compare different classification methods at the drawing level. We experimented with a dataset of 300 digitized drawings with over 80 thousands strokes. The collection mainly consisted of drawings of Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, and Egon Schiele, besides a small number of representative works of other artists. The experiments shows that the proposed methodology can classify individual strokes with accuracy 70%-90%, and aggregate over drawings with accuracy above 80%, while being robust to be deceived by fakes (with accuracy 100% for detecting fakes in most settings)

Material, Trace, Trauma: Notes on some Recent Acquisitions at the Canadian War Museum and the Legacy of the First World War

Recent acquisitions at the Canadian War Museum are considered in relation to the radical innovations of soldier-artists who endured the somatic conditions of the First World War trenches, privileging materiality and psychic reality over visual perception. Barbara Steinman and Norman Takeuchi bring the past into the present through the indexical presence of black and white photographic fragments and the emotive presentation of lost objects as signifiers of the desires of the absent. Scott Waters and Mary Kavanagh evoke dread and the contingency of death through anamorphic distortion and blinding luminosity. Like the suggestive surfaces of the Museum itself, these works unsettle us to make palpable the psychic toll of war