Minor Changes in Art/BFA Undergraduate Program and Curriculum

1. Replace one elective course with a required mixed-media course; 2. Substitute Digital Art I (ART 330) for ART XXX Visual Studies Course; 3. Replace the Art History elective with Contemporary Art Criticism (ARH 410); 4. Eliminate ineffective areas of concentratio

Trends in Contemporary Art Discourse: Using Topic Models to Analyze 25 years of Professional Art Criticism

In this article, we use topic modeling to systematically explore topics discussed in contemporary art criticism. Analyzing 6965 articles published between 1991 and 2015 in Frieze, a leading art magazine, we find a plurality of topics characterizing professional discourse on contemporary art. Not surprisingly, media- or genre-specific topics such as film/cinema, photography, sculpture/installations, etc. emerge. Interestingly, extra-artistic topics also characterize contemporary art criticism: there is room for articles on new digital technology and on art and philosophy; there is also growing interest in the relationship between art and society. Our analysis shows that despite evolutions in the field of contemporary art – such as the ‘social turn’, in which contemporary art starts paying more attention to social forms and content – the prevalence of certain topics in contemporary art criticism has barely changed over the past 25 years. With this article, we demonstrate the unique value of topic modeling for cultural sociology: it is both a powerful computational technique to generate a bird’s-eye view of a huge text corpus and a heuristic device that locates key texts for further close reading

“Surviving Darwin:” A Multi-Method Darwinian Criticism of Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”

This qualitative project explores the music video “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child using art criticism. Biographical and United States socio-cultural contexts are established to analyze the video considering post-millennial conditions relevant to the 2000-2003 redevelopment of Destiny’s Child. This approach identifies “Survivor” as a response to the highly publicized feud between the group and two recently ousted members, and its sensationalism as a corollary of the celebrity-frenzied atmosphere circulated by MTV-era media. Resources from Khan Academy’s digital research library are used to synthesize formalist, stylistic and technical analyses and produce a descriptive summary including considerations of composition, style influences and production processes. Integrating lyrical analysis of the song into the descriptive summary allows investigation of the video within an unprecedented lens via iconological/iconographic methods. Foregoing theoretical analyses traditional of art criticism, the researcher uses biological and psycho-sociological Darwinian theories outlined in post-Romanticism Victorian Era (1850-1901) England. Accordingly, representative perspectives from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin are integrated through direct quotes and explored using modern scholarly publications (books, journal articles, etc.). This interpretive method ultimately reveals that “Survivor” incorporates extensive iconological and iconographic references to Darwinism through costuming, lyrical content and imagery which authenticate and defend the moral, evolutionary and physiological superiority of Destiny’s Child relative to the ousted members. This project represents transformative research by significantly broadening the subject’s critical analysis scope, but perhaps more significant is its integration of digital resources. Digitization still elicits ambivalence from history of art practitioners, with digital research centers occupying a particularly marginal status. By successfully conducting formal analysis of a music video using the Khan Academy research library, this project illustrates the capability of digital art creations to effectively undergo traditional criticism informed by a digitized research body and the opportunity to generate new perspectives by incorporating theories outside of canonical art history approaches

Theory for A Starving Obese

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the video Arabesque Mnemotecnichs (1&2&3), A Preface to Theory for a Starving Obese and a piece of art criticism

Methods of NLP in arts management

The boost of digital archives and libraries in art, literature, and music; the shift of cultural marketing and cultural criticism to social media and online platforms; and the emergence of new digital art and cultural products lead to an enormous increase in digital data, creating challenges as well as opportunities for arts management practitioners and researchers. For arts practitioners, NLP can be used to improve marketing and communication for target group analysis, event evaluation, (social) media analysis, pricing, social media optimization, advertisement targeting, or search engine optimization. In the field of archives, collections, and libraries, NLP can contribute to the improvement of indexing, consistency, and quality of databases as well as the development of suitable search algorithms. In the distribution of cultural products, online platforms can be improved and the markets analyzed

Old Fields and New Fields: Ceramics and the Expanded Field of Sculpture

Part One of this research considers the relationship of ceramics to sculpture through the lens of art vs. craft criticism. Utilizing Rosalind Krauss\u27 concept of the expanded field of sculpture as a focal point, this research examines contradictions in Krauss\u27 argument for the exclusion of ceramic media from the mantle of sculpture, as well as current responses to this exclusion as it exists today. The responses considered aim to argue for ceramics\u27 place in the expanded field, and to question the need for further criticism on this issue, suggesting there are more relevant questions facing the field of ceramics than the medium\u27s classification as an artform or craft. Part Two addresses my functional, sculptural, and digital work made in response to these ideas for the group studio art thesis exhibition: Clear As Day

Artistic Reality in the Space of Digital Technologies: Towards the Problem of Art Criticism

The article is devoted to the comparison of two realities – the digital and the artistic. We demonstrate the principal difference in the mechanisms of their creation. Contemporary artistic practice and theory are undergoing changes to reflect cultural and technological transformations. Today, digital technologies are ubiquitous and widely used in documenting artworks, making them popular and widely available. Also, digital technologies that work with more subtle tools and materials become especially popular and open new horizons for art. However, the structure of digital technologies does not, and possibly never will, enable a living energy impulse of the artwork to become a part of the virtual world. The nature of digital reality is rooted not in the rhythmic but in algorithmic elements, thus putting limitations to what can be achieved through such methods. We discuss the role of a work of art as a biogeochemical factor and the role of digital technologies in deeper connection between viewers and artworks. Keywords: artistic reality, digital reality, ”living matter”, computer graphics, theory of art

‘Is that my score?’ : between literature and digital games

It is on the margins of what Katherine Hayles calls the ‘shifty’ boundaries between computer games and electronic literature as well as between digital art and electronic literature that I set the focus of this paper. I argue that electronic literature, with its cohabitation of strong elements of play and claims to ‘literariness’, allows for a discussion of the interface between literary theory and digital games by exposing points of contact as well as divergence through the respective claims of the two discourses.peer-reviewe

The canonization of German-language digital literature

In his paper, "The Canonization of German-language Digital Literature," Florian Hartling discusses "Net Literature," a relatively young phenomenon, that has its roots in experimental visual and concrete poetry and hypertext. With the use of new media technology, this new genre of literature has acquired much interest and is now considered to be one of the most important influences in contemporary art. Not only does Net Literature connect sound, video, and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression, it also impacts significantly on the traditional functions of the literary system. Hartling suggests that, in relation to Net Literature, the notion of the "death of the author" gives birth to the "writing reader." Hartling presents the results of his study where he applies the concept of "canon" to German-language Net Literature and where he attempts to find out whether, in this new form of literature, a "canon" has already been formed. Based on Karl Erik Rosengren's framework of "mention technique," a sample of Germanlanguage reviews of Net Literature was analyzed. The study intends to test the applicability of Rosengren's method to the analysis of Net Literature, that is, whether it is valid to use a method that was originally developed for the empirical study of the traditional literary canon for the study of an emergent Net Literature

Introduction : photography between art history and philosophy

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006–7). Indeed, Wall’s most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography’s increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate’s first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way