Pictorial Representation And Moral Knowledge

The idea that pictorial art can have cognitive value, that it can enhance our understanding of the world and of our own selves, has had many advocates in art theory and philosophical aesthetics alike. It has also been argued, however, that the power of pictorial representation to convey or enhance knowledge, in particular knowledge with moral content, is not generalized across the medium

Medium practices

In this essay I develop a topic addressed in my book, Film Art Phenomena: the question of medium specificity. Rosalind Krauss's essay 'Art In the Age of the Post-Medium Condition' has catalysed a move away from medium specificity to hybridity. I propose that questions of medium cannot be ignored, since they carry their own history and give rise to specific formal traits and possibilities. The research involves close critical analysis of four moving image works that have not previously been written about: two made with film, and one each with computer and mobile phone. The analyses are conducted by reference to my ideas about how technological peculiarities inform and inflect practice: I see the work's material composition, its form and final meaning as intricately bound up with each other. Film, video and the computer give rise to specific forms of moving image, partly because artists exploit a medium’s peculiarities, and because certain media lend themselves to some methodologies and not others. I do not seek hard distinctions between these media, but discuss them in terms of predispositions. For example, I discuss a 16mm cine film in which the shifting visibility of grain raises ideas around movement and stillness. The aim is to develop a definition of medium specificity, in relation to the moving image, that is not essentialist in the way previous versions were criticised for being, that is, based on ideas of "material substrate" (Wollen). I argue that film is a medium of stages, in contrast to the modern tapeless camcorder, in which all functions of recording, storage, playback and even editing are contained in a single device. Supported by a travel grant, I presented a version of this essay at the International Conference of Experimental Media Congress, Toronto, in April 2011, along with a selection of works: http://www.experimentalcongress.org/full-schedule

State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium

In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of power line communication technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201

Where Have All the Symbols Gone?: A Study of Sufis and Sufi Symbolism in Ottoman Miniature Paintings

Ottoman miniature paintings represent some of the best preserved and documented works of Islamic art still extant. They differ critically from other forms of miniature painting, such as Persian miniature painting, by not representing Sufi symbolism. In the two potential sources of such symbolism, Ottoman Sufism and Persian miniature painters in the Ottoman Empire, appear to have not critically influenced Ottoman miniature painting to produce Sufi symbols, do to political, religious, and cultural factors. Instead, political factors of the Ottoman imperial state and the economics and standards of production in the empire produced an art medium where Ottoman Sufi symbols were not introduced

Radical Joy Performed into Action: A Study of Feminist Performance Art

Although traditionally excluded from the art world as from all major institutions, women artists staked their claim by revolutionizing performance art as a medium in the 1960s and 70s. By integrating life and art, feminist artists developed the powerful ideology that “the personal is political,” especially in art. From this foundation of radical assertion, feminist artists explored, resisted, and deconstructed their struggles. Contemporary feminist artists not only have different battles to fight, they fight them in a different format: digital media. In this project, I seek to explore the ways performance artists before me have used the medium of performance art for radical change, and the ways it can be used to affect change in the future

Modeling On-Line Art Auction Dynamics Using Functional Data Analysis

In this paper, we examine the price dynamics of on-line art auctions of modern Indian art using functional data analysis. The purpose here is not just to understand what determines the final prices of art objects, but also the price movement during the entire auction. We identify several factors, such as artist characteristics (established or emerging artist; prior sales history), art characteristics (size; painting medium--canvas or paper), competition characteristics (current number of bidders; current number of bids) and auction design characteristics (opening bid; position of the lot in the auction), that explain the dynamics of price movement in an on-line art auction. We find that the effects on price vary over the duration of the auction, with some of these effects being stronger at the beginning of the auction (such as the opening bid and historical prices realized). In some cases, the rate of change in prices (velocity) increases at the end of the auction (for canvas paintings and paintings by established artists). Our analysis suggests that the opening bid is positively related to on-line auction price levels of art at the beginning of the auction, but its effect declines toward the end of the auction. The order in which the lots appear in an art auction is negatively related to the current price level, with this relationship decreasing toward the end of the auction. This implies that lots that appear earlier have higher current prices during the early part of the auction, but that effect diminishes by the end of the auction. Established artists show a positive relationship with the price level at the beginning of the auction. Reputation or popularity of the artists and their investment potential as assessed by previous history of sales are positively related to the price levels at the beginning of the auction. The medium (canvas or paper) of the painting does not show any relationship with art auction price levels, but the size of the painting is negatively related to the current price during the early part of the auction. Important implications for auction design are drawn from the analysis.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000196 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Monetary Appreciation of Paintings: From Realism to Magritte

This study investigates how investments in painted arts compare to those in stocks in terms of risk return trade off using Sharpe and Treynor ratios and Markowitz efficient frontiers. A large database was analysed consisting of more than 10500 auction prices of Belgian painted art over the period 1970-1997. Hedonic art returns are influenced by auction location and auction house, current of art, painters’ reputation, medium, signature and painting size. Surrealism and luminism were the most popular currents of art (in monetary terms), while expressionism and symbolism gained (financial) esteem. This study concludes that art investments underperform equity market investments due to high riskiness, transaction costs, capital gains, resale rights, and insurance premia. In addition, the Markowitz efficient frontier shows limited diversification potential for art.Investing in art;Hedonic regression

Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequence

The Iconic Boom in Modern Russian Art

This paper investigates the prices and the returns in the market for modern Russian art, a prime example of an ‘emerging art market’, over the last four decades. After applying a hedonic regression model on an extensive dataset containing 52,154 sales by 410 Russian artists, we show that the reputation of the artist, the strength of the attribution, and the topic of the work play important roles in the price formation of Russian art, in addition to characteristics such as size, medium and the identity of the auction house. We find a geometric average return of 4.07%, in real USD terms, between 1967 and 2007. Since 1997, however, our Russian art index shows an annualized return of 12.40%, which is roughly double the average yearly appreciation of a global art market index over the same period. Especially nineteenth century Russian art has generated high returns. Based on correlations and Granger causality tests, we conclude that the prices for Russian art are impacted by both Russian and global stock market movements. Our results illustrate how the new wealth created in fast-developing economies has its impact on the market for art from these countries.Alternative investments;Art;Auctions;Emerging markets;Hedonic regressions;Wealth