Disparity in Copyright Protection: Focus on the Finished Image Ignores the Art in the Details

Courts initial reactions play a major role in the assessment of copyright protection. A quick recognition of pictorial quality can result in an easy finding of originality. Based upon the extremely low threshold, such a quick summation is not surprising or necessarily refutable. However, the blanket assumption of a pictorial quality in photography creates a disparity in copyright protection for works of graphic design, like maps, which may not emit that immediate pictorial or aesthetic quality but may still employ creative choice. Those works that “scream” their pictorial nature get cursory review while the more subtle are being categorized as compilations and subjected to review more akin to the patent standard of novelty than the copyright standard of originality. Professor Christine Haight Farley has noted that “photographs are at once able to be seen as the expression of the photographer who made it, but also as a direct transcription of nature.” In order to streamline copyright protection for visual works, the dual nature of other visual works must also gain such recognition

Color, grisaille and pictorial techniques in works by Jean Pucelle

The study of color in Pucelle's works cannot be isolated from the question of a workshop and collaborators behind the manuscript paintings attributed to the artist. This subject has been treated in depth by Kathleen Morand and François Avril, whose research has made it possible to better distinguish the various hands at work in the manuscripts. The minute analysis offered here of the color and techniques employed in the very many miniatures, historiated initials, and drolleries in the actual manuscripts returns to this question by distinguishing a number of technical practices applied on a shared formal basis along with a differentiation of color by manuscript. Analysis of manuscripts attributed to the master point to varied usage of color, line and modeling. This confirms the existence of a group of artists working together on certain works and isolates certain hands while posing the problem of their identification. The present study also puts analysis of color and technical processes to the test as criteria for identifying the hands. Although their diversity, or inversely, their consistency can certainly help to distinguish between the various illuminators involved, such analyses do not allow a definitive position to be taken or propose a reconstitution of the division of labor as Jean Pucelle, as chef d'atelier, might have organized it. The second question pertains to the reasons behind the original and rare choice of grisaille in manuscript painting (sometimes added to full color in the second volume of the Belleville Breviary ). The practice of gray monochrome painting or "camaïeu" is obviously at the heart of the matter. It must be placed at the core of the contemporary practice of the ink and camaïeu "pourtrait" in illuminations, and its correlation with metal and color in precious decorative objects

Paradigmas pictóricos en la metaforología temprana de Hans Blumenberg

Specialized studies on Hans Blumenberg’s works have paid little attention on relations between metaphorology and art history. Blumenberg’s interest on aesthetic and pictorial topics are already in his very first publications, but also in his later works. In this paper we consider this specific field, particularly regarding the incidence of various pictorial traditions in early gestation of Blumenberg’s metaphorology.Los estudios especializados en la obra de Hans Blumenberg [1920-1996] han prestado poca atención a las relaciones de la metaforología con la historia del arte. El interés de Blumenberg por temas estéticos y pictóricos es ya patente en sus primeras publicaciones, así como en diversos textos de madurez. En el presente artículo tomamos en consideración este ámbito específico de la obra blumenberguiana. Atendemos en particular a la incidencia de varias tradiciones pictóricas en la temprana gestación de su metaforología

Implied World Views in Pictures: Reflections from a Cognitive Psychological and Anthropological Point of View

In traditional art history, iconological attempts to analyze visual works of art by treating their formal and semantic features as symptoms of more general, implied world views or cultures have occurred rather frequently. Still, such attempts have been criticized for permitting subjective and and non-verifiable interpretations. In this paper, however, I will argue that (i) pictorial works of art indeed imply wider world views or schemata, and (ii) that our comprehension of these schemata can be explained by taking into account recent research within cognitive psychology. More specifically, I will argue that intelligence partly consists of the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata which may occur on various levels of abstraction. I will claim that the possession of high-level narrative structures, shared by a relatively large group of beholders, is actually a necessary presupposition for understanding pictorial works of art as part of a wider context, that is, as implying world views

On Stereoscopic Art

Pictorial art is typically viewed with two eyes, but it is not binocular in the sense that it requires two eyes to appreciate the art. Two-dimensional representational art works allude to depth that they do not contain, and a variety of stratagems is enlisted to convey the impression that surfaces on the picture plane are at different distances from the viewer. With the invention of the stereoscope by Wheatstone in the 1830s, it was possible to produce two pictures with defined horizontal disparities between them to create a novel impression of depth. Stereoscopy and photography were made public at about the same time and their marriage was soon cemented; most stereoscopic art is now photographic. Wheatstone sought to examine stereoscopic depth without monocular pictorial cues. He was unable to do this, but it was achieved a century later by Julesz with random-dot stereograms The early history of non-photographic stereoscopic art is described as well as reference to some contemporary works. Novel stereograms employing a wider variety of carrier patterns than random dots are presented as anaglyphs; they show modulations of pictorial surface depths as well as inclusions within a binocular picture

‘Many Lamps Same Light’: The Stained Glass Paintings of Nigeria’s Prime Artists, Y.C.A. Grillo and D. H. Dale

Many lamps same Light’ investigates the place of agency in the transmutation of indigenous imageries in the art works of the pictorial turn. Through an investigation that entailed an empirical analysis of the works of two Nigerian prime stained glass artists, Yusuf Grillo and David Dale, this study established that in spite of their diversity in picture making tooling mechanisms, both artists met the purposes of the “new thinking” paradigm shift in the post Vatican II evangelisation regime. In a hermeneutic discourse, however, the study investigates Grillo’s exclusive use of indigenous thought systems’ imbued lexiconology as visual tooling mechanisms to affect imagery for the episteme of ecclesia in Africa. In effect that novel art form did not only affect the enlargement of the series in images of this, otherwise, European art form but also a change in imagery in the entire constellation of Church art. In fact, through art as agency utilsing the iconographical imageries from Nigeria as ciphers of the pictorial turn, distinguishing the paradigm shift in Christianity, it was possible to tell the Christos story with Christ as the magnate holding the ecclesiologies together.Keywords: stained glass, pictorial turn, evangelisation, iconographical imagery, tooling mechanism, agency, light, lam

Public relations as visual meaning-making

This chapter explores the implications of the 'pictorial turn' for Public Relations and strategic communication, proposes a systematic framework for understanding how visual communication works, and concludes by considering future directions for conceptual engagement with visual meaning-making

Behind the Lens: A Visual Exploration of Epistemological Commitments in HCI Research on the Home

   In this pictorial, we propose an alternative approach to investigating human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers’ epistemological commitments in research on the home. While researchers’ commitments can be discussed through textual aspects of their research, in this pictorial we conduct a pattern analysis of visual elements as a productive way to further inquire into such kinds of commitments. By analyzing visual elements from 121 works in HCI research on the home, we identify seven types of observers, which can be associated with epistemological commitments in research. We also propose two new complementary observers: the absent observer and the protagonist observer

Pictorial and Literary Evocations in the Programmatic Music of Liszt and Debussy

Abstract Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was extraordinary both as a virtuoso performer and an innovative composer of works in a variety of genres. As a modernist icon bridging the turn of the century, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) had a vast influence on his contemporaries and later generations of composers. Both the piano and society underwent substantial developments and changes during the lives of both Liszt and Debussy. The changes allowed composers to explore new realms of piano sounds. The exploration that Liszt and Debussy sought in their compositions brought a new aesthetic of approaching music and piano playing to audiences. Program music had been written by many composers for the keyboard from the Baroque era until today. Program music as a term refers instrumental music that involves descriptive or narrative effects created through tone painting, musical figurations, and other techniques. Compared to character pieces, which have a similar goal, program music tends to be applied to longer works that feature more complex descriptive or narrative ideas. Pictorial and literary inspirations are two essential non-musical elements in program music and are thus crucial to explore. By analyzing selected programmatic works of Liszt and Debussy, I emphasize how they used and developed pictorial and literary evocations in their program music and how they utilized the piano as a device to provide the sound world of visual and written programmatic sources. Additionally, I discuss and analyze the specific pianistic vocabulary and tools found in the music of Liszt and Debussy. The research includes two main parts. The first chapter contains three sections: an introduction of Liszt and Debussy, the developments to the instrument, and the social changes during these two composers’ lifetime, and the certain pictorial and literary sources that they evoked in their program music. The second chapter is also divided into three sections: a discussion and analysis of how Liszt and Debussy use the piano as a device to reflect certain pictorial and literary sources; a discussion of the new realm of sound and the piano techniques that they employed; and in the last section, the above materials will be reiterated briefly to reinforce the substance and importance of these works by Liszt and Debussy

Kara Walker: Harper\u27s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

The preface to the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden asserts, “We proposed at the outset to narrate events just as they occurred; … to praise no man unduly because he strove for the right, to malign no man because he strove for the wrong. The suite of lithographs on display at Schmucker Art Gallery by prominent contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker entitled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), on loan from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, challenges the truth Guernsey and Alden claimed to recount and inject a discourse about rightness and wrongness the authors professed to omit. Walker’s silhouettes of distorted, fragmented and flailing black bodies are silkscreened over an enlargement, using offset lithography of woodcut plates, of the original Harper’s prints published in Guernsey and Alden’s text to incorporate a new understanding of suffering, loss and horror absent from the nineteenth- century illustrations. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1005/thumbnail.jp