Spiritual Capital: The Economic Core of the Global Art Market and its Origin in Church Financial Structures

Organized religion in the Western Hemisphere and the art world share more than just a shared history of collaboration. Their most significant bond is an economic narrative powered by spiritual capital which produces aura. I contend that religion, specifically Christianity, and the art world share an economy of spiritual capital delivered through aura. Aura in a work of art is not an inherent property of the work itself, but it is manufactured by the art economy which draws its influence from the early formation of the Christian Church. This system involves a number of qualifying factors which I will isolate and investigate through this dissertation. Specifically, both religious and art economies: acquire physical space; establish a structure of cooperative agents; use an exclusive language which produces a discourse of disavowal that denies active participation in a consumer driven economy; and deploy ceremonial symbols of power during ritual events. Additionally, the placement of money within this assembly of practices and practitioners will be presented as an original element inside the art world. The entwinement of the art market and the church’s growth as an international business will finally merge to create a construction of both physical and metaphysical value actualized through aura in spiritual capital. This dissertation offers a new reading of Benjamin\u27s theory of auratic perception as identified in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In coordination with such theorists as Deleuze and Guattari, Bordieu, Marx, Weber, Agamben, Baudrillard, Massumi, Bourriaud, and others, we can understand the historical trajectory and formation of spiritual capital as a part of the economy of art as we are liberated from the taboo of discussing money and its relationship to art and religion.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1021/thumbnail.jp

Murder with Southern Hospitality: An Exhibition of Mississippi Mysteries

In the process of gathering the papers of many of Mississippi\u27s distinguished authors, Dr. Thomas Verich, then Head of Special Collections, noted a missing piece in the literary collections of the department in the early 1990s. Working with then Curator of Mississippi Collections, Debbie Lee Landi, Dr. Verich observed the burgeoning output of murder mystery fiction written by Mississippians. Dr. Verich and Ms. Landi approached University of Mississippi alumnus and award winning mystery author Julie Smith. She generously donated her papers and thus began the core of a new collecting interest of the department. The papers of Nevada Barr followed and the collecting continues today with the papers of Carolyn Haines being the most recent donation

Ron “Ronzo” Shapiro: Oxford’s Beloved Bohemian

On view is a small portion of material from the collection of the late Oxford resident and beloved bohemian, Ron Shapiro. Affectionately known as Ronzo , Shapiro was born in St. Louis, Missouri and made his way to Oxford after his military service during the Vietnam War. He was running a movie theater in Wyoming, when a girlfriend attending the University of Mississippi convinced him to move to Oxford in the 1970s. A champion of the arts, Shapiro took it upon himself to provide an alternative entertainment option to the existing mainstream cinema. He found an old building, renovated it, and created the Hoka Theater, showing independent films until it closed in 1997. Many of the items on display appeared on the walls of the Hoka.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jdw_exhibits/1024/thumbnail.jp

The Almeda Gardner Industrial School and the 1927 Mississippi Flood

The Archives and Special Collections recently acquired several candid photographs, featuring students at the Almeda Gardner Industrial School for Girls, in Moorhead, MS. Named for the wide of Chester H. Pond, the founder of the town and inventor of the electric self-winding clock, the American Missionary Association sponsored the African-American school. At one time, the institution boasted over 100 students, from primary through higher grades, who either boarded at the school or lived in town. On display are enlarged reproductions of the original photographs taken during the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood, when students literally boated across campus. The school closed a few years after the flood.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jdw_exhibits/1023/thumbnail.jp

Beyond information behaviour: evidence based practice as sense-making in public health

Recent decades have seen a trend towards evidence based practice (EBP) in public health, which it is thought will ensure improvements in health by emphasising the use of robust evidence. Library and Information professionals can support EBP by understanding the behaviour of their users in relation to evidence. This thesis explores how public health practitioners use information for sense-making in their work. The conceptualisation of sensemaking is derived from Brenda Dervin’s sense-making methodology, which provides a holistic understanding of ‘information use’. This approach is advantageous in supporting conceptualisation of information use as a social and communicative behaviour where views and perceptions of other people affect the behaviour of the individual. This contrasts to the approach taken by previous studies of information behaviour in public health, which have mainly been concerned with use of information services and systems. The thesis addresses research questions on what situations and gaps in understanding are experienced by public health workers, how they use information to make sense of those situations and progress their work, and what barriers they experience during sense-making. Data from semi-structured interviews and vignettes with a group of UK based public health practitioners is analysed using Grounded Theory methods, to create a substantive theory of how sense-making is undertaken by the participants. This theory provides an understanding of how participants perceive, interact with and construct public health evidence. An acceptance of the concept of EBP as a way of interacting with information is found to be the core driver behind the way in which participants interact with information and with other people. EBP integrates elements of participants’ perceptions of evidence and how these perceptions, alongside other elements of knowledge and past experience affect the participants’ ideas about the potential usefulness of information as part of strategies to influence others