Arts and Humanities Commons^™

After You're Gone: An Installation By Beth Lipman, Judith Tannenbaum, Beth Lipman

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 33, Fall 2008. In July 2006, RISD Museum director Hope Alswang and curator Judith Tannenbaum encountered Beth Lipman’s 2o-foot-long glass tableau entitled Bancketje (Banquet), then on exhibit at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. This tour de force, created in 2003 (now in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), inspired The RISD Museum to invite the artist to visit its galleries, as well as collections in storage, in order to create an exhibition here. In October 2007, Lipman visited the Museum and was particularly excited by its American period …

From Dürer To Van Gogh: Gifts From Eliza Greene Radeke And Helen Metcalf Danforth, Emily J. Peters

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 30, Summer 2008.The Museum of Art was founded simultaneously with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877 by a group of women led by Eliza Radeke's mother, Helen Adelia Rowe (Mrs. Jesse) Metcalf. RISD’s stated purpose was to educate artists in drawing, painting, modeling, and design for the benefit of industry and art, and to educate the public so that they could appreciate and support art and design. The creation of a museum collection was inseparable from these objectives. Both Eliza Radeke and Helen Danforth, as heirs to those aspirations, made extraordinary individual gifts to …

Designing Traditions: Student Explorations In The Asian Textile Collection, Kate Irvin, Laurie Anne Brewer, Anais Missakian

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 32,Summer 2008. RISD’s newest generation of textile designers source the RISD Museum’s vast Asian textile collection in this popular collaborative project and biennial exhibition. Traditional craftsmanship sparks contemporary creativity as objects inspire innovative new textiles and garments.

Office Of Multicultural Affairs (Oma) Annual Report 2007-2008, Intercultural Student Engagement Office, Anthony Johnson

Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) Annual Reports

The Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) Annual Report 2007-2008 is a year in review containing a message from the director, staff updates, community programs, statistics and general report of the work of this office. Our Mission: People from all backgrounds bring value to the art and human conversations held at RISD. The Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) assists the RISD community-at-large in shaping a culturally inclusive and supportive environment that enables all its members the opportunity to fully contribute to and benefit from the total RISD experience. OMA coordinates enriching opportunities for cultural awareness, dialogue, and interaction. The office services …

Oral History Transcript | Interview With Barbara (Bunny) Harvey, May 16, 2008, Barbara (Bunny) Harvey, Andrew Martinez, Risd Archives

RISD Oral History Project Transcripts

No abstract provided.

Oral History Transcript | Interview With Thomas (Tom) Lyon Mills, May 5, 2008, Thomas (Tom) Lyon Mills, Andrew Martinez, Risd Archives, Peter O'Neill

RISD Oral History Project Transcripts

No abstract provided.

Evolution/Revolution: The Arts And Crafts In Contemporary Fashion And Textiles, Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, Amy Pickworth, Editor

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 28, Spring 2008. Evolution/Revolution brings together the textile work of designers from the U.S., Britain, Europe, South and Central America, and Japan, and draws philosophical parallels between these contemporary artists and those of the Arts and Crafts Movement of 19th-century Britain.The exhibition is organized around the themes of Storytelling, Experimentation and Materials, Collaboration, and Art and Life—key ideas that spring from the Arts and Crafts spirit.

One of the most widely influential art and design movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Arts and Crafts Movement was an aesthetic and political response to a world stripped …

Styrofoam: From Industrial Invention To Artistic Transformation, Judith Tannenbaum, Amy Pickworth, Editor

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 29, Spring 2008. Ubiquitous in our culture, styrofoam is used to insulate buildings, package computers and other consumer products, and produce picnic coolers and containers for fast food and take-out. For decades, artists have employed styrofoam in the making of models and molds for casting. Today, however, more and more artists are exploring it as a primary material or a subject in its own right, using it in new and ingenious ways to create sculpture, paintings, and installations.

Oral History Transcript | Interview With Roger Mandle, April 1, 2008, Roger Mandle, Ann Hudner, Risd Archives, Andrew Martinez, Josh Backer

RISD Oral History Project Transcripts

No abstract provided.

Eliza Buffington And The Early Years Of The Library, Carol Terry

Infinite Radius: Founding Rhode Island School of Design

No abstract provided.

A History Of Risd's Histories: Happy Indeed Is The Audience That Has No Random Historian, Andrew Martinez

Infinite Radius: Founding Rhode Island School of Design

No abstract provided.

Preface, Dawn Barrett, Andrew Martinez

Infinite Radius: Founding Rhode Island School of Design

No abstract provided.

Papermaking At Hayle Mill, Maureen Green, Ellen Dorn Levitt, Claire Van Vliet, C. Andrew Miller-Brown, Audrey Holden

Printmaking

65 pages, 1 unnumbered leaf of plates : illustrations, samples, 1 folded map. "Includes a book, Papermaking at Hayle Mill, 1808-1987 by Maureen Green; a map, The Loose Valley, 1856 with the mills on Loose Stream; Mill photographs; Sample papers; and 12 proof sheets for the book; all issued in a box. Printed in black, red, and blue. Contents printed inside the box: Hayle Mill book -- Loose Valley map -- Mill photographs -- Sample papers. ""Printed on Finale, the last paper made at Hayle Mill. ... The portrait of Samuel Green was prepared and printed on Epson Archival paper …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetics Of Trademarks, Peter H. Karlen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Trademarks are not just property, they are aesthetic creations that pervade everyday experience. One estimate is that the average person encounters more than 1,000 trademarks per day, many of which influence purchases and product use.

As pervasive aesthetic creations having literary, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and musical content, trademarks deserve aesthetic analysis. The article discusses the origins, strength, appeal, and effectiveness of trademarks within the context of aesthetic considerations such as meaning, intention, authorship, and mode of creation. Also reviewed are morphemic and phonemic analysis of trademarks, semantic positioning, the dichotomy between creation and discovery of trademarks, and the differences between …

Symposium Danto's The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

A Silent Rhetoric: The Mechanism Of Propaganda As Persuasion, Ken-Ichi Sasaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Under ongoing globalization the particularity of cultures has become a major topic in contemporary aesthetics. Someone insists on the right of national culture against globalism, others wish to bridge cultures.[1] Apparently opposing one another, they share the same gaze on the individual character of every culture. To confirm or transcend our cultural or national affiliation through art there exists the common dimension of aesthetic persuasion: that is the subject of this paper.

Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, And 9/11, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There have been numerous critical articles on what really happened on the otherwise beautiful morning of 11 September 2001. Beyond doubt, the bulk of the critical responses to the terrorist attacks focused on the ethical and humanitarian, or rather the unethical and inhumane implications of the atrocious act, leaving no room for any philosophical reflection on the potential assessment or reception of the event from the perspective of art and aesthetics. The few years that have gone by since 2001 have provided us with some a sense of emotional detachment from the horror of that day, a detachment that may …

Questioning "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction": A Stroll Around The Louvre After Reading Benjamin0, Jonathan Davis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I claim that Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" merits renewed critical attention. Just as Dada had confronted art with anti-art, so Benjamin hoped his essay would confront aesthetics with an anti-aesthetic. I examine Benjamin's capsule history of the aura and show it to be misleading, criticize the essay's underdeveloped ontology of painting and sketch an alternative, and draw attention to the surprising proximity of Benjamin's notion of value to that of neoliberal thought. I conclude with a critique of Benjamin's cultural politics.

Definition Of Videogames, Grant Tavinor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Can videogames be defined? The new field of games studies has generated three somewhat competing models of videogaming that characterize games as new forms of gaming, narratives, and interactive fictions. When treated as necessary and sufficient condition definitions, however, each of the three approaches fails to pick out all and only videogames. In this paper I argue that looking more closely at the formal qualities of definition helps to set out the range of definitional options open to the games theorist. A disjunctive definition of videogaming seems the most appropriate of these definitional options. The disjunctive definition I offer here …

The Riddle Of A Riddle, Ivan Gaskell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper examines the distinction made by Arthur C. Danto between artworks and what he terms "mere real things." It presents an eighteenth-century tool for sifting grain (a riddle) as a case study in the contexts of first, the house of its first known owner, General Artemas Ward (1727-1800); second, an exhibition 2006-7 drawn from the contents of that house pointedly held in an art museum; and, third, the likely maker of the object, a member of Hassanimisco Band of Nipmuc Indians. It examines the equivocal position of objects such as this in Danto's estimation, things that he considers to …

Not Just Mere Things, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper examines Arthur Danto's contention, put forward in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that at a certain point in its history art becomes philosophy. The similarities and differences between Danto's view and the Hegelian one from which it is derived are examined. Using Danto's favorite example of a philosophical work of art, Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1965), it is argued that a more plausible interpretation of the meaning of the work undermines Danto's claims about art's transformation into philosophy.

Danto And Art Criticism, Cynthia Freeland

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I examine the relationship between Arthur Danto's philosophy of art and his practice of art criticism. Danto has said that he included many actual examples of discussions of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace because of the feeling that, previously, philosophers had theorized about art in a vacuum. And since the time of publishing that book, he has written on a wide variety of both historical and contemporary artists and art practices. Danto's philosophy of art commits him to an account of the practice of art criticism as interpretation. However, I question whether the Danto-esque interpretive …

Ontology, Criticism, And The Riddle Of Art Versus Non-Art In The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this "Reply to my Critics," I explain that The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was essentially a contribution to the ontology of art in which two necessary conditions emerge as essential to a real definition of the art work: that an artwork must (a) have meaning and (b) must embody its meaning. Many issues have emerged in the course of art's history that are very much part of its practice but are not part of art's essence. In response to Cynthia Freeland, I argue that though the book does not address art criticism, the two necessary conditions specify a viable …

A Third System Of The Arts? An Exploration Of Some Ideas From Larry Shiner's The Invention Of Art: A Cultural History, David Clowney

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I explore some implications of Larry Shiner’s view that fine art is a modern invention. In part I, I briefly summarize Shiner’s main thesis and defend it against some misunderstandings and objections that have appeared in the literature. In part II, I discuss Shiner’s remarks about the possible emergence of what he calls a “third system of the arts.” I ask what such a system might look like, consider some signs that it may indeed be emerging, and venture a suggestion about what would be required for it actually to come about.

The Friends Of Jones' Paintings: A Case Of Explanation In The Republic Of Art, Graham Mcfee

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

All too often the agenda for discussion of institutional accounts of art has been set by George Dickie's (putative) institutional definition of art. To offer a new beginning, the paper addresses the question of explanation with an institutional framework modeled as Terry Diffey’s Republic of Art. In exploring the argumentative resources here, it meets the objection that institutionalism cannot explore the case of so-called ‘first art’: objects created before the concept art came into being. In particular, the paper uses an example to consider how disputes within the Republic might be resolved through rational means, while still maintaining the institutional …

The Dervishes Dance — The Sacred Ritual Of Love, Jale Erzen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the Sufi Way, the experience of the world and its perception is aesthetic in an ecstatic fashion. The awareness of the overpowering beauty of the world fills the heart with love and opens the mind to cosmic relations. The integration of reason, form-making, and imagining, along with yielding the body and mind to the powers of the earth, is a total aesthetic in Sufism.

In the Islamic world, humans' movement, the way they understand the process of time and space, depends on nature and parallels the cosmic order and the basic underlying forms that are found in nature. They …

Art Imitating Art, Eric Brook

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Using as a contextual reference my experience of seeing the original and copy of Michelangelo's David in Florence, I briefly introduce how the Platonic legacy has affected that discourse. The Western preference in art and aesthetics is typically in favor of the original over the copy, despite whatever indiscernibility may exist between them. Since Arthur Danto has treated this phenomenon in his text The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, his relevant comments are considered and adapted for the purpose of working through how one understands the relationship between the original and copy in terms of a criterion for defining art.