This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.
This book is the first book to comprehensively and deeply explain and construct the legal system of Chinese art auctions. Based on agency theory in traditional contract law, this book combs the legal relationship between client, auctioneer, and buyer. Aiming at the most difficult problem of art identification, this book shows the obligations that auctioneers must perform and the common methods for auctioneers to avoid these obligations. The purpose of this book is to ease the current situation in which the interests of buyers and auctioneers are too opposed and speed up the legalization process of art auctions through the construction of the legal system of art auctions in China. Additionally, using the method of policy demonstration, this book discusses how public power should intervene in the process of art auctions.
The Encyclopedia of Social Theory contains over 500 entries varying from concise definitions of key terms and short biographies of key theorists to comprehensive surveys of leading concepts, debates, themes and schools. The object of the Encyclopedia has been to give thorough coverage of the central topics in theoretical sociology as well as terms and concepts in the methodology and philosophy of social science. Although 106 theorists are given entries, the emphasis of the work is on the elucidation of ideas rather than intellectual biography. The Encyclopedia covers the leading contemporary domains of debate on social theory and the classical legacies of social thinkers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving proper balance to both the European and North American traditions and to important new developments in the global self-understanding of sociology. Social theory has become one of the most vigorous specialisms of sociology in recent years. This is in part due to the considerable overlaps of social theory with other disciplinary areas, such as cultural and media studies, anthropology, and political theory, and to the cross-disciplinary nature of theoretical approaches such as feminism and psychoanalysis, and new fields such as postcolonial studies. The editors have therefore worked to produce in the Encyclopedia of Social Theory a first-call reference for students and researchers across the social sciences and humanities with an interest in contemporary theory and the modern history of ideas. The Encyclopedia has been authored by leading international specialists in the field under the direction of a well-balanced editorial team. It is comprehensively cross-referenced and all larger entries carry bibliographies. There is a full index.
Building a National Literature boldly takes issue with traditional literary criticism for its failure to explain how literature as a body is created and shaped by institutional forces. Peter Uwe Hohendahl approaches literary history by focusing on the material and ideological structures that determine the canonical status of writers and works. He examines important elements in the making of a national literature, including the political and literary public sphere, the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the emergence of academic criticism as literary history. Hohendahl considers such key aspects of the process in Germany as the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the delineation of the borders of German literature, the idea of its history, the understanding of its cultural function, and the notion of a canon of major and minor authors.
The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.
In Deleuze and Art Anne Sauvagnargues, one of the world's most renowned Deleuze scholars, offers a unique insight into the constitutive role played by art in the formation of Deleuze's thought. By reproducing Deleuze's social and intellectual references, Sauvagnargues is able to construct a precise map of the totality of Deleuze's work, pinpointing where key Deleuzian concepts first emerge and eventually disappear. This innovative methodology, which Sauvagnargues calls "periodization", provides a systematic historiography of Deleuze's philosophy that remains faithful to his affirmation of the principle of exteriority. By analyzing the external relations between Deleuze's self-proclaimed three philosophical periods, Sauvagnargues gives the reader an inside look into the conceptual and artistic landscape that surrounded Deleuze and the creation of his philosophy. With extreme clarity and precision, Sauvagnargues provides an important glimpse into Deleuze's philosophy by reconstructing the social and intellectual contexts that contributed to the trajectory of his thought. This book is the product of insightful and careful research, which has not been made available to English readers of Deleuze before now.
There is currently no reader in print that provides a broad ranging overview for an undergraduate course on the sociology of the arts or the sociology of culture. This book remedies this situation as it provides students with an overall understanding of the current issues, theoretical approaches, and substantive contributions in the sociology of the arts. Included are chapters on the aesthetic meaning of art; the social and institutional production of art; the links among audiences, artists, and cultural organizations; tensions between artists and their bureaucratized working settings; the training and careers of artists; relations between art and society; and the dynamics of cultural change. In addition to section introductions, there is a comprehensive introduction to provide students with an understanding of the history of the field, its main theoretical currents, and also to provide them with an appreciation of the contributions to cultural studies by other disciplines, such as anthropology and history. An extensive bibliography is also included in the reader, which was developed to assist students who wish to pursue research topics.
This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts - from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the 'creative economy' - to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just 'knowledge management' but the design of 'creative institutions' embodying new patterns of work.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary panel of contributors, this book presents a stimulating dialogue between economics and art theory and considers how this might aid our understanding of both areas of research. The collection explores themes which both fields share, including rationality, abstraction and model building, the nature of social reality, representation and transformation. The contributions employ a broad range of methods to investigate the links between economics and art, and their coverage includes architecture, history of ideas, art theory, literature studies and beyond. This innovative volume will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of economic theory, cultural economics, literary and art theory and it intends to be a starting point for new avenues of interdisciplinary research.
