Art as a Social System

Author: Niklas Luhmann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804739078
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
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.

Art Worlds

Author: Howard Saul Becker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520043862
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description

Art and Social Structure

Author: Robert Witkin
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745611341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This book is a major contribution to the sociology of art. Wide-ranging and well illustrated, it develops an original argument about the relation between social structure and forms of art.

Women, Art, and Society

Author: Whitney Chadwick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500203545
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description
"This expanded edition is brought up to date in the light of the most recent developments in contemporary art. A new chapter considers globalization in the visual arts and the complex issues it raises, focusing on the many major international exhibitions since 1990 that have become an important arena for women artists from around the world."--BOOK JACKET.

The Social System

Author: Talcott Parsons
Publisher: Hassell Street Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

Book Description
Regarded as one of the most influential works in the field of sociology, this book provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the social world. The author dissects the complex interplay between social structures, cultural patterns, and individual behavior, and presents a nuanced view of society as a constantly evolving system. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Art and Social Theory

Author: Austin Harrington
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745630397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Art and Social Theory provides a comprehensive introduction to sociological studies of the arts. It examines the central debates of social theorists and sociologists about the place of the arts in society and the social significance of aesthetics. provides a comprehensive introduction to sociological study of art; examines the central debates of social theorists and sociologists about the place of the arts in society and the social significance of aesthetics; discusses the meaning of the arts in relation to changing cultural institutions and socio-economic structures; explores questions of aesthetic value and cultural politics, taste and social class, money and patronage, ideology and utopia, myth and popular culture, and the meaning of modernism and postmodernism; presents lucid accounts of leading social theorists of the arts from Weber, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer and the Frankfurt School to Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Luhmann and Jameson.

The Play in the System

Author: Anna Watkins Fisher
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012323
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.

The New Boss

Author: Niklas Luhmann
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509517898
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
Any organization, no matter how stolid, may be unsettled by the news that a new boss is about to take over. Talk in the hallways increases, staff worry about their jobs, uncertainty grows. Even when the change has happened, problems emerge when the boss who was hired to manage “from above” has to learn about the organization “from below.” In this book, Niklas Luhmann scrutinizes the relationship and shows how it is stretched to its limit by communication difficulties, demands for self-presentation, and disagreements concerning fundamental values. Many of the tensions crystallize around the question “who has the power?” It isn’t necessarily the boss, provided the employees are well versed in the art of directing their superiors. “Subtervision” is Luhmann’s term for this state of affairs, and tact is the most important means to this end. Yet caution is advised: whoever achieves mastery in subtervision may well become the new boss. This slim and thought-provoking book from one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the dynamics and machinations of the workplace.

Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271048147
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

The Political Power of Visual Art

Author: Daniel Herwitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350182400
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Visual art has a ubiquitous political cast today. But which politics? Daniel Herwitz seeks clarity on the various things meant by politics, and how we can evaluate their presumptions or aspirations in contemporary art. Drawing on the work of William Kentridge, drenched in violence, race, and power, and the artworld immolations of Banksy, Herwitz's examples range from the NEA 4 and the question of offense-as-dissent, to the community driven work of George Gittoes, the identity politics of contemporary American art and (for contrast with the power of visual media) literature written in dialogue with truth commissions. He is interested in understanding art practices today in the light of two opposing inheritances: the avant-gardes and their politicization of the experimental art object, and 18th-century aesthetics, preaching the autonomy of the art object, which he interprets as the cultural compliment to modern liberalism. His historically-informed approach reveals how crucial this pair of legacies is to reading the tensions in voice and character of art today. Driven by questions about the capacity of the visual medium to speak politically or acquire political agency, this book is for anyone working in aesthetics or the art world concerned with the fate of cultural politics in a world spinning out of control, yet within reach of emancipation.