New Books in Art

Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos edited volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Manchester UP, 2022) examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, art...

The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media (Amsterdam UP, 2019) describes, historicizes, theorizes, and creatively deploys massive media -- a set of techno-social assemblages and practices that include large outdoor projections, programmable architectural façades, and urban screens -- in order to better understand their critical and creative potential. Massive media i...

How can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography...

The illuminations of The Saint John’s Bible have delighted many with their imaginative takes on Scripture. But many struggle to appreciate the calligraphy more deeply than merely noting its beauty. Does calligraphy mean something? How is it beautiful? Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022), written by a biblical scholar who has spe...

Alexandra Chiriac's book Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest (de Gruyter, 2022) examines the reach of modernism in design and performance in interwar Romania. It follows the transnational trajectories of several remarkable Jewish avant-garde artists, actors, and directors based in Bucharest, the country's capital, in the 1920s and 1930s. The first part of the book recovers the...

Artist Penelope Umbrico talks about her work, images as currency, and how technology and various platforms herd images. And is photography tyrannical? Umbrico has some thoughts. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanitie...

For the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding settlements. But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects try...

Where people are killed and abused in warfare and violent conflict, artifacts of cultural heritage are often destroyed and mistreated as well. Indeed, in the World War II-era efforts to promote the then-novel idea of genocide, the Polish lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin sought to codify the notion that genocide was both personal and cultural. What has come of his efforts? In this episode of Inte...

Let's plays are among the most popular genres on YouTube. The visual worlds of video games shape the worldviews of millions. Gaming is a hobby and a mass spectacle. For a long time, the history of video games was primarily one of technical progress: from pixelated figures in 2D to increasingly convincing illusions of reality in games like Control. At the same time, independent game worlds emerge,...

Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago's edited volume Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven UP, 2022) questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contempo...

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in...

Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of change—bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. So how can we, as individuals, radically expand the work of museums to live up to this potential? How can we more fiercely recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities? How...

Dr. Tim Harte's Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) looks at sport as artistic subject matter, in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. In sport, artists found inspiration that could be applied both to improvement of the self and to social progress as artists defined it. In the long run, the constraints...

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart tak...

Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the sa...

Angela Vanhaelen's The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths (Penn State University Press, 2022) opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of laby...

Patrick McCray, Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about his book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book shows how artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works after...

Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions of battles, pogroms, uprisings, and their suppression. Not all of these stories are told from the perspective of the victors. Many contemporary creatives have continued this tradition. While the position of the official war artist seems to have gone...

Feeling down about museums? We have so many reasons to, but Chris Newell, Tribal Community Member-in-Residence at UConn and Director of Education at the Akomawt Educational Initiative, gives a dose of optimism about the future of museums. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Alexis L. Boylan is the director o...

In Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide li...

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford UP, 2020) demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the hu...

Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities (Oxford UP, 2014) offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account. Its cent...

Characterized by a search for meaning, Hirsch’s oeuvre connects psychological, scientific, and philosophical implications of form, bringing together ideas in art, science, ecology, and human consciousness. The artworks in multiple and mixed media provide an evolving history of Hirsch’s ideas and craft as they illustrate the progression of her original research on the origin of all alphabets. Her e...

Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to pe...

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also considered later on how his framework might apply to art. In After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (De Gruyter, 2022), Oana Serban elaborates on the suggestio...