The Sixth International Conference on the Arts in Society will be held in Berlin, Germany in May of 2011 at the Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW).

Thank you to all of those who contributed to the 2010 Arts Conference, held at The University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts in Sydney, Australia. The conference brought together delegates from many backgrounds and discipline areas, continuing the conference’s commitment to inclusive dialogue.

Both delegates who attended the conference and virtual delegates may upload their presentations and videos to the Arts Conference YouTube channel. (Information on uploading your presentation available here.) You may also be a part of our Common Ground YouTube community by joining the conference group and becoming a subscriber (click on the yellow “subscribe” button in the top left corner of the screen).

Additionally, please join our online conversation by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter and subscribing to our Facebook, RSS, or Twitter feeds at http://artsinsociety.com.

It is no doubt that the 2011 Arts Conference will continue on the momentum and successes of this year’s conference, and we are pleased to be hosting the conference in Berlin and at the Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Please continue to check the conference webpage, newsletter and blog for further information and conference announcements at http://artsinsociety.com/.

To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Arts Conference in Sydney, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tour, the Biennale and ‘down time’ are all welcome!

Join our Arts Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.

For information on sharing your photos with Flickr, please read more here.

Volume 5, Number 1 contains:

• The Gap within Environmental Art Practices by Chia-Ching Lin and Dan Wollmering.
• Listening to Movement: LMA and Audio Description by Joel Snyder and Esther Geiger.
• Vapbr in the Qualitative Landscape by Connie Michele Morey.
• The Neoclassical Belisarius and the Napoleonic Code: The Dilemma of Corporeal Kingship and Republic in the Revolutionary Politics of Jacques Louis David, Jean-François Marmontel and Stephanie-Felicité Genlis by Sharon Worley.
• Snaps! Bourdieu and the Field of Photographic Art by Cheryl Hardy and Michael Grenfell.
• Transfiguration of Goat Designs in the Ancient Persia by Mahsa Behnood, Shanthi Balraj Baboo, Izmer Ahmad and Effatossadat Afzal Tousi.
• The New Resale Royalty Right in Australia: Is the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 the Legislation we Expected and will it Work? by Mary Wyburn.
• Compelling Form: Architecture as Visual Persuasion by James Donald Ragsdale.

• Exploration of Artistic Experience and Multiliteracies in an Artist Workshop by Mi-Hyun Chung.
• “Zwischen der Hoffnung und dem, was man für sie tut”: Erich Fried’s Intrepid, Active and Intersubjective Hope by Billy Badger.
• Convergence: A Collaborative Course Linking Public Art and Education among Artists, Art Educators, and Students by Jan-Ru Wan.
• The Role of Photo-Surrealism in Print Advertisements by Raqee Sabah Najmuldeen and June Siok Kheng Ngo.
• The Art of Tax Reform: What Tax Reforms should be Introduced to Assist the Australian Arts Sector? by Brett Freudenberg.
• Art, Culture Industry and the Transformation of Songzhuang Artist Village by Meiqin Wang.
• Encouraging Thinking through the Arts by Jonelle Pool, Marta Robertson, Kenneth Pool and GailAnn Rickert.
• Rational Witness no More: Social Documentary and War in Northern Uganda by Lara Rosenoff.
• Generating a Soundscape of a Virtual Dancing Duet by Marina Ismini Ioannatou and Christos Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos.
• The Effects of Modern Visualization Tools on Art and Art Education within the Context of Conceptual Art by Tu?ba ?enyava?.
• Meditative Dance: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Art Education: New Generation Body Mind Development Method by Ilkay Sevgi Temizalp.
• Composing Music Based on Batak Folklore: “VIO” Monologue Opera by Junita Batubara.
• From Allegory to Commodity: Graphic Lady Justice and Twenty-first Century Law by Susan H. Stephan.
• Yoga for Singers by Jeremy Hunt.
• A Wireless, Real-time, Distributed Music Composition and Performance System by Ian Gibson.

From Nature News…

Remember the Mozart effect? Thanks to a suggestion in 1993 that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, there has been a flood of compilation CDs filled with classical tunes that will allegedly boost your baby’s brain power.

Yet there’s no evidence for this claim, and indeed the original ‘Mozart effect’ paper¹ did not make it. It reported a slight, short-term performance enhancement in some spatial tasks when preceded by listening to Mozart as opposed to sitting in silence. Some follow-up studies replicated the effect, others did not. None found it specific to Mozart; one study showed that pop music could have the same effect on schoolchildren². It seems this curious but marginal effect stems from the cognitive benefits of any enjoyable auditory stimulus, which need not even be musical.

The original claim doubtless had such inordinate impact because it plays to a long-standing suspicion that music makes you smarter. And as neuroscientists Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, point out in a review published today in Nature Reviews Neuroscience³, there is good evidence that music training reshapes the brain in ways that convey broader cognitive benefits. It can, they say, lead to “changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing”. More…

From The Times Higher Education…

Rebellion was everywhere in the 1960s, recalls Sally Feldman, but Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch made the most audacious demand of all: for a feminist revolution that was personal and political

When I started university in the late 1960s I thought I had the world at my feet. We all did. We were the children of the post-war boom, of swinging London and psychedelia. We were the ones who were going to change the world and it really seemed as if the transformation had begun, especially for women. In our first term, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album of the moment. We’d all pile into Lynn Barker’s room in hall to absorb the full virtuosity of the Beatles on her stereo. We also tried to squeeze into Gary Arlott’s room to squeal at Monty Python on his TV, but failed because girls weren’t allowed in men’s halls in the evenings. That outrage led to our first political sit-in. While other campuses were raging against the Vietnam war and the Kent State shootings in the US, we campaigned against the university’s paternalistic residential strictures.

One girl, whose name was Sheila I think, ignored those constraints with glorious abandon. She was the university social secretary for a while, booking bands who today would not have got out of bed unless it was to perform at the O2 centre or Wembley, but in those days did the campus circuit just like everyone else. The Who played at a Saturday night disco, The Animals at another. Pink Floyd and Jeff Beck serenaded our May Ball. One night Sheila managed to smuggle into her room an entire band, The Move, plus their two roadies. Unfortunately, the warden of the hall had decided to take advantage of the balmy summer evening to hold a bridge party on her lawn. Disturbed by sounds of thudding and gasping, she flashed her torch into the shrubbery, only to confront the spectacle of a line of shaggy-haired rockers climbing out of Sheila’s window, way after curfew. More…

From The Times Higher Education…

Since America finally entered the debate about studio-based PhDs in the visual arts, books, magazine articles and conference halls have been filled with discussion on the topic. Every conceivable point of view has been put forward: some urge a total rethink of the whole university system, in addition to the art school’s place within it; others urge an expansion of how we define research; and yet others, such as Robert Storr at Yale University, deny that artists do, or should do, research at all.

Most of us know what it is like when a department or school goes through that death by a thousand cuts known as a restructure. Every faculty member puts forward his or her utopian vision of how an art school should be run, but in the end nothing is agreed, which is usually just as well because management has probably decided already.

It is a little like that with the whole PhD debate. Many, although by no means all, who lead the debate in print come from a “theory” background and see theory as making up a large part of the studio-based PhD submission. However, many of those theoreticians have never fully understood that art is a language in its own right, like music or mathematics, and arguments can be made in paint and through drawing and photography, or in the physicality of matter (sculpture, installation art) without recourse to words. More…