Monthly Archive for August, 2010

What you bump into when you stand back from a photograph

Published on August 31, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments
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The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at The Museum of Modern Art

August 1 to November 1, 2010
11 West 53 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 708 9400

From David Cohen at Art Critical…

Art has its objects and MoMA has its mediums.

Considering how much energy artists of the last 120 years have put into subverting boundaries, testing conventions, inventing ostentatiously category-defying new techniques, and tapping emphatically non-fine art technologies it is supremely curious that modernism’s principal collecting and theorizing institution is so rigidly organized by medium-defined curatorial departments. Prints and Illustrated Books, Drawings, Film and Media, Photography: what a glutton for punishment MoMA is, to demarcate so unruly a period along the lines of the very disciplines it subverted.

Even stranger, having divvied up the century by medium, is that the two time-hallowed activities that witnessed most acutely the striving for medium specificity are actually thrust together.  Painting and Sculpture is the grand duchy among the fiefdoms—perhaps, indeed (along late Hapsburg lines) the dual monarchy. MoMA’s taxonomy spotlights a struggle at the heart of modernism between materialism and transcendence, essence and dissolution—the very codependency, perhaps, that keeps painting and sculpture together. More…

Arts Journal – Become an Associate Editor

Published on August 31, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: .

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of the Arts in Society all submissions are sent for peer review, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of the Arts in Society, please email journals@artsinsociety.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Series: The Arts in Society

Published on August 31, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Arts in Society.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

For Pianist, Software Is Replacing Sonatas

Published on August 30, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From James Barron at The New York Times…

The pianist Robert Taub was puttering around the house one afternoon in 2004 while his teen-age daughter was practicing for a violin lesson — a Schubert sonatina in A minor. His assessment of her playing was diplomatic: “She needed to be reminded about notes and rhythms.”

What followed was a brainstorm that explains why Mr. Taub — who made his reputation playing two distinctly different B’s, Beethoven and Milton Babbitt — has put his performing on hold, and why “software entrepreneur” now tops his résumé.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”

Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that. More…

Arts Journal: Latest Papers

Published on August 26, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

arts_frontRecently published papers in The International Journal of the Arts in Society include:

Between Grace and Fear: The Role of the Arts in a Time of Change

Published on August 23, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

grace-and-fear-v4Between Grace and Fear: The Role of the Arts in a Time of Change by William Cleveland and Patricia Shifferd is now available from The Arts in Society imprint.

This book is a series of interviews with social theorists and scholars, philanthropists, scientists, theologians, artists, community development and community arts activists. Several recent books, including The Great Turning by David Korten, and A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, have made the argument that a new way of organizing our relationships to each other and to nature will be necessary in the coming years. The subjects, some 30 in all, were all asked to comment on this eventuality and to provide their perceptions of what role that artists and arts organizations should play in contributing to a more just and sustainable society.

William Cleveland is a pioneer in the community arts movement and one of its most poetic documenters. His books Art In Other Places, Making Exact Change and Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines are considered seminal works in the field of arts-based community development. An activist, teacher, lecturer and musician, he also directs the Center for the Study of Art and Community, located on Bainbridge Island, in Washington state in the U.S.

Patricia A. Shifferd is an independent consultant in research and evaluation to arts groups and communities. Formerly the Vice President for community and education programs at American Composers Forum, she directed the community-based music commissioning project, Continental Harmony, a model of arts-based community development. Trained in Sociology and Anthropology, she received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; her research and teaching interests have centered on community development, the role of the arts in society, sense of place, and the social aspects of environmental affairs.


Recently Published in the Arts Journal

Published on August 17, 2010 in Journal. 0 Comments

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Recently published papers in The International Journal of the Arts in Society include:

After the Internet, There’s Always Art

Published on August 6, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Alex Williams at The New York Times…

Tim Nye, the bon vivant, Park Avenue heir and Chelsea gallery owner, has a theory about art openings. “You’ve got to do something that makes them say ‘Wow.’ ”

By that standard, the festivities for Swell, a three-gallery exhibition on surfing-inspired art that opened last month, lived up to expectations.

This was no typical art opening, in a windowless white box with chablis in plastic cups. Instead, the post-opening party crammed 250 scruffy artists, well-dressed buyers and art world insiders onto a 108-foot wooden Turkish sailing yacht moored on the Hudson River. A live band thundered funk-inflected free jams, while kegs flowed. The artist Norton Wisdom created a “live painting” on a sheet of translucent vellum illuminated by stage lights.

Always near the center of the action, sporting a broad mustache and chin puff, was Mr. Nye. “People are so jaded,” he said, shouting over the band while he leaned against the port railing. “You have to make it a happening.”

That seems to be his specialty. But Mr. Nye is not your usual scion of a New York real estate fortune, going about town, quietly sprinkling money around art fairs and museum boards. He has always tended to make big professional statements. In the 1990s, he earned millions of his own, as a high-flying dot-com entrepreneur, when the Web was in its unprofitable infancy. More…