Search results
The fashion industry has long been a particular victim of the borders between academic disciplines that have pursued their own agendas and employed their own language with minimum dialogue with outsiders. This book represents a sustained interdisciplinary and global assault on such artificial constraints which have constrained much research on the fashion industry in the past. Many historical studies have heavily focused on the ecosystems of Paris, Milan, New York, and other fashion hubs. It breaks new grounds as the authors trace the actors involved, from the luxury conglomerate LVMH to retailers, including the iconic Swedish firm H&M. The book also emphasizes the work of fashion professionals who worked behind-the-scenes as intermediaries: trendsetters, retail buyers, stylists, art directors, advertising executives, public relations agents, brand managers, and entrepreneurs. It examines the transition from the old system to the new in a series of case studies grouped around three major themes. The book deals with the transformation of Paris from a couture production centre to a creative hub for design and brand management. It examines the special role of retailers and retail brands in promoting European fashion, with reference to transnational exchanges between Europe, America, and the wider world. The book explores seminal developments in a select group of global fashion hubs on the European periphery or entirely outside of Europe, and their roles in critiquing the mainstream fashion system with heritage marketing, vintage aesthetics, ethical brands, and local styles.
The nascent field of game studies has raised questions that, so far, that field has been unable to answer. Among these questions is a foundational one: What is a game?
Despite the widespread appeal of games, despite the rise of digital games as a global cultural phenomenon, vexing problems persistently confront those who design, play, and think about games. How do we reconcile a videogame industry's insistence that games positively affect human beliefs and behaviors with the equally prevalent assumption that games are “just games”? How do we reconcile accusations that games make us violent and antisocial and unproductive with the realization that games are a universal source of human joy?
In Games are not, David Myers demonstrates that these controversies and conflicts surrounding the meanings and effects of games are not going away; they are essential properties of the game's paradoxical aesthetic form.
Buttressed by more than three decades of game studies scholarship, Myers offers an in-depth examination of games as objects of leisure, consumption, and art. Games are not focuses on games writ large, bound by neither by digital form nor by cultural interpretation. Interdisciplinary in scope and radical in conclusion, Games are not positions games as unique objects evoking a peculiar and paradoxical liminal state – a lusory attitude – that is essential to human creativity, knowledge, and sustenance of the species
‘On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess.’ (Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share , 1949) The kinds of ecologically orientated art history we have so far reviewed converge around no singular ideological position. This chapter is equally promiscuous in its discussion of at best only loosely connected ecocritical contributions (from technical art history and environmental aesthetics to land art and eco-aesthetics), with the difference that materiality, ecology and the environment lie in plain sight. What
elements that may be uncovered even in a single shot and thus to reserve until later the discussion of editing. Pro-filmic elements of mise-en-scène Coined in the 1950s by the French philosopher of aesthetics Etienne Souriau, the term pro-filmic refers to those components of a film’s visual field that are considered to exist prior to and independent of the camera’s activity: namely, the elements of setting, props, costume, lighting and acting (or performance) which cinema shares with forms of staged spectacle such as theatre, opera and dance. The
‘N, there’s no doubt about it, has to be for Narrative’, writes Peter Wollen in ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’ ( 2002 : 12). Wollen fashions here a miniature narrative of his own, delineating the history of cinema from its beginnings as ‘the history of the development of a “film language” that would facilitate storytelling’ (12). Certainly, the telling of stories has been fundamental to both the aesthetics and the economics of film, reaching far back into the medium’s history and extending globally also. It did not take long following its emergence late in the
; for others, a term of provocation and controversy, focusing intense struggles over the aesthetics and politics of cinema. Here we briefly discuss some of the geographically and historically dispersed understandings of montage, before turning in more detail to the influential form that emerged in early Soviet cinema. The first definition the OED gives of ‘montage’ is sufficiently neutral as to contain no hint of highly charged formal and ideological disputes: ‘The process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to
Terms used to describe artistic practices have different meanings from their common usage, but 'realism' as an aesthetic idea cannot be too far removed from the way we would talk about something 'real'. This book explores the artistry and aesthetics of realist literature, along with the assumptions of realist literature. It examines the different ways in which theorists, critics and philosophers conceptualise 'realism'. The book argues that a 'realist' sensibility is the ground on which other modes of literature often exist. It considers verisimilitude that is associated with the complexity of realism, describing the use of realism in two ways: capital 'R' and small 'r'. A set of realist novels is used to explore preliminary definition of realism. The STOP and THINK section lists some points to consider when thinking about realist works. The book looks at the characteristics of the Realist novel. It deals with the objections raised in discussions of Realism, from the Realist period and twentieth- and twenty-first century criticisms. The book provides information on the novel genre, language that characterises Realism, and selection of novel material. It looks at crucial elements such as stage design, and a technical feature often overlooked, the aside, something which seems non-realistic, and which might offer another view on Realism. The book talks about some writers who straddled both periods from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, until the 1920s/1930s, gradually moved away from Realism to modernism. Literary realism, and Aristotle's and Plato's works in relation to realism are also discussed.
historical discourse (from Donald Preziosi’s ‘vast aggregate of materials, methods, protocols, technologies, institutions, social ritual, and systems of circulation and inventory’, 61 to Griselda Pollock’s ‘complex of processes and relationships’ in ‘the interplay of multiple histories’ 62 ). In a different vein, the French curator and writer Nicholas Bourriaud influentially introduced ‘relational aesthetics’ in the 1990s. His book of the same name has its critics but I note it here as a contribution to green political theory and ecological awareness (neither of which
emphasis on what he terms a ‘meaning as relationship’, 8 or what one might call situated relatedness, echoes as a concept throughout The ecological eye , whether it be in the focus on ‘relations over relata’ in Bateson, 9 in the situated knowledges of Haraway or Lippard, or in the relational aesthetics of Bourriaud’s art writing. Art historicist accounts can be reappropriated, assembled, to apply their force in a forward direction, to an art history yet to be fully realised. Anarchist literary theory, Cohn proposes, in drawing its inspiration from the
whole.’ 45 This might be a somewhat distant anticipation of the relational aesthetics of Nicholas Bourriaud promoted in the 1990s but it also, more conventionally, echoes Kropotkin, when he wrote that ‘[t]he fittest are thus the most sociable of animals, and sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution, both directly, by securing the well-being of the species while diminishing the waste of energy, and indirectly, by favouring the growth of intelligence.’ 46 After all, as Kropotkin knew: ‘The unsociable species … are doomed to decay.’ 47 Of the ‘three