Meta-Image – a collaborative environment for image discourse

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. The Febuary 2011 annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) in New York had an entire session organized by Patricia Mainardi dedicated to “The Crisis in Art History.” The papers were later published in a special issue of Visual Resources (27, no. 4, 2011). Yet the present crisis in the discipline can be considered just the latest of many that it has faced at least since the 1970s, when a whole new range of theoretical references, such as postcolonial theories, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and semiotics, pressured art historians to reflect about their specific approaches to art. Hans Belting's Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? came out in 1983, centering its fire on the power structures of the field in Germany, and in 1982 the Art Journal also produced an issue on “The Crisis in the Discipline,” edited by Henri Zerner, with articles by such leading art historians as Rosalind Krauss, David Summers, and Donald Preziosi, among others. At that time, the main topic of discussion was the incorporation of new objects of study in the art historical field, such as advertisement, photography, and other aspects of visual culture, bringing art history closer to so-called visual studies. Concerns about developing a global art history, something that still resonates today, appeared at the turn of the century with important publications such as Hans Belting's Bild-Anthropologie (2001) and David Summers's Real Spaces (2003). Both books demonstrate a special interest in anthropology, which persists today with the incorporation of anthropological theories such as those of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, for example, into the field. Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983), trans. as The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Zerner, ed., “The Crisis in the Discipline,” special issue, Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982); Belting, Bild-Anthropologie (Munich: W. Fink, 2001); and Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003).2. This was the 33rd Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, July 15–20, 2012. Its theme, “The Challenge of the Object,” appears somewhat conservative when considered from the perspective of contemporary art. Since at least the 1960s Conceptual art has done away with the idea of a necessary connection between art and the material world, which had important political consequences as well.3. The same logic that we see here organizes much of the “globalized” art world. In a review of the exhibition Africa Remix: L’art contemporain d’un continent, presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2005, Roberto Conduru notes that African artists still need to pass through the established institutions of art in the United States or in Europe to enter the circuits of the international market and art world. “With one sole exception—Wim Botha … all of the remaining 87 artists already represented their country and/or the Continent in the Biennials that proliferate throughout the world, and also presented their work in prestigious institutions within the system of international art.” Conduru, “O mundo é uma tribo,” Concinnitas (UERJ, Rio de Janeiro), no. 8 (July 2005): 198–202.4. Although this in fact is a very significant way to approach Brazilian visual culture, it should not be exclusive. Important work has been done in the last few years on the process of the transfer and circulation of material culture within the Portuguese Empire and in Brazil. See Jens M. Baumgarten, “Transformation asiatischer Artefakte in brasilianischen Kontexten,” in Topologien des Reisens, ed. Alexandra Karentzos, Alma-Elisa Kittner, and Julia Reuter (Trier: Universität Trier, 2009), vol. 1, 178–94.5. A good example can be found in Rodrigo Naves's interpretation of Jean-Baptiste Debret's Brazilian period: “Definitely, the existence of slavery hindered once and for all any effort to transplant the classical form as truth into Brazil.” Naves, A forma difícil: Ensaios sobre arte brasileira (São Paulo: Ática,1996), 71.6. Moema is the tragic character of Frei Santa Rita Durão's epic poem Caramuru. She was the sister of Caramuru's wife, Paraguaçu, and drowned while swimming after the ship that carried Caramuru back to Europe.7. Regarding the position that Baroque occupies in Brazilian art history, it is interesting that in the first Pan-American Congress of Architects, organized in Uruguay in 1920, Alexandre de Albuquerque proposed the Baroque manner of Minas Gerais as the source for a Brazilian national style, since, according to him, Brazil did not possess a strong indigenous culture, as did other countries in South America.8. Sergio Miceli, Nacional estrangeiro (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003).9. The study of art history is relatively recent in Brazil, and by examining other contributions to the history of culture in the country, one can find elements that could help to impel art history in new directions. The writer Mario de Andrade, one of the main protagonists of Brazilian modernism, for instance, developed a genuine interest in African and Native culture and in 1936 wrote a project for the creation of an Institute for National Patrimony in which he included material and immaterial culture of the different populations in Brazil. In the same period, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who had studied with Franz Boas, wrote his classic book Casa-grande e senzala, in which he examines the diversity of contributions to Brazilian culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lina Bo Bardi organized exhibitions in Bahia and at the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) based on her research on popular art in Brazil. See, among others, Antonio Gilberto Nogueira, Por um inventário dos sentidos: Mário de Andrade e a concepçã de patrimônio e inventário (São Paulo: Hucitec/Fapesp., 2005); Marina Grinover and Silvana Rubino, eds., Lina por escrito: Textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2009); and Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala (São Paulo: Global, 2003).10. “From this we conclude that … art, in its simple forms, is not necessarily expressive of purposive action, but rather based upon our reactions to forms that develop through mastery of technique.” Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955), 62. I also think that Boas's question about what could be considered an aesthetic object in these cultures is a very important one because it definitely secures these objects as of interest for the field of art history, at the same time that it forces us to listen to the point of view of their creators.11. On Assuriní visual culture, see Regina Polo Müller, Os Assuriní do Xingu: História e arte (Campinas: Unicamp, 1993). When dealing with contemporary indigenous culture we must also acknowledge the impact of the market on how aesthetic value is assigned. This, of course, implies recognizing that indigenous culture is in fact alive and interacting with other sectors of society today, resisting the tendency of both anthropologists and art historians to imagine these cultures as if “frozen in the past.”12. Tapirage is the name given to a technique used by some indigenous groups to alter the feather colors of live birds. See Amy Buono, “Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil,” in The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800, ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2012), 8–40.13. Amy Buono, “Indigeneity as Corporeality: The ‘Tupinambization’ of the Early Modern Atlantic,” in Art and Its Histories in Brazil, by Claudia Mattos and Roberto Conduru, Issues and Debates (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, forthcoming).14. On this issue, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–26.15. As I have argued above, there cannot be one unitary Brazilian art; given the constant dynamic exchange between local and transferred material and immaterial culture, we must substitute this concept for a more dynamic view of the arts in Brazil.16. Terreiro is the name for buildings and spaces that contain Afro-Brazilian religious activities. Quilombos are historic settlements of fugitive and freed slaves that were created in remote places within the interior of Brazil.17. We must learn to see the circulation of people, ideas, and objects between different localities in Africa and Brazil as a two-way process. As Roberto Conduru notes, although slavery implied the forced migration of a much larger population from Africa to the Americas, there was also some significant immigration in the other direction. This is well documented, for example, in the development of agudá architecture in the region of the Gulf of Guinea (Togo, Benin, and Nigeria). Conduru, “Sobrevivência e invenção—conexões artísticas entre Brasil e África,” in Mattos and Conduru, Art and Its Histories in Brazil.18. The direct relation between art and art history has been pointed out numerous times. Wolfgang Kemp (“Benjamin and Aby Warburg,” Kritische Berichte, no. 3 [1975]: 5–6) has argued that Dadaist collage played an important role in the development of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, for instance. See Kurt W. Forster, “Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kunstwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten,” in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag), 11–37. Performance art has helped us understand the theatricality of Baroque art, and it also can be very productive in interpreting much of what we call Native art, for instance.19. Thierry Dufrêne, “Pour en finir avec le corset de la chronologie: Vers une histoire de l’art élargie qui rapproche les temps et les oeuvres,” in Théâtre du Monde, exh. cat. (Paris: FAGE, 2013), 30–37. The exhibition at La Maison Rouge, which showed the collection of eccentric Tasmanian collector David Walsh, was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, who also used Surrealist-inspired anachronistic models to display the objects.20. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie; and Summers, Real Spaces. For a critique of David Summers's book in relation to the question of a new world art history, see James Elkins, “On David Summers's Real Spaces,” in Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2007), 41–72.Additional informationNotes on contributorsClaudia MattosClaudia Mattos, professor of art history at the University of Campinas, earned a PhD from the Freie Universität, Berlin, in 1996. She publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and is preparing one book on art and ecology in Brazil and editing another on Brazilian art history for Getty Publications [Instituto de Artes, Departamento de Artes Plásticas, Rua Elis Regina 50, Cidade Universitária Zeferino Vaz, 13083-854, Campinas, SP, Brazil, cvmattos@iar.unicamp.br].

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...

Often featuring lighthouses, bridges, or quaint country homes, Thomas Kinkade’s soft-focus landscapes have permeated American visual culture during the past twenty years, appearing on everything from Bibles to bedsheets to credit cards. Kinkade sells his work through his shopping-mall galleries, QVC, the Internet, and Christian stores. He is quite possibly the most collected artist in the United States. While many art-world and academic critics have dismissed him as a passing fad or marketing phenomenon, the contributors to this collection do not. Instead, they explore his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture. They consider Kinkade’s imagery and career in relation to nineteenth-century Currier and Ives prints and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ , the collectibles market and the fine-art market, the Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center, and “The Village at Hiddenbrooke,” a California housing development inspired by Kinkade’s paintings. The conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, the curator of the first major museum exhibition of Kinkade’s art and collectibles, recounts his experiences organizing that show. All of the contributors draw on art history, visual culture, and cultural studies as they seek to understand Kinkade’s significance for both art and audiences. Along the way, they delve into questions about beauty, class, kitsch, religion, and taste in contemporary art. Contributors . Julia Alderson, Alexis L. Boylan , Anna Brzyski, Seth Feman, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Micki McElya, Karal Ann Marling, David Morgan, Christopher Pearson, Andrea Wolk Rager, Jeffrey Vallance

The creative component of the design process is fundamental, as it is associated with the search for innovative solutions. In the creative process, the designer’s imagination plays a leading role – it serves as the foundation for shaping and transforming the vision of the functional and aesthetic image of the future object. This study was aimed to identify and systematise the main strategic directions and techniques that stimulate the creative process in generating innovative solutions within modern design practice. The research methodology included the analysis of information sources on design methods; tools for form development in architectural, industrial, and environmental design; structural and systematic analysis; and synthesis of research results. It has been demonstrated that human imagination operates on the basis of previously formed visual images through perception. The strategic approach to reativity development is shaped by visual-operational experience. It has been established that the main method of generating new ideas is creative experimentation. To stimulate the creative process during the ideation stage, it is advisable to apply techniques such as decomposition, alteration of visual modelling tools, combinatorics, the use of simple and flexible tools, references and analogies, brainstorming, and design heuristics. The practical significance of these findings lies in their application to design practice, the education and training of specialists in artistic and creative fields, and further research in art history, cultural studies, architecture, and design.

Araştırmanın ilgilendiği sanat işleri, sanat tarihi çalışmalarında “duvar resmi” terim anlamının içine dâhil olmaktadır. İncelenen resimler, “geçiş döneminin” artık fotoğraf teknolojisinin de bu uygulamada rolü olduğu 19. yy. ‘ın son çeyreğine aittir. Edirne’de konak maliki merhum Şücaattin Dumlu ismi dolayısıyla Dumlu Konağı olarak geçen günümüzde metruk halde bulunan tarihi konaktaki toplamda 4 adet duvar resmi, estetik değerleri, mekânla kurduğu ilişkileri ve sanat tarihsel özellikleriyle incelenmektedir.

Scenography and Art History reimagines scenography as a critical concept for art history, and is the first book to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of this concept for art historians and scholars in related fields. It provides a vital evaluation of the contemporary importance of scenography as a critical tool for art historians and scholars from related branches of study addressing phenomena such as witchy designs, Early Modern festival books, live rock performances, digital fashion photography, and outdoor dance interventions. With its nuanced and detailed case studies, this book is an innovative contribution to ongoing debates within art history and visual studies concerning multisensory events. It extends the existing literature by demonstrating the importance of a reimagined scenography concept for comprehending historical and contemporary art histories and visual cultures more broadly. The book contends that scenography is no longer restricted to the traditional space of the theatre, but has become an important concept for approaching art historical and contemporary objects and events. It explores scenography not solely as a critical approach and theoretical concept, but also as an important practice linked with unrecognized labour and broader political, social and gendered issues in a great variety of contexts, such as festive culture, sacred settings, fashion, film, or performing arts. Designed as a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in art history, visual studies, and related subjects, the book, through its cross-disciplinary frame, does consider, implicitly and explicitly, the roles of both scenography and art in society.

In the meantime, if studies of art history have mainly focused on external factors such as style, form, and background of works, studies of recent art history persistently digest intrinsic problems, intrinsic intentions and political implications. The study of Korean art history in 2015 and 2016 can be summarized by the words ‘twisting’ and ‘looking for diversity.’ ‘Twisting’ is a re ‐ examination of what has been taken for granted from a different point of view. ‘Looking for diversity’ means that the outline of the research field has expanded, and communication and negotiation with other fields has been made. This view is not different from the trends of other humanities, and it may be the direction that art history should pursue in the future. However, if it is based on the humanistic methodology, it is necessary to have a balanced viewpoint in that the art works which are targeted at ‘works’ may fail if the works are omitted. In addition, the research method for each field is so different that the problem of what kind of research methodology is desirable at present is encountered. There are areas that deviate from the essence of art history by analyzing and classifying styles and forms by microscopic methodology and interpreting them by way of over ‐ interpretive methodology. Indeed, it is the time that the worries between art as work and art history as humanities are more serious than ever.

"„Sok szíves üdvözlettel régi barátos...” (“With kind regards, your old friend...”). Coriolan Petranu’s Friendly Connections to the Hungarian Historians. Coriolan Petranu is the founder of modern art history education and scientific research in Transylvania. He had received special education in this field of study that is relatively new in the region. He started his studies in 1911 at the University of Budapest, attending courses in law and art history. During the 1912-1913 academic year he joined the class of Professor Adolph Goldschmiedt (1863-1944) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. The professor was an illustrious personality from the same generation as art historians Emil Mâle, Wilhelm Vögte, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin, specialists who had provided a decisive impetus to art historical research during the twentieth century. In the end of 1913, Coriolan Petranu favored Vienna, with its prestigious art historical school attached to the university from the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he completed and perfected his education under the supervision of Professor Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941). The latter scholar was highly appreciated for his contributions to the field of universal art history by including the cultures of Asia Minor (Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia), revealing the influence that this area had on proto-Christian art, as well as by researching ancient art in Northern Europe. In March 1920 the young art historian successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Inhaltsproblem und Kunstgeschichte (”Content and art history”). He thus earned his doctor in philosophy title that opened him access to higher education teaching and art history research. His debut was positively marked by his activity as museographer at the Fine Art Museum in Budapest (Szepműveszeti Muzeum) in 1917-1918. Coriolan Petranu has researched Romanian vernacular architecture (creating a topography of wooden churches in Transylvania) and his publications were appreciated, published in the era’s specialized periodicals and volumes or presented during international congresses (such as those held in Stockholm in 1933, Warsaw in 1933, Sofia in 1934, Basel in 1936 and Paris in 1937). The Transylvanian art historian under analysis has exchanged numerous letters with specialists in the field. The valuable lot of correspondence, comprising several thousands of letters that he has received from the United States of America, Great Britain, Spain, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Egypt represents a true history of the stage and development of art history as a field of study during the Interwar Period. The archive of the Art History Seminary of the University in Cluj preserves one section dedicated to Hungarian letters that he has send to Hungarian specialists, art historians, ethnographers, ethnologists or colleagues passionate about fine art (Prof. Gerevich Tibor, Prof. Takács Zoltán, Dr. Viski Károly, Count Dr. Teleki Domokos). His correspondence with Fritz Valjavec, editor of the “Südostdeutsche Forschungen” periodical printed in München, is also significant and revealing. The letters in question reveal C. Petranu’s significant contribution through his reviews of books published by Hungarian art historians and ethnographers. Beyond the theoretical debates during which Prof. Petranu has criticized the theories formulated by Prof. Gerevich’s school that envisaged the globalization of Hungarian art between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and that also included in this general category the works of German masters and artists with other ethnic backgrounds, he has also displayed a friendly attitude and appreciation for the activity/works of his Hungarian colleagues (Viski Károly and Takács Zoltán). The previously unpublished Romanian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Romanian set of letters discussed here attest to this. Keywords: Transylvania, correspondence, vernacular architecture, reviews, photographs, Gerevich Tibor, Dr. Viski Károly "

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture. Edited by CAROLINE VAN ECK and EDWARD WINTERS. Ashgate. 2005. pp. xvi + 304. 84 b & w figures. £65.00 (hbk). THE IDENTIFICATION of ‘the visual’ as a field of study follows hard on the heels of ‘the political’ and ‘the ethical’. Depending on one's perspective, the grammatical awkwardness of such terms signals either a forced attempt to give substance and weight to work that lacks the necessary rigour or a welcome departure from traditional approaches. For its proponents, reference to ‘the visual’ provides a way of overcoming the deep-rooted prejudices and assumptions that are built into the older disciplinary designations. In wresting the wider field of visual culture from its subsumption under art history, they have sought to circumvent the privileging of the fine arts over popular culture and to open up new areas of enquiry. It is perhaps inevitable that the readjustment of disciplinary boundaries that were established in the nineteenth century should put pressure on language. Those who have sought to win intellectual and institutional authority for emergent disciplines such as cultural studies have insisted on the need to adopt a less prejudiced vocabulary. However, as the editors of this valuable collection of essays point out, the central paradox of the study of visual culture (as it is currently practiced) is its lack of attention to the specifically visual. Although its roots are still relatively shallow, they are tightly wrapped around twentieth-century models of analysis that are derived from general linguistics, semiotics, and structuralism. By shifting attention to the wider signifying systems within which works of art are made and received, practitioners of visual studies have tended to overlook the specific aesthetic properties of individual works of art and to treat them instead as social and historical documents that are of no greater intrinsic value or interest than other cultural products such as advertising, fashion, and soap operas.

This project studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today, correlating portrayals in ancient Greek myth, nineteenth- century Symbolist painting, and new, controversial, visions of women in contemporary art. The myth of the Medusa has long been the ultimate symbol of woman as monster. With her roots in classical mythology, Medusa has appeared time and again throughout history and culture and this book studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today. Hedgecock presents an interdisciplinary and broad historical “cultural reflections” of the modern Medusa, including the work of Maria Callas, Nan Goldin, the Symbolist painters and twentieth-century poets. This timely and necessary work will be key reading for students and researchers specializing in mythology or gender studies across a variety of fields, touching on interdisciplinary research in feminist theory, art history and theory, cultural studies, and psychology.

Since the late 1980s visibility has become a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. It also brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, and a hotly contested debate unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of visual culture, whose impact can still be felt today. In this first comparative study Susanne von Falkenhausen reveals the concepts of seeing as scholarly act that underwrite these competing approaches to visuality and society, along with the agendas of identity politics that motivate them. In close readings of key texts spanning from the early 20th century to the present the author crosses expertly between American, German, and British versions of art history, cultural studies, aesthetics, and film studies.

Visual culture is an area of study focused on practices of looking and the role of visual representations in the arts, popular and alternative media cultures, institutional and professional contexts, and everyday life. Art history, film and media studies, → cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology are some of the fields in which visual culture study is conducted. Forms of → visual representation studied include → museum display, fine art, film and → Television, old and new media, computer and → video games, digital culture, medical images such as X‐rays and sonograms, and advertising (→ Art as Communication; Painting; Cinema; Film as Popular Culture; Television, Visual Characteristics of; Video; Digital Imagery; Advertisement, Visual Characteristics of).

Art history has lost and rediscovered semiotics several times since the 1950s, and at the moment writers employ an eclectic mixture of theories derived mainly from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. Of the two, Peirce is possibly the more influential model, on account of his tripartite theory of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. (The Saussurean model is identified more closely with the poststructuralist moment in art history, beginning in the 1970s.) The question of semiotics is once again topical now that visual culture is consolidating as a discipline, because the new field can choose from a wide range of semiotic practices – or it can choose to bypass semiotics altogether. This essay is a contribution to that current state of affairs. My principal point is that Peirce is much stranger than he is taken to be: he is idiosyncratic and demanding, and at times outlandishly hermetic. For most of what art history and visual studies aim to do, Peirce is simply not necessary; and when he is pertinent, he is so mainly as a model for concertedly logical thinking of a sort that is rare in visual studies or art history.

The article discusses transcultural art history with Danish examples about Japanese art. This includes an introduction to the concept of transculturation, and how the concept is used in art history research. The core of the argument concerns two interrelated aspects of Danish art historiography: the role of ethnography and the myth of modernism as a Western phenomenon. For the first of these aspects, I analyse the only existing Japanese art history in Danish language, published in 1885. For the other aspect, I analyse recent interpretations of the Danish painter Anna Ancher and her alleged use of formal elements from Japanese woodblock prints. I thereby wish to connect the theoretical issues of transculturation with analyses of transformative and constituent exchange of objects, phenomena and ideas, and point out the potential of the concept of transculturation as both theory and method. An investigation of transcultural connections between Japan and Denmark will contribute to writing a new art history on global interactions.