New Books in Art

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an unusually large number of court cases against artists and curators in Russia. Focusing on prominent cases against the organizers of the exhibitions Caution, Religion! (2003) and Forbidden Art 2006 (2007), Frimmel examines the ways in which the meaning of art and its socio-political effects are argued in court. By placing these cases in a historical context, and comparing them with a number of international case studies, Art Judgements: Art on Trial in Russia After Perestroika (Vernon Press, 2021) reveals how these proceedings have intensified juridical power over artistic freedom (of speech) in Russia over the past two decades.Sandra Frimmel is Research Coordinator of the Centre of Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) and an affiliate of the Department for Slavic Studies at the University of Zürich. Her research interests include Russian art from 19th century through to today, as well as the concepts of art, law, justice, power, and society.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ariana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs.But Cory and Rebecca have solutions to break the stranglehold, and in this episode of Darts and Letters Cory helps Jay explore various chokepoints, from concert tickets to audiobooks, and how we can open up the industries and get workers paid.SUPPORT THE SHOWYou can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.ABOUT THE SHOWFor a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame through which to understand discourses of globalization: the so-called Chinese Atlantic. Elaborating on and complicating various Atlantic discourses (among them Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”), Metzger follows the flows of Chinese labor and capital throughout the Atlantic world, examining various media and aesthetic practices, among them documentary film, public art, and tai chi. As the title implies, Metzger’s book combines multiple disciplinary approaches, including, of course art history and performance studies, to chart the theatricality of seascapes across multiple Atlantic locales. To borrow one of Metzger’s own conceptual metaphors, the book “incorporates” histories and aesthetic genealogies from the Caribbean to the coasts of England and South Africa to propose new modes of apprehending globalization as it constituted through the movement of Chinese people and imaginaries across the ocean. Metzger’s book has been awarded both the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies and the 2021 John W. Frick Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society for best book on theater and performance of/in the Americas. Join us for our conversation about the place of the Chinese Atlantic in Asian and Asian American studies.Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame through which to understand discourses of globalization: the so-called Chinese Atlantic. Elaborating on and complicating various Atlantic discourses (among them Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”), Metzger follows the flows of Chinese labor and capital throughout the Atlantic world, examining various media and aesthetic practices, among them documentary film, public art, and tai chi. As the title implies, Metzger’s book combines multiple disciplinary approaches, including, of course art history and performance studies, to chart the theatricality of seascapes across multiple Atlantic locales. To borrow one of Metzger’s own conceptual metaphors, the book “incorporates” histories and aesthetic genealogies from the Caribbean to the coasts of England and South Africa to propose new modes of apprehending globalization as it constituted through the movement of Chinese people and imaginaries across the ocean. Metzger’s book has been awarded both the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies and the 2021 John W. Frick Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society for best book on theater and performance of/in the Americas. Join us for our conversation about the place of the Chinese Atlantic in Asian and Asian American studies.Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emergence of modernist art in early twentieth-century China and to the nation’s larger modernization project. Amanda S. Wangwright’s analysis of a wealth of primary sources demonstrates how these women constructed public personas, negotiated space within art societies, applied feminist thought to their artistic praxis, and surmounted obstacles to their careers—wielding art as the “golden key” to professional advancement and gender equality.Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary.Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A bold reorientation of art history that bridges the divide between fine art and material culture through an examination of objects and their uses art history is often viewed through cultural or national lenses that define some works as fine art while relegating others to the category of craft. Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton UP, 2022) points the way to an interconnected history of art, examining a broad array of functional aesthetic objects that transcend geographic and temporal boundaries and challenging preconceived ideas about what is and is not art. Avoiding traditional binaries such as East versus West and fine art versus decorative art, Edward Cooke looks at the production, consumption, and circulation of objects made from clay, fiber, wood, and nonferrous base metals. Carefully considering the materials and process of making, and connecting process to product and people, he demonstrates how objects act on those who look at, use, and acquire them. He reveals how objects retain aspects of their local fabrication while absorbing additional meanings in subtle and unexpected ways as they move through space and time. In emphasizing multiple centers of art production amid constantly changing contexts, Cooke moves beyond regional histories driven by geography, nation-state, time period, or medium. Beautifully illustrated, Global Objects traces the social lives of objects from creation to purchase, and from use to experienced meaning, charting exciting new directions in art history.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray/Penguin, 2022) by Hettie Judah is a beautifully designed collection of true stories/essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history.The earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia stitched in gemstones onto the front of her bodices.Through the realms of art, myth, geology, philosophy and power, the story of humanity can be told through the minerals and materials that have allowed us to evolve and create. From the Taiwanese national treasure known as the Meat-Shaped Stone to Malta’s prehistoric “fat lady” temples carved in globigerina limestone to the amethyst crystals still believed to have healing powers, Lapidarium is a jewel box of sixty far-flung stones and the stories that accompany them. Together, they explore how human culture has formed stone, and the roles stone has played in forming human culture.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art