From popular genre films to cult avant-garde works, this book is an essential guide to Japan's vibrant cinema culture. It collects two decades of the best of Mark Schilling's film writing for Variety, Japan Times, and other publications. The book offers an in-depth look at hundreds of landmark Japanese movies as well as undeservedly neglected ones. The essays and detailed analyses are interwoven with more than sixty interviews showcasing Japan's most talented directors and stars. This book enables students, teachers, and lovers of Japanese cinema to make new discoveries while learning more about their favorite films. Mark Schilling set off for Japan in 1975 to immerse himself in the culture, learn the language, and haunt the theaters. He has been there ever since. In 1989 he became a regular film reviewer for The Japan Times, and has written on Japanese film for publications including Variety, Screen International, Premier, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Japan Quarterly, Winds, Cinemaya, and Kinema Jumpo.

A frank, provocative, and entirely unconventional look at two worlds in tandem--the realms of money and art. Profusely illustrated, the book investigates how money becomes (or is) artwork and how artwork comes to assume some of the characteristics of money. 9 color plates; 100 halftones.

This book offers a compelling perspective on the striking similarity of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Combining the history and theory of art with theories of contemporary culture and marketing, Maria A. Slowinska chooses three angles (space, object/experience, persona) to bridge present and past, aesthetic appearance and theoretical discourse, and traditional divisions between art and commerce. Beyond both pessimistic and celebratory rhetorics, »Art/Commerce« illuminates contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.

This work was originally published in the Brown Judaic Studies series in 1984 by Scholars Press. It was first brought to my attention by Sarah Schwarz at Penn. The book describes the thinking of the Hellenistic Jewish community outside Palestine, beyond rabbinic influence, in the early days of the Christian church. It particularly addresses their influences on the Church, their interactions with it, and their shared cultural perceptions. The author's social-anthropologic approach to the history of religion was ground-breaking. This new edition of the work is accompanied by a comprehensive new introduction and updated bibliographysituating the book in the literature, bringing its content up to date, and describing its influence on subsequent work.

This volume collects contributions written by eight authors interested in different research areas in East Asian Studies. Divided into a Japanese and a Chinese section, it explores topics ranging from East Asian literatures to contact linguistics and sociology. The Japanese section contains four essays about contemporary Japanese cinema and different aspects of Japanese modern and contemporary literature (i.e. the literary motif of kame naku, ‘crying turtle’, yuri manga, and tenkō bungaku, the ‘literature of conversion’). The Chinese section concerns two main macro-topics: on the one hand, it focuses on issues related to cultural contacts between Italy and China; on the other hand, it deals with Chinese migration to Italy, highlighting socio-historical aspects and cultural production.

High Art Lite takes a cool and critical look at the way in which British art in the 1990s has reinvented itself, successfully appealing both to the mass media and to the elite art world. In this extensively illustrated polemic, Julian Stallabrass asks whether it has done so at the price of dumbing down and selling out. 18 color and 53 b/w photographs.

A cultural history of the first truly modern art market, Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present furthers the burgeoning exploration of Britain's struggle to carve a niche for itself on the international art scene. Bringing together scholars from the UK, US, Europe, and Asia, this collection sheds new light on such crucial notions as the internationalization of the art market; the emergence of an increasingly complex exhibition culture; issues of national rivalry and emulation; artists' individual and collective strategies for their own promotion and survival; the persistent anti-commercialism of an elite group of art lovers and critics and accusations of philistinism levelled at the middle classes; as well as an unquestionable native British genius at reconciling jarring discourses. Essays explore the unresolved tension between artistic aspirations and commercial interest - a tension that has come to shape Britain's national artistic tradition - from the perspectives of artists, dealers and (super-) collectors, and the upwardly mobile middle classes whose consumerism gave rise to the British art market as it is known today. Specific case studies include Whistler, Roger Fry, Damien Hirst, and Charles Saatchi; essays consider art markets from London and Manchester to Paris and Flanders.

While historians have explored the impact on workers of changes in American business, the broader impact on other cultural forms, and vice versa, has not been widely studied. This anthology contributes to the debate at the intersection of business history and the study of cultural forms, ranging from material to visual culture to literature.