Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a deep insight and comprehension of the world of Art. Contents: What is Art? The Structure of Art Significance of Materials Used in Art Describing Art - Formal Analysis, Types, and Styles of Art Meaning in Art - Socio-Cultural Contexts, Symbolism, and Iconography Connecting Art to Our Lives Form in Architecture Art and Identity Art and Power Art and Ritual Life - Symbolism of Space and Ritual Objects, Mortality, and Immortality Art and Ethics

This book is for art market researchers at all levels. A brief overview of the global art market and its major stakeholders precedes an analysis of the various sales venues (auction, commercial gallery, etc.). Library research skills are reviewed, and advanced methods are explored in a chapter devoted to basic market research. Because the monetary value of artwork cannot be established without reference to the aesthetic qualities and art historical significance of our subject works, two substantial chapters detail the processes involved in researching and documenting the fine and decorative arts, respectively, and provide annotated bibliographies. Methods for assigning values for art objects are explored, and sources of price data, both in print and online, are identified and described in detail. In recent years, art historical scholarship increasingly has addressed issues related to the history of art and its markets: a chapter on resources for the historian of the art market offers a wide range of sources. Finally, provenance and art law are discussed, with particular reference to their relevance to dealers, collectors, artists and other art market stakeholders.

This detailed book is a “how-to” guide to building controlled vocabulary tools, cataloging and indexing cultural materials with terms and names from controlled vocabularies, and using vocabularies in search engines and databases to enhance discovery and retrieval online. Also covered are the following: What are controlled vocabularies and why are they useful? Which vocabularies exist for cataloging art and cultural objects? How should they be integrated in a cataloging system? How should they be used for indexing and for retrieval? How should an institution construct a local authority file? The links in a controlled vocabulary ensure that relationships are defined and maintained for both cataloging and retrieval, clarifying whether a rose window and a Catherine wheel are the same thing, or how pot-metal glass is related to the more general term stained glass. The book provides organizations and individuals with a practical tool for creating and implementing vocabularies as reference tools, sources of documentation, and powerful enhancements for online searching.

"This bibliography supplements the greatest of modern art bibliographies, Etta Arntzen and Robert Rainwater's Guide to the literature of art history (ALA, 1980)"--Preface.

This compilation focuses on the indexing of history textbooks, including art history, medieval and Renaissance history, Latin American history, and gender and sexual orientation language issues. The intelligent advice of contributors will assist both new and experienced indexers who work in the field of history and related disciplines.

How design can improve the quality of our everyday lives by engaging the invisible electromagnetic environment in which we live. As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from "intelligent" toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the "electrosphere" in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends. The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, "mixing criticism with optimism." Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include "Electroclimates," animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; "When Objects Dream...," consumer products that "dream" in electromagnetic waves; "Thief of Affection," which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; "Tuneable Cities," which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the "Faraday Chair: Negative Radio," enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield. Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: "Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable." His project and proposals challenge it to do so.

What is art history? Why, how and where did it originate, and how have its aims and methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century,debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field''s most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner,Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi''s introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake.His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field. From the pre-publication reviews: ''Until now, anthologies about the history of art have tended to be worthy yet inert, plotting a linear evolution from the great precursors (Vasari, Winckelmann) to the founding fathers of the modern discipline (Wolfflin, Riegl, Panofsky) to the achievements and refinements of today''s scholarship.The texts that Donald Preziosi has brought together provide something far more challenging: the juxtapositions and alignments between individual essays point the reader towards unresolved problems, ongoing debates, and paths not takenor not taken yet. In place of the consoling tale of intellectualprogress, the collection defamiliarizes the whole field, and opens up a space for radical reflection on its basic procedures and assumptions. Definitely the best introduction to art history currently available.'' Professor Norman Bryson, Harvard University ''Donald Preziosi has prepared an anthologyfrom the Greek, a collection of flowersof art history. His bouquet contains representatives from the discipline''s two-hundred year history, arranged in standard and innovative methodological categories. Within each, the readings selected providestimulating congruencies and contradictions that will inspire productive debate and contemplation. But what makes this anthology more than an arresting assemblage is the author''s critical stance toward what he has wrought. His introduction and concluding chapter write around and under the subjectspresented, emphasizing the ''art'' of art history, its kinship with modernity''s post-Enlightenment project, and its collaboration with the rise of nationalism. Thus the discipline''s past is probed and questioned and made relevant for its present and future. The whole thereby addresses, withouthealing or concealing, the disciplinary ruptures of modernism. The book might also have explored further nature of art history''s history within the emergent discourse of post-colonialism and the globalization of culture Yet the many new perspectives it does offer help to re-present the discipline for its readers, students, teachers, and curators, for other areas of humanistic inquiry, which are being subject to similar critiques, and for artists and the larger art community, for whom history, narrative, and anaccounting of art''s past have once again become vital issues'' Professor Robert S. Nelson, Professor of Art History and Chair, Committee for the History of Culture, University of Chicago ''Rather than focusing on its Vasarian moment or on the later academic institutionalization of art history in the 19th and 20th centuries, Donald Preziosi, in The Art of Art History, constructs a reading of this hegemonic and reductive practice of making ''the visible legible'' as one that isinextricably tied to the museographic paradigm of late 18th and early 19th centuries. This shift, he sees as equivalent in importance to the brought by the ''invention'' of perspective. But the author goes further than to underline the implication of art history with the premises of modernity, hemakes a strong case, in a vivid and inspiring prose, for a tighter equation between art history and modernity: an equation grounded in his insightful considerations (and meteoric formulations) of the epistemological setting, rhetorical operations political (colonialist) aims and schizophrenic yetall-invasive aestheticization of knowledge that, in the last two centuries, have fashioned what we will no longer dare to call the discipline of art history. The result is a flamboyant book that offers anything but a celebratory reading of art history. It does not constitute an articulation of canonical texts or an up-to-date menu of art historical currents, methods, or trends. Yet it manages to avoid none of these dimensions. Art history is notenvisages as the learned discourse of modernity on a specific class of objects nor is it reduced to a genealogy of outstanding artist-subjects and their volatile constellations of contemporary subjects-readers. It becomes a practice wherein objects and subjects relate and relations oftencrystallize, under the unrecognized aegis of the fetish, this Other of art, since Preziosi concisely defines art as ''the anti-fetish fetish''. Far from the fantastic neutrality that is traditionally found in the format of such an historiographic endeavour, Preziosi frames his selection of text andthreads through them with an array of different strategic voices, superimposed (to stress a spatial figure he is keen to discern) in order to elaborate a strong polemic position that situates art history as an enduring and well disguised fictional genre. In the process, the author courageouslytakes on the paradox that is at the core of his project: to introduce students to the coming out o art history... as art, one that is not necessarily meant to be our coming out of it but that certainly well establishes our motives to continue to shake its grounds and its multi-storied apparatus.'' Professor Johanne Lamoureux, University of Montreal.