Category Archives: Philosophy

Vanitas

A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Best-known are vanitas still lifes, a common genre in Netherlandish art of the 16th and 17th centuries; they have also been created at other times and in other media and genres. Vanitas means ‘futility’ or ‘worthlessness’, that is, the pointlessness of earthly goods and pursuits, alluding to Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8 Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, translated “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” in the King James Bible. Etymology The Latin noun vānĭtās (from the Latin adjective vanus ’empty’) means ’emptiness’, ‘futility’, or ‘worthlessness’, the traditional Christian view being that earthly goods and pursuits are transient and worthless. It alludes to Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8, where vanitas translates the Hebrew word hevel, which also includes the concept of transitoriness. Themes…

Remodernism

Remodernism revives aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, and follows postmodernism, to which it contrasts. Adherents of remodernism advocate it as a forward and radical, not reactionary, impetus. In 2000, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, founders of the stuckism art movement instigated remodernism, with a manifesto, Remodernism in an attempt to introduce a period of new spirituality into art, culture and society to replace postmodernism, which they said was cynical and spiritually bankrupt. In 2002, a remodernism art show in Albuquerque was accompanied by an essay from University of California, Berkeley art professor, Kevin Radley, who said there was a renewal of artists working without the limitation of irony and cynicism, and that there was a renewal of the sense of beauty. In 2006, the Stedelijk Museum and the University of Amsterdam held a talk on remodernism with Daniel Birnbaum and Alison Gingeras; the introduction to this talked…

Yellow color in history and art

Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of visible light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 570–590 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In the RGB color model, used to create colors on television and computer screens, yellow is a secondary color made by combining red and green at equal intensity. Carotenoids give the characteristic yellow color to autumn leaves, corn, canaries, daffodils, and lemons, as well as egg yolks, buttercups, and bananas. They absorb light energy and protect plants from photodamage. Sunlight has a slight yellowish hue, due to the surface temperature of the sun. Because it was widely available, yellow ochre pigment was one of the first colors used in art; the Lascaux cave in France has a painting of a yellow horse 17,000 years old. Ochre and orpiment…

Red color in history and art

Red is the color at the end of the visible spectrum of light, next to orange and opposite violet. It has a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–740 nanometres. It is a primary color in the RGB color model and the CMYK color model, and is the complementary color of cyan. Reds range from the brilliant yellow-tinged scarlet and vermillion to bluish-red crimson, and vary in shade from the pale red pink to the dark red burgundy. The red sky at sunset results from Rayleigh scattering, while the red color of the Grand Canyon and other geological features is caused by hematite or red ochre, both forms of iron oxide. Iron oxide also gives the red color to the planet Mars. The red colour of blood comes from protein hemoglobin, while ripe strawberries, red apples and reddish autumn leaves are colored by anthocyanins. Red pigment made from ochre was one of…

Blue colour in history and art

Blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments in painting and traditional colour theory, as well as in the RGB colour model. It lies between violet and green on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. Most blues contain a slight mixture of other colors; azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains some violet. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. An optical effect called Tyndall scattering explains blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called atmospheric perspective. Blue has been an important colour in art and decoration since ancient times. The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was used in ancient Egypt for jewellery and ornament and later, in the Renaissance, to make the pigment ultramarine, the…

Brown color in history and art

Brown is a composite color. In the CMYK color model used in printing or painting, brown is made by combining red, black, and yellow, or red, yellow, and blue. In the RGB color model used to project colors onto television screens and computer monitors, brown is made by combining red and green, in specific proportions. The brown color is seen widely in nature, in wood, soil, human hair color, eye color and skin pigmentation. Brown is the color of dark wood or rich soil. According to public opinion surveys in Europe and the United States, brown is the least favorite color of the public; the color is most often associated with plainness, the rustic and poverty. History and art Ancient history Brown has been used in art since prehistoric times. Paintings using umber, a natural clay pigment composed of iron oxide and manganese oxide, have been dated to 40,000 BC.…

White color in history and art

White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue), because it fully reflects and scatters all the visible wavelengths of light. It is the color of fresh snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. In ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, priestesses wore white as a symbol of purity, and Romans wore a white toga as a symbol of citizenship. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance a white unicorn symbolized chastity, and a white lamb sacrifice and purity. It was the royal color of the Kings of France, and of the monarchist movement that opposed the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Greek and Roman temples were faced with white marble, and beginning in the 18th century, with the advent of neoclassical architecture, white became the most common color of new churches, capitols and other government buildings, especially in the United States. It was also…

Gray Color in history and art

Gray is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning literally that it is a color “without color.” It is the color of a cloud-covered sky, of ash and of lead. The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700. Grey is the dominant spelling in European and Commonwealth English, although gray remained in common usage in the UK until the second half of the 20th century. Gray has been the preferred American spelling since approximately 1825, although grey is an accepted variant. In Europe and the United States, surveys show that grey is the color most commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and modesty. Only one percent of respondents chose it as their favorite color. In history and art Antiquity through the Middle Ages In antiquity and the Middle…

Orange colour in history and art

Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. In painting and traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, created by mixing yellow and red. It is named after the fruit of the same name. The orange colour of carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, oranges, and many other fruits and vegetables comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the sun into chemical energy for the plants’ growth. Similarly the hues of autumn leaves are from the same pigment after chlorophyll is removed. In Europe and America, surveys show that orange is the colour most associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroverts, warmth, fire, energy, activity, danger, taste and aroma, Protestantism, the autumn and Allhallowtide seasons,…

Purple in history and art

Purple is a color intermediate between blue and red. It is similar to violet, but unlike violet, which is a spectral color with its own wavelength on the visible spectrum of light, purple is a composite color made by combining red and blue. According to surveys in Europe and the U.S., purple is the color most often associated with royalty, magic, mystery, and piety. When combined with pink, it is associated with eroticism, femininity, and seduction. Purple was the color worn by Roman magistrates; it became the imperial color worn by the rulers of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and later by Roman Catholic bishops. Similarly in Japan, the color is traditionally associated with the Emperor and aristocracy. The complementary color of purple is yellow. In art, history and fashion In prehistory and the ancient world: Tyrian purple Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic…

Pink color in history and art

Pink is a pale red color that is named after a flower of the same name. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most often associated with charm, politeness, sensitivity, tenderness, sweetness, childhood, femininity and the romantic. It is associated with chastity and innocence when combined with white, but associated with eroticism and seduction when combined with purple or black. History, art and fashion From prehistory to post-classical history The color pink has been described in literature since ancient times. In the Odyssey, written in approximately 800 BCE, Homer wrote “Then, when the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn appeared…” Roman poets also described the color. Roseus is the Latin word meaning “rosy” or “pink.” Lucretius used the word to describe the dawn in his epic poem On the Nature of Things…

Black color in history and art

Black is the darkest color, the result of the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, literally a color without hue, like white (its opposite) and gray. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness, while white represents light. Black ink is the most common color used for printing books, newspapers and documents, because it has the highest contrast with white paper and is the easiest to read. For the same reason, black text on a white screen is the most common format used on computer screens. In color printing it is used along with the subtractive primaries cyan, yellow, and magenta, in order to help produce the darkest shades. Black and white have often been used to describe opposites; particularly truth and ignorance, good and evil, the “Dark Ages” versus Age of Enlightenment. Since the Middle Ages black has been the symbolic…

Perceptual art

Perceptual art is a form of art that can trace its roots to the art history concepts of perceptualism as well as to twentieth century inventions of conceptual art and performance art. Perceptual art delineates the aspects of art that need explaining: not just why it is attractive, but why fine execution and form.Perceptual art states certain constraints, and explain pleasure in contemplation, not value extracted from the object by activities other than contemplation. The theory is that aesthetic pleasure is a motivation for learning skills. Two forms of pleasure are postulated. The first accompanies the spontaneous activity necessary for learning a more or less universal basic level of skill. The second accompanies highly skilled activity. This second kind of pleasure is specific to art as such. Perceptualism The concept of perceptualism has been discussed in historical and philosophical explorations of art and psychology, thus it forms an innate relationship…

Fourth dimension in art

New possibilities opened up by the concept of four-dimensional space (and difficulties involved in trying to visualize it) helped inspire many modern artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, and abstract artists took ideas from higher-dimensional mathematics and used them to radically advance their work. The idea of the fourth dimension is conveyed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the most diverse channels. A field of work in the exact sciences, it has been distributed by Poincaré publications to a wide audience. The fourth dimension quickly became a favorite subject of popular mathematics, science fiction, esotericism and art. It could be called the hyperspace philosophy. The representations of the mathematical vulgarizations of the higher dimensions give rise to a flowering of illustrations of geometric solids all more complicated than the others. N – dimensional geometries and non – Euclidean geometries are two…

Assemblage

Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts, and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials. Technique The assemblage is obtained by incorporating into a work of art not specifically artistic three-dimensional materials and “found objects”, ie everyday objects that, elevated to the state of the art, allow artists to challenge the traditional idea of art itself. Initially it takes inspiration from the collage. “Space, in the assemblage, does not exert any ‘syntax’, does not impose any ordering principle”: “no point of view” is “privileged”, since “every trait” wants to “be equally impressive”. Furthermore there are no rules for its realization: “the cluster of heterogeneous materials can proliferate at will”. Features Assemblage is…

Hypermodernist art

Hypermodernism is a cultural, artistic, literary and architectural successor to modernism and postmodernism in which the form (attribute) of an object has no context distinct from its function. Attributes can include shapes, colors, ratios, and even time. Unlike postmodernism and modernism, hypermodernism exists in an era of fault-tolerant technological change and treats extraneous attributes (most conspicuously physical form) as discordant with function. While modernism and post-modernism debate the value of the “box” or absolute reference point, hypermodernism focuses on improvising attributes of the box (reference point now an extraneous value rather than correct or incorrect value) so that all of its attributes are non-extraneous; it also excises attributes that are extraneous. Hypermodernism is not a debate over truth or untruth as per modernism/postmodernism; rather it is a debate over what is and is not an extraneous attribute. Synchrony between previously-clashing objects (now attributes) and amorphous self-identity coupled with allusions to…

Metaphysical art

Metaphysical painting (Italian: pittura metafisica) or metaphysical art was a style of painting developed by the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began in 1910 with de Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality, “painting that which cannot be seen”. De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917. The term ” metaphysics ” was used for the first time by the philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BC) to title those works of Aristotle that did not deal with the previous topic, physics for the very reason, and that precisely for this reason they were cataloged in the ” metaphysics “(literally” half “” tà “” physikà “), a term that if translated means” after physics “. Metaphysical art applied to the work of Giortio de…

Excessivism

Excessivism is an art movement which was introduced in 2015 by American artist and curator Kaloust Guedel with an exhibition titled Excessivist Initiative. A preview of the exhibition written by art critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot, titled “Excessivism: Irony, Imbalance and a New Rococo” was published in the Huffington Post. Its early adopters go back to late 20th century. Excessive – to go beyond the usual, necessary, or proper limit or degree. To have a certain urge ”to acquire material goods beyond one’s needs and often means.”. Excessivism, as a new global art movement, tends to be a commentary on the economic materialism. The movement draws our attention to a capitalist system where it’s all about profits at all, or better yet, minimal costs, meaning there’s absolutely no consideration of aspects like the human and the environmental ones. While one part of our world squanders precious natural resources, the…

Guide Tour of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, France

Saint-Germain-des-Prés is one of the four administrative quarters of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France, located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. St-Germain-des-Prés, the 6th Arrondissement of Paris, is best known for the literary and artistic celebrities who lived and worked here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was the meeting point for existentialists, painters, and writers. Today the heart and soul of the 6th arrondissement, St-Germain-des-Prés is one of Paris’ most charming neighborhoods, just bursting with fine food shops, restaurants, markets and picturesque streets lined with cafés. Known as the true center of Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés is one of the most literary and best shopping areas in the city. It’s a real delight to living here, right next to the garden with its stone fountains, its budding idylls, its ornate busts and statues. If you stay in St-Germain everything is at your doorstep, cafes,…

Review of Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, Italy

The 15th Venice International Architecture Exhibition, open to the public from May 28 to November 27 2016 at the Giardini and the Arsenale. Titled “REPORTING FROM THE FRONT”, is directed by Alejandro Aravena and organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta. The Exhibition also includes 63 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the historic city centre of Venice. Four countries are participating for the first time: Philippines, Nigeria, Seychelles and Yemen. The Exhibition Reporting From The Front is laid out in a unitary exhibition sequence from the Central Pavilion (Giardini) to the Arsenale, and includes 88 participants from 37 different countries. 50 of them are participating for the first time, and 33 architects are under the age of 40. The theme image shows, a lady climbing up onto the highest steps can gaze over a far broader horizon, and…

Art methodology

Art methodology refers to a studied and constantly reassessed, questioned method within the arts, as opposed to a method merely applied (without thought). This process of studying the method and reassessing its effectiveness allows art to move on and change. It is not the thing itself but it is an essential part of the process. An artist drawing, for instance, may choose to draw from what he or she observes in front of them, or from what they imagine or from what they already know about the subject. These 3 methods will, very probably, produce 3 very different pictures. A careful methodology would include examination of the materials and tools used and how a different type of canvas/brush/paper/pencil/rag/camera/chisel etc. would produce a different effect. The artist may also look at various effects achieved by starting in one part of a canvas first, or by working over the whole surface equally.…

Geocriticism

Geocriticism is a method of literary analysis and literary theory that incorporates the study of geographic space. The term designates a number of different critical practices. In France, Bertrand Westphal has elaborated the concept of géocritique in several works. In the United States, Robert Tally has argued for a geocriticism as a critical practice suited to the analysis of what he has termed “literary cartography”. The current concept of geocritics belongs to Professor Bertrand Westphal of the Faculty of Letters in Limoges, who has devoted several scientific works and manifestations to him, among them the article For a geocritical approach to texts. Geocritics aims to be an interdisciplinary reading, an interface between different disciplines such as literature, geography, architecture, philosophy, geopolitics, urbanism, which all have as object of study the space. The method of geocritics is oriented in four directions: multifocalization, polysensory, stratigraphy and intertextuality. Geocritics is thus a poetics…

Environmental justice

Environmental justice emerged as a concept in the United States in the early 1980s. The term has two distinct uses with the more common usage describing a social movement that focuses on the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. The other use is an interdisciplinary body of social science literature that includes theories of the environment and justice, environmental laws and their implementations, environmental policy and planning and governance for development and sustainability, and political ecology. Environmental justice can also affect the effects of climate change; In this context, sometimes we talk about injustice and / or climate justice. This concept implies that there are rights for nature for all; individuals, families, communities, businesses and other human groups in relation to the environment considered as a common good, but in exchange for legal duties and obligations, and in accordance with UNDP assumed by Fabrice Flipo (2002), «In the absence…

Environmental ethics

Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to including the non-human world. It exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and environmental geography. Environmental ethics is a relatively new area of applied ethics. Therefore, some terms are still used differently. For example, environmental ethics is often referred to as ecological ethics or, erroneously, as environmental philosophy. Important areas of environmental ethics are the animal ethics, dealing with the moral verantwortbaren handling of animals is concerned; the natural ethics of dealing with biological units such as populations, species, biotopes, ecosystems or landscapes; the environmental ethics in the narrower sense, which deals with the handling of natural resources and environmental media (for example, water, soil, climate, genetic diversity). Various positions A central question of environmental ethics is which being…