Octavian Esanu - Böcker

This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each chapter provides a distinct perspective on the early days of the fine arts genre of the nude, as its author studies a particular aspect through analysis of artworks and historical documents from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. The volume examines a rich body of reproductions of both primary documents and of works of art made by Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian artists or of anonymous book illustrations from the nineteenth century Ottoman erotic literature.

This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called "contemporary art" – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called "contemporary art" – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each chapter provides a distinct perspective on the early days of the fine arts genre of the nude, as its author studies a particular aspect through analysis of artworks and historical documents from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. The volume examines a rich body of reproductions of both primary documents and of works of art made by Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian artists or of anonymous book illustrations from the nineteenth century Ottoman erotic literature.

The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a western ‘open society’ by means of art. This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of this new social order by studying the programme’s rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with ‘contemporary art’ as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.

"Mind-blowing... What we get here is not the insight in some secret core of Jameson's thought lost in later gentrified published versions but, on the contrary, a flow of improvisations and mental experimentations where the detours through secondary topics are often more precious than the main line of argumentation." - Slavoj ZizekMimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson's Duke University seminar on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time.Comprised of twenty-one seminar transcripts in which Jameson engages with his students as they explore Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modern art, this volume is also the first and only record of Jameson's teachings and pedagogic practice.Transcribed directly from audio recordings taken by the editor when the seminar was given in 2003, and presented like a play with closed captioning and stage directions, Mimesis, Expression, Construction is a new entry in the work of one of the greatest living philosophers.