Topic Review
Aesthetic Education in Chinese Schools
Since the promulgation of the first school education regulations in the early 20th century, Chinese school aesthetic education has gone through its first century of history. Six stages of development have been formed in this century of vicissitudes, namely, the budding period, the starting period, the salvation movement period, the tortuous development period, the reconstruction period, and the modernization period of the new era. Aesthetic education in Chinese schools places a prominent place on “establishing, cultivating and clarifying morality”, emphasizes the role of “beauty” in “goodness”, and follows the aesthetic guideline of “unity of beauty and goodness”. Art education and its practical activities are the main content of school aesthetic education. The formation mechanism, laws, and characteristics of the sustainable development of school aesthetic education in China are summarized from the perspective of the century-old school aesthetic education policy, which is of theoretical guidance for the study of the future development of school aesthetic education in China.
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  • 11 Apr 2023
Topic Review
AI Art
Artists have been working with artificial intelligence (AI) since the 1970s. They comprised a minuscule enclave within the early computer art community throughout the 1970s and 1980s and were largely unnoticed by the mainstream artworld and broader public. In the 1990s and 2000s, more artists got involved with AI and produced installations that question the meaning of agency, creativity, and expression. Since the 2000s, AI art diversified into generative and interactive approaches that involved statistical methods, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and computer vision algorithms. The increasing affordance of multilayered machine learning architectures, as well as the raising socio-political impact of AI, have facilitated the further expansion of AI art in the second half of the 2010s. The topics, methodologies, presentational formats, and implications of contemporary AI art are closely related to, and affected by, AI science research, development, and commercial application. The poetic scope of AI art is primarily informed by the various phenomenological aspects of sub-symbolic machine learning. It comprises creative strategies that explore the epistemological boundaries and artifacts of AI architectures; sample the latent space of neural networks; aestheticize the AI data renderings; and critique the conceptual, existential, or socio-political consequences of corporate AI; a few works criticize AI art itself. These strategies unfold in disparate practices ranging from popular and spectacular to tactical and experimental. The existing taxonomies or categorizations of AI art should be considered as provisory because of the creative dynamics and transdisciplinary character of the field. Similar to other computational art disciplines, AI art has had an ambivalent relationship with the mainstream artworld, marked by selective marginalization and occasional exploitation.
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  • 27 Jan 2022
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Alphonse II of Aragon (1164–1196)
Alphonse II King of Aragon (1164–1196). He was the first king of the Crown of Aragon and son of the Queen Petronila of Aragon (1157–1164) and the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV (1137–1162). Aware of the new political reality that he embodied as King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, Alphonse II made significant changes to his iconography. Among the most important of these is the binomial that he incorporated to his pendent seals; that is, a portrayal of Alphonse enthroned as king on the obverse and Alphonse as count and mounted on a horse on the reverse. As a known bibliophile and as a result of his desire to reorganise his chancellery following the union of various political entities, he ordered the compilation of the Liber Feudorum Maior, the folios of which demonstrate his potestas regia through their lavish iconography. He was no less innovative in his coinage, on which he included, for the first time, the image of his head wearing the crown.
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  • 13 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Aragonite and Unusual Pigments Identification
Aragonite is a mineralogical form of calcium carbonate, mainly of biogenic origin. Historical sources report its use in Roman times as an aggregate in mortars, and in the literature it has only been shown in Roman wall paintings. Thus, its use in 16thcentury wall paintings of the church of Santo Stefano in Selva (Cerignale, Apennines of central Italy) is surprising.
  • 706
  • 01 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Australian Modernism
Australian Modernism, similar to European and American Modernism was a social, political and cultural movement that was a reaction to rampant Industrialisation, associated moral panic of modernity and the death and trauma of the World Wars. This movement was predominately a reaction of female artists towards the male dominated art style of naturalism. It is also important to note the presence of Indigenous Art during this time of modernity. Indigenous Modernism refers to the unique experience of modernity of Aboriginal people that is vastly different to the White Australians experience of Modernity. The mainstream movement began in Australia approximately in 1914 and continued until 1948. Throughout these years tensions continued between the conservative and the Avant-garde schools of thought. The years following the Second World War is when Australian Modernism gained notability in the art world of Australia. Nationalistic pastoral painting of the Australian landscape were superseded by abstracted, colourful distorted images of Modernist works. After the World Wars the dynamics of society in Australia and overseas changed dramatically causing increased acceptance and attraction towards Modernism. Social and political unrest continued due to the devastation of war and increased immigration occurred. This caused a subsequent amount of European artists to travel to Australia to live. This contributed to the introduction of further art styles to Australia such as Surrealism, social realism and expressionism. Additionally, continued technological progress in the later 20th century contributed to an increase in cubism and print making. The first Indigenous Modernist or Modern Artist is said to be the Artists Albert Namatjira. He created art that aligned with the styles and techniques of western Modernism in Australia and Europe. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that scholars began to call Indigenous Art Modern as there was a distinction made between Modern and Contemporary art to traditional Indigenous art. However, it is argued that all types of Indigenous Art is Modernist as it is all an aesthetic expression of Indigenous experiences of modernity.
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  • 28 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Authenticity in Art
Authenticity in art is the different ways in which a work of art or an artistic performance may be considered authentic. Denis Dutton distinguishes between nominal authenticity and expressive authenticity. The first refers to the correct identification of the author of a work of art, to how closely a performance of a play or piece of music conforms to the author's intention, or to how closely a work of art conforms to an artistic tradition. The second sense refers to how much the work possesses original or inherent authority, how much sincerity, genuineness of expression, and moral passion the artist or performer puts into the work. A quite different concern is the authenticity of the experience, which may be impossible to achieve. A modern visitor to a museum may not only see an object in a very different context from that which the artist intended, but may be unable to understand important aspects of the work. The authentic experience may be impossible to recapture. Authenticity is a requirement for inscription upon the UNESCO World Heritage List. According to the Nara Document on Authenticity, it can be expressed through 'form and design; materials and substance; use and function; traditions and techniques; location and setting; spirit and feeling; and other internal and external factors.'
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  • 09 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Born in Translation and Iteration
João Delgado’s poetry first appeared as an anthology of translated poetry in He’arat Shulaym Issue 1, published in November 2001 in Jerusalem by the artist collective Sala-Manca. The entire issue was devoted to João Delgado. Delgado was a Portuguese-Argentinean poet, born in Lisbon circa 1920 (or not), who left Portugal as a political refugee for Buenos Aires. He disappeared in 1976 during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Since 1976, there has been no trace of his fate, although new fragments of his work are constantly being discovered, translated, and published by the Sala-Manca group.
  • 204
  • 22 May 2023
Topic Review
Camille Bryen Avant-Gardist/Abhumanist
French artist and poet Camille Bryen (1907–1977) is usually, and always very briefly, cited as a member of the post-Second World War (1939–1945) lyrical abstraction trend in Paris, often designated as Ecole de Paris or Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, Tachisme, or Informel. Bryen painted hybrids of plants, animals, rocks, and humans, mixing the organic with the inorganic, evoking cellular agglomerations, geological structures, or prehistorical drawings. He emphasized the materiality and the process through thick impasto, visible brushstrokes, and automatic drawing. Along with other abstract painters in post-war Paris, Bryen’s work is usually associated with vague humanist interpretations and oversimplified existentialism.
  • 352
  • 11 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Chimera (Mythology)
The Chimera (/kɪˈmɪərə/ or /kaɪˈmɪərə/, also Chimaera (Chimæra); Greek: Χίμαιρα, Chímaira "she-goat") was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of more than one animal. It is usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat arising from its back, and a tail that might end with a snake's head, and was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. The term Chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals, or to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling. The sight of a Chimera was an omen for disaster.
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  • 16 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Crossing Borders in the Work of Perejaume
The Catalan artist Perejaume (b. 1957) visualizes the migration of art movements across geographical and political borders. In doing so, the artist offers visual forms for intangible journeys through time and space. In sharp contrast to earlier concepts of the development of art, from Vasari’s cyclical model of rise and fall to Alfred H. Barr’s linear ‘Development of Cubism and Abstract Art’, Perejaume’s drawings offer a less definitive, more suggestive, visualization of the migration of art movements. 
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  • 17 Mar 2022
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