The Ephemeral,the Essential and the Material in the Conservation of Contemporary Art: Decision-Making for the Conservation of a Work of Art Made with Butterfly Wings

This article presents the intervention process carried out on a work of art created by artist Yolanda Gutiérrez Acosta, using a series of ephemeral materials such as butterfly wings and agave thorns. The work, an installation from 2002, is entitled ‘Efímeras’ (‘Ephemera’) and consists of 12 flowers mounted on acetate sheets and attached to the same with vinyl acetate copolymers and acrylic acid esters (Mowilith®). These flowers are installed on the floor in a bed of dried flowers. The conservation of contemporary art can lead to some previously unimaginable problems for restorers. Current works of art are somewhat material in nature, but they also have a conceptual dimension that is essential for their artistic interpretation. The artist’s participation in the decision-making process prior to the restoration was quite useful. The passage of time, its effect on the work, and the need to understand the possibility of the demise and destruction of the work were implicit as of the onset of its creation, such that, according to the artist, we are forced to reflect upon the possibilities of its future state.     

Fakes on Display: Special Exhibitions of Counterfeit Art

Since the mid‐twentieth century, special exhibitions of art forgeries have appeared in many museums in the United States and Europe. These exhibitions have displayed artworks of many kinds, and have been structured around a variety of objectives and methodologies to engage the public. Fundamentally, they inform that public about an uncomfortable reality: that artistic deception is more common than they may think. The collective phenomenon of these forums displaying faux art has reached a point at which it is a topic worthy of study. This article draws upon representative examples of exhibitions of fake art to present an overview of their “what,” “why,” and “how” in light of commonalities and differences among them. It furthermore traces a loose historical pattern in these exhibitions that shows change over time as well as continuity.     

Conserving contemporary artworks: perspectives of artists and curators at the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe

In fine arts, contemporary artists seek to showcase their artistic skills and concepts. There is very little awareness by most artists on the quality of materials they use in art production and the conservation needs of contemporary artworks which pose conservation challenges as materials used and the physical quality of artworks produced are secondary to what the artists seek to express. Of prime interest to them is the expression of concepts through various genres of art creation. However, the quality of material used by most artists is largely affected by their financial situation and inadequate knowledge on the durability of such materials. Artworks created using recycled materials such as found objects and cheap materials like poor quality paint on paintings, low grade paper in artworks, or poor quality wood present conservation challenges to professionals in galleries. The end product are artworks made from composite materials, some stable and unstable. Thus professionals are faced with a dilemma to reconcile the conservation needs of these artworks and the artists’ expression of their concepts. Moreover, in the absence of remedial conservation measures, artworks are prone to deterioration. This is worsened by dwindling donor and government funding which negatively impacts on the gallery's capacity to conserve the art. Additionally, conceptual expression, artistic creativity, and commercialisation of the art are of priority over conservation. Therefore there is need to maintain a balance between the need to express concepts and commercialise the art on one hand and to conserve the contemporary artworks on the other hand.     

艺术创作在科技馆展览展品设计中的重要作用

科技馆展览展品设计通过科学和艺术的完美融合,不断突破常规、激发想象的跨界表达,成为了现阶段中国科学文化语境中亟需研究的课题,更是科技馆展览展品研究工作的一项任务。本文从艺术创作在科技馆展览展品设计中的必要性与现实意义入手,对展览展品策划、环境艺术设计、展品造型设计三个方面来解读具体的实践方法。科技馆为了避免枯燥的教化式科学传播,其作为传播美学和艺术的载体作用将会受到广泛重视,艺术创作的融入能够切实提高展览的艺术性、原创性和生动性,赋予科普展览更多可能,也为科技馆自身发展带来更大的上升空间。     

Participatory Graffiti as Invitational Rhetoric: The Case of O Machismo

This article engages the Brazilian O Machismo graffiti project as an example of invitational visual rhetoric. Although most understandings of graffiti as communication consider it to be a persuasive artistic form, O Machismo invites viewers to respond to its invitation to help complete the art project and collectively share in co-creating its message. Through an examination of the responses to the invitation that emerge to resist machismo and promote non-patriarchal understandings, the article offers some ideas about how an invitational visual rhetoric expands our previous understandings of graffiti.     

Children's Museum Experiences: Identifying Powerful Mediators of Learning

This article reports on a study of young children and the nature of their learning through museum experiences. Environments such as museums are physical and social spaces where visitors encounter objects and ideas which they interpret through their own experiences, customs, beliefs, and values. The study was conducted in four different museum environments: a natural and social history museum, an art gallery, a science center, and a hybrid art/social history museum. The subjects were four‐ to seven‐year old children. At the conclusion of a ten‐week, multi‐visit museum program, interviews were conducted with children to probe the saliency of their experiences and the ways in which they came to understand the museums they visited. Emergent from this study, we address several findings that indicate that museum‐based exhibits and programmatic experiences embedded in the common and familiar socio‐cultural context of the child's world, such as play and story, provide greater impact and meaning than do museum exhibits and experiences that are decontexualized in nature.     

Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague

In histories of the art museum, Prague has only a minor place. Yet at one crucial early moment, Prague played an important role in what we might call the prehistory of European public museums. There is a close link between art museums and nationalism. One necessary condition for being a country, it might be said, is that its people have a distinctive artistic tradition and therefore reason to build a museum in which to house it. What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s art museums and the identity of the Czech people?     

Touring Yuzi Paradise Art Park,Guilin, China

Abstract Guilin, a small city in subtropical southwest China, is an hour’s flight north from Guangzhou or Hong Kong. This region, famous for its mountains, which appear in some important Chinese old master scrolls and also on the 20 RMB currency note of the People’s Republic, is nicely described by a popular saying: “Guilin’s scenery is best among all under heaven.” An art park, Yuzi Paradise, founded in 1997 by Tsao Ryh‐Chang, a wealthy Taiwanese entrepreneur, occupies 1,300 acres of land in this remote area. Ten percent of the acreage is the art park; the rest is mostly untouched landscape. Sculptors from 30 nations were invited to more than a dozen symposiums at the park and were given the means to create art. Recently, the site was opened to the public.     

读者服务艺术及其心理学研究

读者服务不是简单劳动，而是一门艺术。为达到最佳的服务效果，需要心理学成果的支持。读者服务艺术涵盖静态服务艺术和动态服务艺术二个方面。图书馆所有有形设施的设计与配置，均应具有艺术性，充分体现“以读者为中心”的服务理念：而馆员为读者服务过程中的形象、语言、行为更应注意艺术性，以满足读者的阅读行为需求和心理需求。     

纸马艺术的文化价值述评

中国纸马文化作为非物质文化遗产,历经千年,融中国传统信仰观念、民俗文化与艺术创造为一体,成为中国木版画文化遗产中丰富而复杂的类别。纸马多见诸于民间,俗信所用,产地颇多,其艺术审美可谓是殊有稚气、蔚成大观。纸马不仅具有拙趣的艺术特征,更具有重要的尊崇功用、教育功用、审美功用的文化价值。新时代国际视野下由于艺术领域的拓展纸马艺术符号有着更广阔的传承应用与流播空间。     

以“艺”抗“疫”——融媒体时代艺术专业媒介素养教学与实践

新型冠状病毒暴发后,很多艺术类高校的学生积极以"艺"抗"疫",用艺术的视角,聚焦当前疫情环境下的民生问题,表现出极高的媒介素养。本文以南京艺术学院为例,探讨融媒体时代艺术专业媒介素养的教学与实践,分别从图片、影像、音乐、社交平台、产品设计以及装置等抗击疫情的艺术作品来分析媒介素养教学的成果。     

The Uneasy Relationship of Self‐Critique in the Public Art Institution

Reacting to the gradual neoliberalization of the European public art institutional landscape, actors within a number of critical art museums and galleries have attempted to reform their institutions from within through a process that is largely commensurate with Chantal Mouffe's radical political strategy of ‘critique as hegemonic engagement‐with’. This article focuses on Manuel J. Borja‐Villel's attempt to implement such a strategy at the Museu D'Art Contemporani, Barcelona (MACBA) in the early 2000s. Through an examination of two key projects – Las Agencias (The Agencies) (2001) and Com Volem ser Governats? (How do we want to be governed) (2003‐2004) – it considers the efficacy of such an approach. In so doing, it calls into question the public art institution's ability to perform a self‐critique when embedded within the hegemony of the neoliberal order and constrained by bureaucratic institutional limitations. It concludes by noting that Mouffe's strategy of engagement does not give sufficient consideration to the dependence critical public art institutions have on local and national political support and its funding channels, making them extremely susceptible to instrumentalization. In response to this constraint, it makes the recommendation that, rather than curbing their experimentation, these critical actors should embrace the potentially temporary status of their institutions, and intentionally push them to and even beyond their bureaucratic limitations.     

科学与艺术结合在展览设计中的实践与思考——以中国科技馆为例

本文通过梳理中国科技馆开馆30余载以来,科学与艺术在科普展览中从相互碰撞、两两融合到彼此借力、强强联合,最终珠联璧合、彼此成就的渐进过程,从教育学、传播学视角出发,提出了在展示内容和展示形式上加强科学与艺术结合广度和深度之思考,以及加强人才队伍建设、探索更多合作途径、将科学与艺术结合的理念融入展览全流程等对策,以期为促进科学与艺术在科技馆中的融合,达到科技馆培养兼具科学精神和艺术修养的创新型人才之教育目标提供参考。     

英语广告语篇的语言艺术特点

广告是一门综合艺术。广告创意是现代广告的灵魂,是引起消费者注意、激发消费者购买欲望的驱动力。它的实质是对商 品或服务进行艺术化的渲染和推销。本文着重分析英语广告语篇的语言艺术特征与技巧在语用原则和消费者心理上的体现。     

西方自然历史博物馆展陈变迁——从以文化和艺术为主的综合性视角出发

西方自然历史博物馆的展陈设计向来不是仅以科学作为独立的支撑。在其变迁中,艺术与文化的影响不可小觑。本文从西方历史、宗教和文化的背景出发,分析长期以来在自然历史博物馆的展陈设计中所隐含的科学观念与艺术文化现象,及其设计方式和影响范围。最后对新型自然历史博物馆所在学科理念和理论依据方面可尝试的突破方向做出了预期。     

CHRISTIAN SACRED ART: A CONSERVATION CHALLENGE

Abstract

Christian sacred art is not only an artistic and aesthetic phenomenon, but can also be seen as a manifestation of the divine, the objects becoming a presence of what they represent. A substantial proportion of this kind of art remains dispersed in churches and ecclesiastic treasuries without any special provision for its care and much is still in ceremonial use, continuing to be handled and moved. Recording by inventory and transfer to museums are only recent developments. Portugal has developed various strategies for the preservation of these collections, including the creation of Diocesan Sacred Art Commissions, diocesan museum networks where small museums and museological treasuries are maintained separately but have a common technical staff, a Secure Church Programme and temporary exhibitions, which play a role in conservation, promotion and public awareness. Although not conventional conservation, these actions have helped us to keep the memory of the past alive and let us carry it into the future.     

Some Theory for the Conservation of Contemporary Art

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes different ontological categories and how they relate to the conservation of contemporary art. Faced with the necessity of apprehending the work of art from an ontological point of view, a theoretical approach is made on the concepts that most affect the conservation of contemporary art: quiddity, truth-authenticity, identity, quality, consistency, and interpretation. These are analyzed from an empirical perspective, based on the experience of conservation and restoration. Since conserving and restoring require making decisions that will affect the material and conceptual plane of the works, several possible paradigms that must be introduced into the deontological code of the profession are analyzed. In addition, the study of a new paradigm is provided, that of the death of the work of art. This paradigm can serve as a frame of reference, given the impossibility of bringing the ‘Truth’ of the artwork into the world of the sensitive. This may occur due to different conditioning factors and limitations of a material, technical, or intentional type, which affect issues that were once established as essential to the entity. On the other hand, different types of time that are related to the conservation of contemporary art are studied: biological time, the eternal present of the work, time as a constructor agent, and destructive time as a facilitator of the appearance of ruin or ruin-relic in the work of art.     

The Right Stuff in the Right Place: The Institution of Contemporary Art

Abstract A long walk in the “world” of contemporary art gives multiple views of interlocking ecologies that, in their particularities, contradict the stereotypes suggested by language, invert “north” and “south,” question what is “traditional” in artistic practices, reflect on the intermix of society and art, glimpse the colonial mind in postmodern dress, and illuminate a restless subculture of professional migrants. What does our ramble reveal about the institution of contemporary art? “Diversity” hardly seems an adequate word.     

The Intergrated Museum: A Meaningful Role in Society?

Abstract This article describes a process initiated in 1983, at the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN), which was based on the premise that a responsible natural history museum should assist society in shaping its collective future. The museum predicted that if it were able to help people understand themselves and their relationship to the natural world, the museum would again be seen as valuable to society, and thus would be supported in its efforts. The CMN therefore began to integrate its collections, scholarship, discovery, public programming, and public exhibits into broad, institution‐wide programs focused on the needs and interests of society. These programs enabled the museum to engage its visitors in “guided conversations” in which the museum provided the content, drawing on the research and communication strengths of the museum, while the audience, representing society, set the context. This guided conversation empowered the public to make informed decisions and to influence the museum and its work. CMN also designed exhibit formats that allowed the visiting public to contact industry and government decision‐makers with their opinions. The article describes the museum's evolution through several stages of increasing internal and external integration, ultimately using a managerial matrix to form project teams, with discipline‐based professionals focused on the interests and needs of society. Drawing on audience participation, the CMN reset its programming and offered advice and counsel to government and industry. The museum also took the first steps to include the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples as an additional source of wisdom about the natural world. Financial and other support grew rapidly, effectively demonstrating a successful programmatic feedback loop helping society to shape its future using the museum as an information source and communication tool. The effort was terminated before the integration was completed, but nonetheless, CMN demonstrated that is possible to achieve a programmatic feedback loop that includes collections, science, exhibits, the general public and both government and industry decision‐makers.