Age–price profiles for Canadian painters at auction

We conduct an empirical analysis of the effect on the auction price of a Canadian painting of the age of the painter at the time of creation of the painting. We consider over two hundred artists, active over the entire history of Canadian art, who are pooled in the estimation of a hedonic regression in which a polynomial function in age enters as a regressor along with several other control variables. We consider the possibility that the age–price relationship has changed over time by: (a) estimating separate age–price functions for three generational groups of artists—those born before 1880, between 1880 and 1920, and after 1920 and thus coming of age in the world of post-war ‘contemporary art’ and (b) estimating a parameterization where the shape of the age–price profile is permitted to change continuously depending on the year of birth of the artist. Our principal result is that artists born more recently tend to ‘peak’ earlier in their careers than those of previous generations.     

Metaphorical and Non-Metaphorical Meaning in Ideological Discourses: an Examination of Technocratic Discourses and Counter-Discourses from the Progressive Era

Two contrasting visions of ideological discourse populate sociological treatments of culture. In the work of the British social theorist Margaret Archer, we find a conception of ideological discourse as essentially dialectical and reliant on logically compelling argument. In American sociology of culture, conversely, we find an implicit understanding of ideological discourse as a ‘performative’ mode of discourse built around emotionally resonant symbols, image, and metaphors. If we take either of these categorical conceptualisations of ideological discourse seriously, then the only discourses which can qualify as ideological are those discourses which are either fully metaphorical or entirely dialectical. In fact, many ideological discourses make use of imagery and metaphors and at the same time feature propositions meant to be interpreted as part of a logically compelling argument. As the paper demonstrates through a detailed examination of the discourses produced by the American technocrats of the 1920s and 1930s, elaborate ideological productions often include both metaphorical propositions and logically compelling argument. Moreover, metaphorical constructions and literal propositions often function as complements in effective ideological discourses. This is especially true when the discourses are addressed to knowledgeable and economically privileged audiences, such as the ‘new class’ of the pre-depression United States.     

The Philippine–American War and the American Debates about the Necessity and Legality of the “Water Cure,” 1901–1903

Abstract

This essay provides a critical genealogical study of the “water cure” controversies that took place during the Philippine–American War. The author extends the work of Foucault and Agamben to argue that a biopolitical review of this controversy illustrates how many of the legal and cultural arguments used to legitimate the water cure have resurfaced in contemporary debates about waterboarding and enhanced interrogations techniques. The essay also illustrates how anti-imperialists and other critics of Theodore Roosevelt's administration tried to use these water-cure debates as discursive vehicles for complaining about the systematic abuse of Filipinos during the Philippine “Insurrection.”     

The Elasticity of Thought: A Note on the Drive in Worringer and Freud

Abstract

The essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction.     

在中国教授莎士比亚戏剧

随着北京2008年奥运会的临近,民众越来越关心“中国”品牌的树立,学习英语的热情也被点燃。越来越多的外宣干部和业内同行向我们表达了期待看到双语栏目的愿望。因此,我们自2006年第1期起开办了《双语视窗》栏目以满足广大读者的需求。 看看周围的媒体,在《北京青年报》、《参考消息》、《国门时报》上有许多精粹的小短文,像一只只啄木鸟,善意地提醒了中国人习以为常的行为背后“尚未和国际接轨”的细节,读后让人回味不已。在获得借鉴意义的同时,也带来更深入的思考。我们效仿中英文对照的版面形式,旨在通过外国友人的视角来看中国,从中折射出东西方观念、习俗的异同。通过一篇篇这样的文章,让读者在领略异域文化的同时,也能达到学习英语的目的。     

The ``Death-Effect' in Art Prices: A Demand-Side Exploration

Many factors affect the supply and demand characteristics of artists' output.This exploratory study focuses on a ``supply-induced' demand effect –the death of the artist and the assurance that, from the perspective of thedurable goods monopolist, the output of the artist ends. While not purportingto be a formal test of that proposition, we observe, using U.S. auction data,a clustered rise in artists' values immediately around the time of death andsuggest some possible demand-side explanations using a sample of LatinAmerican artists between 1977 and 1996.     

Reading against culture in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said is the literary critic most cited by American anthropologists, but there has been relatively little anthropological examination of his concept of culture. Apart from an isolated attempt by Lila Abu‐Lughod to ‘write against culture’, most anthropologists have ignored Said’s approach. In Culture and Imperialism, Said draws on Matthew Arnold’s ‘best of the best’ definition, while American anthropologists owe their holistic culture to fellow Victorian Edward Tylor. Claude Levi‐Strauss is praised by Said, but other major anthropological approaches to culture are ignored. Said assumes anthropology is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, although he holds out hope for those who are now reading the work of literary and cultural critics. In this essay I compare Said’s reading of anthropology, exemplified by Kipling’s Colonel Creighton, to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas on ethnographic method.     

Managing the Research University: Clark Kerr and the University of California

In the 1950s and 1960s, Clark Kerr led the University of California's Berkeley campus, and then the University of California as a whole. Throughout these years, he developed a system of managerial strategies. This paper shows how Kerr's administrative views drew upon his background in industrial relations, his liberal theories of pluralistic industrial change, and contemporary understandings of American business organization.     

Creativity versus branding: totemism,animism and the pursuit of uniqueness in fashion

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary organization of the economy, creativity and branding constitute two distinctive imperatives which generally point in different directions: the former towards newness and change, the latter towards continuity and recognisability. Numerous agents in corporate organizations thus face a conundrum of creativity versus branding, which is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the fashion business. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a fashion company, I argue that these seemingly incompatible imperatives are inextricably entangled, as their paradoxical relation is solved, even dissolved, in a dynamic interplay between ‘a totemic logic’ and ‘an animist practice’. Thus, a dynamics of totemism and animism unites creativity and branding in the continual pursuit of uniqueness. While totemic and animist modalities are most commonly associated with non-western ontologies and perceived as mutually exclusive, I contend that they are also at work in contemporary commercial processes and that they are enmeshed in, and propelled by, each other. This suggests that these modalities operate together particularly when the making of distinctive identities is critical – as in economic competition today.     

A Trip to the World Cinema: The Fantastic Spectators of Felisberto Hernández and Alberto Mario Ferreiro

What if World Cinema was a cinema, a global movie theatre called the World Cinema? This is the imaginative leap taken in two works of fiction published in Uruguay at the end of the 1920s: the ‘Prologue’ to Felisberto Hernández’s experimental Books without Covers (1929), and ‘The Cinema Seen from the Screen’ (1930) by Alberto Mario Ferreiro. Both texts construct scenarios of fantastic, impossible cinematic spectatorship that are nevertheless situated within early twentieth-century Uruguay’s unusual political climate and the global phenomenon of the avant-garde. The fantastical points of view constructed by Ferreiro and Hernández work to interrogate both the promises and the perils of spectatorship in a medium whose circulation was becoming increasingly global.     

Middle East and other futurisms: imaginary temporalities in contemporary art and visual culture

This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour’s films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.     

The trope as trap: ideology revisited

Abstract

Beginning with Wallace Stevens, the influence of Simone Weil’s philosophy of decreation on American poetry has been substantial, if often underestimated. Focusing on recent volumes by Jorie Graham and Anne Carson, I suggest that this use of Weil’s philosophy presents a new way of understanding a dominant trend towards the metaphysical and difficult in modern American poetry. In various and divergent ways, both poets’ work explicitly points towards a decreated world and explores the ways in which poetry replaces prayer when God is absent. Both in form and content, this work expands upon and illuminates ideas put forth by thinkers such as Blanchot and Nancy, but it is primarily through an understanding of Weil and decreation that such work can best be approached. For Carson and Graham, poetry is the best expression of the imminent void; by placing their work in a definite Weilian context, it is possible to reveal their claims about the nature of truth, God and the material world more fully.     

Creativity and Life Cycles of Artists

Age curves, which relate age to creativity or exceptional achievements, seem to take two forms: some artists bloom early (Picasso), others later in life (Cézanne). We argue that this objective fact is not related to their mode of creation according to which some artists proceed by drawings made prior to the painting's execution, while others are more likely to imitate and achieve this through color and the process of painting itself. JEL numbers:Z10,Z11A very preliminary version of this paper was presented as a discussion at the conference Measuring Art: A Scientific Revolution in Art History, University of Chicago and American University of Paris, June 2003.     

Royalties for Artists versus Royalties for Authors and Composers

Legislation creating or reinforcing resale royalties for visual artists retains substantial political popularity – particularly in the European Union – despite the often skeptical attitude toward those rights in the economics literature. In this essay, we probe more deeply the affirmative arguments that can be made for a resale royalty right, in either a mandatory or a discretionary form. We also compare the rationale for visual artists' resale royalties with the potential rationales for the now-well-established systems of royalty rights for authors and composers. This comparison has particular interest both because some of the principal arguments made against visual artists' resale royalties also apply to authors' royalties, and because the economic rationale for compensating authors with royalties has itself not been well explored. We also discuss briefly the related subject of display rights for visual artists. We conclude with some general implications for policy.     

Indigenous Digital Art as Politics in Australia

This essay contributes to discussions about Indigenous politics and debates about contemporary democracy. It uses a case study of video art produced by young indigenous people and a community development organisation in the Pilbara, Australia. Those involved in the project use digital media under the auspices of the Big hART Yijala Yala Project to produce an interactive comic series. The essay addresses the following questions: Do contemporary community development projects play a conservatising role serving the interests of a neoliberal polity? Given the long-standing practice of representing modern media as a vehicle for western domination what, if anything, do these projects imply about the political relations between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians? Are Indigenous media and cultural work inherently political? What conceptions of the political are at stake in such arguments? We focus on how certain groups of young people use new media, and how their activities are political. The argument is that Indigenous media like these are ‘inherently political’ because they are about efforts to reclaim the images of indigenous peoples for themselves.     

Daily Grind: The Spiritual Workday of the American Prosperity Gospel

This paper responds to two common questions surrounding the controversy of the American prosperity gospel: what kind of work is the prosperity gospel and who does it benefit? I argue that the movement contains both heavily supernatural approaches and deeply pragmatic responses to the market. Further, its wealthy preachers are the most direct beneficiaries and the focus of the debate over the movement's claims.     

Asian Americans Beyond the Model Minority Stereotype: The Nerdy and the Left Out

Abstract

Most racial-ethnic stereotypes about Asian Americans are constructed, activated, and perpetuated by the media, but very few empirical studies have ever investigated the extent to which people accept the media stereotypes about Asians. This study applied cultivation theory to examine whether people's perceptions of Asian Americans are consistent with media stereotypes and whether the media activated racial-ethnic stereotypes affect people's interaction behaviors with Asians. Results demonstrate that people's perceptions and judgments about Asian Americans are largely aligned with the media representations, and these stereotypes impact people's intent to interact with Asians. Four specific findings were obtained. First, among racial-ethnic groups in the U.S., Asians are perceived as most likely to achieve academic success; second, Asians are most likely to be perceived as nerds; third, Asians are perceived as most likely to be left out; and last, people are least likely to initiate friendship with Asians and Hispanics.     

Application of geographic information technologies to historical landscape reconstruction and military terrain analysis of an American Revolution Battlefield: Preservation potential of historic lands in urbanized settings,Boston, Massachusetts,USA

Through funding from the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program, geographic information technologies were employed to create a high resolution, spatially accurate representation of the 1775 landscape of Boston's Inner Harbor and to conduct a geospatial and temporal assessment of the location, extent, and preservation potential of an American Revolutionary War battlefield and its associated cultural resources. Geographic information technologies provide the tools and methodologies to accurately create digital representations of historical landscapes. These tools enable the visualization and geospatial analysis of landscapes and significant historical events, greatly enhancing the understanding of temporal and spatial interactions between these events and the physical landscape upon which they occurred. Data sources include historical bibliographic and cartographic records, high resolution orthophotographs, constant value raster grids, and LIDAR data. A military terrain model was created utilizing American Battlefield Protection Program's KOCOA system categories, in order to identify defining features of the battlefield. KOCOA is an acronym which stands for Key terrain, Obstacles, Cover and Concealment, Observation and Fields of Fire, and Avenues of Advancement and Withdrawal. The KOCOA analysis provides an established method for identifying critical defining features of the battle and determining the influence of the landscape on the ephemeral battle events. The base map was created utilizing U.S. Navy Coast Survey maps dating from the mid-19th century. A digital elevation model was created to represent the 1775 topography, utilizing LIDAR data and constant value raster layers. The military terrain analysis provided valuable insights into battlefield events and decisions. Defining features of the battle were also identified and mapped. A detailed Environmental Systems Research Institute's ArcGIS Citation Data Model was used to link landscape and KOCOA features to the historical sources they were derived from. A comprehensive source table was created as part of this effort. The results of this investigation have provided a high resolution dataset of Boston's historical landscape during the time of the American Revolution. The geospatial analysis will aid in the development of long-range management strategies for the Chelsea Creek Battlefield and facilitate the assessment of threats to cultural resources posed by both anthropogenic activities and environmental change. The methodologies and interdisciplinary approach will also be applicable to other investigations seeking to recreate historical landscapes within a geographic information system.     

Planned Hindsight

By the early 1980s, many life scientists had begun to maintain small collections of cryopreserved tissues for their own specific research purposes. It became apparent that these materials could be successfully reused as new techniques and research questions emerged. This realization led several American leaders in the field of systematic taxonomy (the science of biological classification) and conservation genetics to argue for the need to take stock of and coordinate these heterogeneous collections. Their strategy, which they called ‘planned hindsight,’ was meant to organize the present in a way that appeared to anticipate the needs of future scientists. In this paper I examine how the seemingly paradoxical strategy of ‘planned hindsight’ has functioned as a strategy for choreographing life, time, and value at two centralized biospecimen collections: The Frozen Zoo in Escondido, CA, USA, and the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I conclude that, in practice, ‘planned hindsight’ not only contributes to the endurance of frozen tissues but also preserves widely divergent speculative visions of the many different individuals involved with their creation, maintenance, and re-use.     

The Relationship Between Self-Construals,Perceived Face Threats,and Facework During the Pursuit of Influence Goals

Abstract

The purpose of our study was to understand how self-construals affect the intensity of perceived face threats and the subsequent deployment of coping strategies within compliance-seeking situations involving three different influence goals (giving advice, asking favors, or enforcing unfulfilled obligations). Five-hundred and seventy-six students from four different ethnic backgrounds (African American, Asian American, Latino, and European American) at six universities in the U.S.A. indicated their levels of independence and interdependence. Then they wrote what they would say to a same-sex friend in a hypothetical advice, favor, or obligation scenario, and whether they would persist in the face of initial resistance from their friend. They also evaluated the degree to which seeking compliance would threaten the target's negative face, the target's positive face, their own negative face, and their own positive face. Written messages were coded for how many reasons participants provided for seeking compliance. As levels of interdependence increased and independence decreased, participants perceived a larger total threat to both the target's face as well as one's own face when pursuing influence goals. Furthermore, people provided more reasons for compliance as well as persisted more after initial refusal as the level of independence increased. Implications for future research on culture, influence goals, and face are discussed.