How to Buy and Sell Art

The art world can be an intimidating one for the experienced buyer let alone the aspiring collector, but with this handbook to the world of collecting, Michael Reid arms buyers with a no-nonsense, informative map to the issues surrounding the buying and selling of art. No matter what your budget or your collecting interest, How to Buy and Sell Art answers all the questions you might have taking you from your first visit to an art gallery all the way to the high drama of an auction room. Michael Reid offers advice on everything from when and when not to buy art, artists to keep an eye on, collecting categories, tax and superannuation matters, collecting groups and how to buy Aboriginal art.With an Australia-wide listing of galleries, fine art auction houses, conservators and restorers, and collecting associations together with a glossary of key terms, How to Buy and Sell Art is an invaluable resource for anybody with an interest in art.After a decade of arts experience with Christie's London, Michael Reid is now a leading Australian art market commentator, dealer and consultant. He advises both private and corporate clients and has since the mid 1990s written as art market analyst in a weekly column for The Australian.

Art, Technology, Consciousness

Within a technological context, this volume addresses contemporary theories of consciousness, subjective experience, the creation of meaning and emotion, and relationships between cognition and location. Its focus is both on and beyond the digital culture, seeking to assimilate new ideas emanating from the physical sciences as well as embracing spiritual and artistic aspects of human experience. Developing on the studies published in Roy Ascott's successful Reframing Consciousness, the book documents the very latest work from those connected with the internationally acclaimed CAiiA-STAR centre and its conferences. Their artistic and theoretical research in new media and art includes aspects of:

Google® SketchUp® For Dummies®

Considerably easier to use than other 3D software, Google SketchUp has found a niche in architecture, landscaping, real estate development, furniture building, and other design professionsThe fun and friendly approach assumes no previous 3D modeling experience and explains the basic concepts involved in 3D modelingShows readers how to build a 3D model, print it, share it, export it to another professional design package, export it to Google Earth, and create a 3D animated tourHelps readers harness the power of Google SketchUp so that they can populate Google Earth with 3D buildings, monuments, and other sculptures

Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art

Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament, preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus, with all her charms, into exile, Wendy Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's horrified response in Frankenstein, Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. She argues that the avant-garde set out to replace the impurity of woman and ornament with form - the new arch-symbol of artistic beauty. However, in the process of controlling desire and pleasure in this way, artists admitted the exotic fetish objects of "primitive" cultures - someone else's power and allure that surely would not overmaster the sophisticated modernist. A century of pornography, shock, and alienation followed, and this rejection of feminine and bourgeois values - domesticity, intimacy, charm - kept the female subject an impossible and remote symbol. Ironically, as Steiner reveals, the feminist hostility to the "beauty myth" had a parallel result, leaving Western society alienated from desire and pleasure on all sides. In the course of this elegantly constructed and accessibly written argument, Steiner explores the cultural history of the century just ended, from Dada to Futurism, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Pumping Iron II: The Women and Deep Throat, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Outsider Art, Naomi Wolf and Cindy Sherman, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, ranging across art and architecture, poetry and the novel, feminist writing and pornography. Only in recent years, Steiner demonstrates, has our culture begun to see a way out of this damaging impasse, revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard, and celebrating pleasure and charm in the arts of the present. By disentangling beauty from a misogynistic view of femininity - as passive, narcissistic, sentimental, inefficacious - Western culture now seems ready to return to the female subject and ornament in art, and to accept male beauty as a possibility to explore and celebrate as well. Steiner finds hints of these developments in the work of figures as varied as the painter Marlene Dumas, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and the choreographer Mark Morris as she leads us to a rediscovery and a reclamation of beauty in the Western world. From one of our most thoughtful and ambitious cultural critics, this important and thought-provoking work not only provides us with a searching analysis of where we have been in the last century but

Visual Information For Everyday Use

Creating graphical commmunication for public use represents both a large industry and a fertile area for research and development. In this collection, world figures within the interdisciplinary field of public graphics present a late-1990s looks at

Telematic Embrace

Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term "telematic art" to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott's philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott's ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.Telematics, a powerful marriage of computers and telecommunication, made technologies we now take for granted--such as e-mail and automated teller machines (ATMs)--part of our daily life, and made art a more interactive form of expression. Telematic art challenges traditional relationships between artist, artwork, and audience by allowing nonlocal audiences to influence the emergent qualities of the artwork, which consists of the ebb and flow of electronic information. These essays constitute a unique archaeology of ideas, tracing Ascott's meditations on the formation of consciousness through the intertwined cultural histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present.Shanken's introduction situates Ascott's work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy. Given the increasing role of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the creation of commerce and community at the dawn of this new millennium, scholars, students, laypeople, policymakers, and artists will find this collection informative and thought-provoking.

Visions from the Past

A vast art gallery - the work of 1500 generations.Across an island continent - on flat slabs overlooking the sea, on desert boulders, under rock overhangs, on the sheer face of deep ravines - the first Australians painted and carved what mattered to them.Here are stories of the birth of the world and the creation of ancestral humans, of the creatures who made the landscape and gave humans their laws, of the animals who shared these peoples' world, of contact with seafaring races from the north, and of fateful meetings with European arrivals.Here is art that reaches back towards the beginning of art, a record of communities of immense antiquity. Some sites present the art of recent times alongside or overlapping with art many thousands of years old. In other places the record has been broken in the distant past.How do we read these stories? How can this art yield up some of its meanings to strangers? How do we learn to appreciate the richness of this ancient legacy?Mike Morwood, archaeologist and teacher, draws upon many years' experience, comparisons with rock art across the world, and a deep understanding of the present-day custodians of this vast treasure to provide a key to the world's oldest and most remarkable art gallery. Visions from the Past tells the exciting story of how the study of rock art is undertaken, providing information on its systems of meaning and changes over time, and revealing how an understanding of these ancient forms contributes to our knowledge of Australia's immense prehistory."An excellent introduction, comprehensive, superbly illustrated and emphasising the chronological depth and regional variation of this artistic heritage. An authoritative, clearly documented case for treating Australia as the rock art capital of the world." John Mulvaney."A definitive text, insightful, informative, always interesting." Claire Smith, Flinders University, Adelaide.

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Drawing

There's no reason to be intimidated by art; creating a compelling drawing can be nothing more than breaking down the process into a few simple stages. This book shows you how to consider the shape of an object, render light and shadow, and make your drawi

The Science of Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci?s pioneering scientific work was virtually unknown during his lifetime. Now acclaimed scientist and bestselling author Fritjof Capra reveals that Leonardo was in many ways the unacknowledged ?father of modern science.? Drawing on an examination of over 6,000 pages of Leonardo?s surviving notebooks, Capra explains that Leonardo approached scientific knowledge with the eyes of an artist. Through his studies of living and nonliving forms, from architecture and human anatomy to the turbulence of water and the growth patterns of grasses, he pioneered the empirical, systematic approach to the observation of nature?what is now known as the scientific method. Leonardo's scientific explorations were extraordinarily wide-ranging. He studied the flight patterns of birds to create some of the first human flying machines. Using his understanding of weights and levers and trajectories and forces, he designed military weapons and defenses, and was in fact regarded as one of the foremost military engineers of his era. He studied optics, the nature of light, and the workings of the human heart and circulatory system. Because of his vast knowledge of hydraulics, he was hired to create designs for rebuilding the infrastructure of Milan and the plain of Lombardy, employing the very principles still used by city planners today. He was a mechanical genius, and yet his worldview was not mechanistic but organic and ecological. This is why, in Capra's view, Leonardo's science?centuries ahead of his time in a host of fields?is eminently relevant to our time.Enhanced with fifty beautiful sepia-toned illustrations, The Science of Leonardo is a fresh and important portrait of a colossal figure in the world of science and the arts.

Beyond Aesthetics

Countering conventional aesthetic theories that maintain that authorial intention, art history, morality and emotional responses are irrelevant to the experience of art, Carroll argues that all of these factors can play a legitimate role in our encounter with art works.

Declarations of Independence

American independent cinema has been an important creative and cultural media entity for the past fifteen years. The approach of this sector is one of cultural construction that simultaneously provides a socio-political reference through which critics and audience can attach certain films to popular movements and ideas.Declarations of Independence questions the supposed autonomy of this cinema and asks if independent film can possibly survive in the face of the mass-production and profit of Hollywood. Berra’s text presents the reader with a unique structural approach to the subject matter with his arguments mirroring the actual film production process. He gives detailed insight into the core product with reference to specific films and studies of audiences and their enthusiasm for this type of alternative media. American Independent cinema continues to grow as a fashionable scene and Declarations of Independence analyses its popularity, economic viability and the production process of so-called ‘niche’ cinema. Berra uses directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderberg as examples of those who have crossed successfully into the cultural mainstream, altering media and public perception.This comprehensive book is a useful resource for scholars as it gives an overview of the industry from conception of a film right though to festival exposure and public consumption. Berra also presents a strong academic argument and places the discussion of this increasingly popular genre within a wider socio-political context.