Cultural Arts Books

I am one of the authors: This book (CCO) is a manual for describing, documenting, and cataloging cultural works and their visual surrogates. The primary focus of CCO is art and architecture, including but not limited to paintings, sculpture, prints, manuscripts, photographs, built works, and other visual media. It also covers many other types of cultural objects, including archaeological sites, artifacts, and functional objects from the realm of material culture.

CCO is designed for use by professionals in museum collections, visual resources collections, archives, and libraries that have a primary emphasis on art, architecture, and material culture.

It is the more concise and more prescriptive grandchild of the comprehensive set of rules, Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), and it refers to the controlled terminology of the Getty Vocabularies (both of which are available online).

Thank you, Paul Bahn, for making this book! I am planning a trip to Europe exclusively to visit cave art sites. I have been trying to find information about caves that are still open to the public, but was having a really hard time on my own finding anything helpful. My search has come to an end! This book has a wealth of information which will undoubtedly be invaluable for planning and during my trip. It covers more than 50 caves and relevant museums/centers throughout England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy that are open to the public.

Each cave is arranged by country. It has a description of the site and what there is to see as well as the histories and interesting facts about them. Coupled with the description is a list of practical information about the site which includes:

- The site's address, telephone, fax, website, and e-mail address
- Nearest city/town
- Nearest airport
- Nearest car rental
- Nearest train station
- Nearest bus route
- Nearest taxi or private car hire
- Restaurants in the vicinity
- Hotels in the vicinity

Then it has a list of questions which are each answered with as much detail as possible for each site. The questions are:

- When is the cave open?
- Admission prices?
- Storage facilities?
- Do you have to make a group?
- Can you reserve a place in a group?
- Languages of the guides?
- Length of tour?
- Is the cave privately owned?
- Is there a gift shop?
- Are there WC facilities?
- Handicapped access?
- Is there any climbing necessary?
- Distance to walk?
- Level of fitness required?
- Equipment required?
- What are the conditions inside the cave?
- Is it lit?
- Is it slippery?
- Is photography allowed?

There are maps and an informative introduction to the book that explains a lot about what to expect when you visit these sites. There is also some interesting information about cave art itself. There are many full color photos of the art you can expect to see. It is apparent that great care went into creating this guide. It far surpassed my expectations. It is clear, easy to read, and up to date. I can't wait to use it to help me plan my trip to Europe!

Kuoshu gives a long overdue summary of the mainland Chinese movie history, spanning 1930-2000. A period of tremendous turbulence and change. He does this by analysing 15 films that he considers to be the best (or amongst the best). The analysis places each film in the context of Chinese society when it was produced. The themes, ideals and aspirations embedded in the movies often reflect the prevailing values of the society.

The author is ethnic Chinese, living in the US. He could say what he wants about the Chinese Communist Party. But the book is actually quite respectful of the Party. While there certainly is censorship in China, he gives high praise to the book's films. Which can be instructive to an American reader. You should not assume that a movie made in a democracy is automatically "better" than one made in China. Garbage movies can be made under any political system.

Most of the films he discusses may be unknown to a non-Chinese reader. And some might be hard to obtain outside China. Though these days, with the resources on the Web, you may well be able to find a legitimate copy of a film from a vendor in your country. Nor it is clear that the movies are subtitled; necessary for the non-Chinese speaking viewer. But even if you can't see or follow a movie, the book does offer a better understanding of the achievements of Chinese film makers and actors.

This book is a great read - providing an excellent overview of the Celts from their early European Iron Age times to Celtic Christinity in Ireland. Very readable text by David James, who is editor of a magazine called Celtic Connections, and fine artwork by Courtney Davis. I really enjoyed this book and found it very informative. Would recommend it to anyone starting out on a Celtic journey.

so I could go back and hang out some on Central Avenue. Fortunately white people were much better tolerated there than black people were in most of the rest of the city. But there is a more important story here than the history of racism in SoCal: it is how music transcended racism. Even as an L.A. boy who was lucky enough to be a student of Bill Green and a fan of Gerald Wilson while in high school, I didn't realize how much important jazz history took place here. Many of the great jazz musicians appear in the stories in this book. I found it about as easy to put down as a Clancy novel.

In a critical writing course I taught in Spring 2002, I used Channels of Discourse, Reassembled as the core text for the course readings. The many chapters within are written by the best of the best in the fields of media studies and cultural studies, and the methodologies are presented in an easy-to-read manner which is informative and full of examples and case studies. This is an excellent book for media studies students, as its chapters lay out the basic information they should know about many of the methodologies often used in media criticism.

Chicano Discourse is an excellent work that explains and defines Chicano discourse through a ground-breaking socio-historical perspective. This work complements Chicana/o works of fiction in that it clearly illustrates how Chicano discourse is particular to time and space. In other words, Sanchez tells us why Chicano discourse is different throughout the Southwest and elswhere in the U.S. Challenging academia and in conversation with Gloria Anzaldua and Jose Antonio Burciaga,among others,Sanchez's brilliant perspective allows us to see why Spanglish is a unique dialect which is reflective of the lived experience(s) of Chicana/os in the U.S

2007 seems like a fine year for reviewing THE CHILDHOOD OF ART / AN INTERPRETATION OF FREUD'S AESTHETICS by Sarah Kofman, but a large number of ironies abound in the context of comic dementia in which I undertake this task. American society has many centers of political power, a few widely recognized organizations devoted to art, a mainstream media dedicated to journalistic rules which make the story that politics wishes to tell the dominant theme for their efforts, and late night television, an American alter ego which allows comedians to have a take on events of the day, blowing up out of all proportion whatever features of modern life can grab the most attention, much like tragedy in ancient Athens was celebrated at an annual festival which allowed poetic dramatists to deal with those issues that seemed most likely to get people's goats. As a baby boomer, born in 1947, I am also uniquely situated to pass judgment as a child raised in an age of TV fantasy, though I was frequently exposed to the ancient creeds of religion and warfare, sometimes simultaneously, as when a sermon reflected on the basis for an adage, "There are no atheists in foxholes," or a chaplain in Nam was requesting that the American troops have a little faith in the institution that they were part of, and show some respect for its leaders, who were certainly trying to do the right thing.

Something about respect seemed like it was an attempt to attack every fiber of my being, which has always been subversive to the core, and the basis of my respect for Freud has always been close to my appreciation for his examination of wit as a habit of mental life which makes intellectual pleasure possible in the face of great ambivalence or outright hostility. As a child, I saw denominations merge in an ecumenical attempt to express the fundamental unity of religious life by combining groups which had different traditions but which, it was hoped, would soon find themselves existing together in the same place at the same time. My father was a minister engaged in the merger of his German Reformed and E&R tradition into the Congregational Christian churches to form the United Church of Christ, a denomination which lost half the total membership in the 40 years which followed the merger. Most likely, half of its people were staying home, watching TV, instead of seeking ways to be more actively involved in their communities. I married within the larger denomination, and also observed my wife come home and watch TV, though she did not always want to see what I wanted to watch when "Saturday Night Live" was on and I did not happen to be asleep, which was far more likely. There are a few comments in THE CHILDHOOD OF ART about comedy releasing inhibitions, and I believe Henry Miller found Freud useful for ridding himself of whatever inhibitions might keep him from writing things down, so we are not all the Lone Ranger on this.

The last major chapter of THE CHILDHOOD OF ART, "Artistic Creation to Procreation, concludes with a comment about Nietzsche, another thinker that Sarah Kofman and I enjoy. A note on page 224 quotes about ten lines of section 1 of THE GAY SCIENCE, ending with, "For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions." Nietzsche makes an attack on philosophy as a teacher of ethics much more explicit than the lines quoted in the note, which I would like to include in a more recent translation by Josefine Nauckhoff of Wake Forest University for Cambridge University Press:

The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessarily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its old, ordinary hinges. (Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, p. 28).

Comic dementia reaches its potential when an individual who has been responsible for creating the illusions that prone thinkers with suspended disbelief can live by is subjected to a roast that would live up to Nietzsche's expectations:

. . . But you will never find someone who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth -- for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! (Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, p. 27).

This book examines Freud's attempt to define the kind of genius that he was able to observe in the arts which he appreciated enough to attempt to make some explanation. Instead of a bibliography, there is a list "Works of Freud Cited" on pages 227-229 giving titles of works found in the first 23 volumes of THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD (1953). To give an example of Sarah Kofman's handling of a matter for which she added a note in the third edition pointing out that Freud regarded a hat as a prolonged, detachable head, I quote a paragraph near the end of her book:

Now, behind the unmasking of the artist, we must read the unmasking of the father, and here one cannot help thinking of Freud's father, the "great man" stooping to pick up his hat at a Christian's command--a scene about which one can either cry or laugh, but which brings disappointment that can only lead to the end of admiration for the father and with it, the death of the sacred. However, instinctual renunciation is possible only thanks to the superego and its satisfaction: it is still through the father that one overcomes the father. Yet the greatest proof of one's faithfulness to him is to "kill" him, not in order to put oneself in his place, but to construct a new concept of paternity stripped of sanctification. The yield of pleasure obtained by the superego in renouncing its infantile illusions is humorous pleasure. "Humor seems to say: Look! There is the world that seems so dangerous! A mere child's game! The best thing to do is joke about it! . . . When the superego tries, by means of humor, to console the ego and protect it from suffering, this in no way contradicts its origin in the parental agency" ("Humor," 21:166). (Sarah Kofman, THE CHILDHOOD OF ART, p. 173).

This is a truly groundbreaking study that completely overturns the conventional wisdom on the Cultural Revolution. By focusing on culture rather than politics -- that is, on music, fine art, opera, films, and architecture -- the author demonstrates convincingly and in fascinating new ways, that the years of the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 -- were a period of great innovation as artists and ordinary Chinese reached back to the past and recast it in radical new ways. They did this behind formulaic acknowledgments of political orthodoxy, often with a wink and a nod and a tone. Clark brings out the complexities of the Cultural revolution, and the occasional pleasures that people made for themselves in daily life, a view quite different from the usual accounts that focus almost without exception on high politics and suffering. Moreover, its a great read.

Say what you want about oppressive regimes, they always have the best propaganda. Art, when made to serve the purpose of convincing a population that what is going on around them is actually great and wonderful even though they are starving, produces something eerily inspiring, something that taps into a subconscious desire to believe in those in power.

This is the artwork in "Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". These are images of a bright future, where the land is abundant and serves the will of the people, where industry is clean and progressive, bringing fair income to everyone, where everyone pulls their weight with a smile and Chairman Mao shines light on us all. The art here is joyful, optimistic and hopeful. It makes you feel good to look at it. It makes you feel bad knowing that this optimistic, hopeful future never materialized, and was followed by starvation and oppression.

But this is so much more than just a picture book. The author, Ann Tompkins collected these posters while living in China during the Cultural Revolution, a full participant in Mao's glorious dream who wanted to live and work alongside the people forging this Brave New World. Reading her introduction is a bit shocking. I expected a historical critique on the nature of propaganda, not the flip side of the coin, someone who believes in the dream and remains inspired by the message.

And through her eyes, I saw these posters from a different perspective. How progressive, how revolutionary they were at the time. Here were positive images of women working in factories, firing guns and conducting scientific experiments during a time when they were expected to be house wives and mothers. Here were glorious scenes of all human beings struggling together, separated not by race, religion or gender, but bound by the brotherhood of the proletariat. The fact that it failed: is it the fault of the dream or the dreamers? This is the kind of art that makes you ask those questions.

As both an art book and a history book, "Chinese Posters" succeeds beautifully. I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting to, especially after reading the introductions and then looking at the posters in a whole new light.