ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-22DOI: 10.3390/arts15100239
Colleen Foran
{"title":"“Solving/Resolving”: On the Role of Women in Building Ghana’s Contemporary Art Ecosystem","authors":"Colleen Foran","doi":"10.3390/arts15100239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100239","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the critical role of women in establishing the infrastructure that has allowed Ghana’s art scene to flourish into an art ecosystem. Using Ghana as a case study, this article will examine why new models of art markets and scenes are necessary for considering global contemporary art. It will also put forward some preliminary tenets to define such an ecosystem, compelled by the need to expand our art histories to recognize institution builders. By suggesting that art historians must work toward a rigorous and specific definition of ecosystem, this article makes space to acknowledge the work of Ghanaian women in the 1990s and early 2000s as undergirding the scene’s explosive rise in the 2010s and into the 2020s. It argues that the extant infrastructure they built was necessary for Ghana to become a sustainable art ecosystem and, thus, that the work of women has been integral, if less visible, to the scene’s success.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149241248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-22DOI: 10.3390/arts15110241
Isabel Cecilia Martínez
{"title":"Postcognitivism and the Unfolding of a Music Cognition Research Program: Embodiment, Imagination, and Intersubjectivity in the Latin American South","authors":"Isabel Cecilia Martínez","doi":"10.3390/arts15110241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15110241","url":null,"abstract":"This narrative review examines a research program in psychology of music developed over two decades in Latin American South, tracing how studies at the intersection of music psychology, developmental psychology, and the philosophy of mind articulated a postcognitivist account of musical experience. The program unfolded in three overlapping phases: a focus on the listener’s imaginative engagement with tonal structure (2004–2009); an expansion toward embodied and intersubjective processes in adult–infant interaction and musical performance (2010–2018); and a consolidation around the second-person perspective and social enactivism (2018–present). The review revolves around five thematic axes: imaginative ontogenesis, metaphorization in adult musical practice, the postcognitivist turn, embodied performance, and second-person social cognition. Across studies of communicative musicality, image-schematic listening, cross-cultural and tango performance, jazz duos, ensembles, and dancing crowds, a recurring finding emerges: embodied engagement with shared musical structure takes stable but idiosyncratic, culturally and stylistically specific forms, rather than converging through a common entrainment mechanism. The program is discussed in relation to predictive processing, the coupling–constitution debate, simulation-theoretic, entrainment, and new-materialist accounts. Its limits—situatedness, the corroborative rather than comparative status of its second-person claims, and an underdeveloped pedagogical line—are acknowledged, and a future agenda is outlined.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149241246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-22DOI: 10.3390/arts15110240
Maria Gabriela Punin, Oscar Correa, Israel Campoverde
{"title":"Reimagining Cultural Memory Through Bioart: A Multisensory Installation Based on Ecuadorian Horchata Waste","authors":"Maria Gabriela Punin, Oscar Correa, Israel Campoverde","doi":"10.3390/arts15110240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15110240","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores the potential of bioart to connect cultural memory, sensory experience, and environmental awareness through a multisensory project inspired by Ecuadorian horchata, a traditional herbal beverage from southern Ecuador. Developed using a research-creation methodology, the project transformed the waste generated during the preparation of horchata into a sculptural material used to reinterpret the traditional “ato,” a local technique associated with market practices. The work combines visual, tactile, and olfactory elements and incorporates essential oils extracted from the same plant species to create an immersive sensory environment. Audience perception was assessed through surveys of 304 visitors. The results demonstrate bioart’s capacity to transform organic waste into a medium for cultural expression, fostering connections between sustainability, heritage, and artistic practice.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149241247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-20DOI: 10.3390/arts15100238
Aristeidis Lamprogeorgos, Dalila Honorato, Michail Panagopoulos, Andreas Giannakoulopoulos
{"title":"The Dynamic Relationship Between Global Aesthetic Homogenization and the Preservation of Culturally Rooted Visual Expression in Web Design","authors":"Aristeidis Lamprogeorgos, Dalila Honorato, Michail Panagopoulos, Andreas Giannakoulopoulos","doi":"10.3390/arts15100238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100238","url":null,"abstract":"The aesthetic quality of a website is shaped by the interaction of color, typography and layout, with simplicity and coherent color harmonies consistently linked to more positive user perception and emotional response. In this research, a systematic and comparative analysis of the aforementioned parameters is carried out on a selection of thousands of popular websites, originating both from Greece and around the world. Data extraction techniques were employed to systematically gather archival information from a major internet repository, covering a continuous period of over twenty years from 2000 to 2020. This long-term dataset provides a comprehensive historical record of website design practices, enabling the study to trace aesthetic developments, shifts, and patterns across two decades of aesthetic evolution. The purpose of this examination is to map and describe each website’s distinct aesthetic identity. By evaluating these characteristics, the study seeks to uncover emerging trends and recurring patterns in website aesthetics through time. A central question guiding this investigation is whether design practices are gradually converging toward a unified, globalized aesthetic identity or whether regional visual design practices continue to shape online environments in meaningful ways. Ultimately, this analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of how regional variation coexists with increasingly globalized web-design practices.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"493 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149241249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-15DOI: 10.3390/arts15100233
Ewelina Chwiejda
{"title":"From Bare to Informed Looking: An Art-Historical Proposition on Mindful Art Engagement, Emotion Regulation, and Cognitive Enrichment in the Age of AI","authors":"Ewelina Chwiejda","doi":"10.3390/arts15100233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100233","url":null,"abstract":"The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence has unsettled more than the labour market. It has given rise to two related anxieties: an existential unease about human meaning, agency, and uniqueness—“AI anxiety”—and a quieter abdication of critical effort to machines, which recent works call “cognitive surrender.” The remedies most often proposed for these conditions, among them psychoeducation, regulation, engineering ethics, and therapy, leave a conspicuous gap, since none of them draws on aesthetic experience or on the making of meaning. This article, written from an engaged, applied art-history position, proceeds as a conceptual analysis rather than an empirical study. It defines “mindful art engagement” as a receptive, two-phase practice that moves from bare to informed looking, an open and contemplative looking followed by art-historically informed interpretation, sets out its boundaries, distinguishes the three constructs on which it bears (felt meaningfulness, art-historical understanding, and cognitive enrichment), and maps the existing evidence onto its components. On this basis, it advances a hypothesis that such a practice could contribute to emotion regulation and to cognitive enrichment in the age of AI, and that meaning is the point at which the two pathways meet.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"87 1","pages":"233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-15DOI: 10.3390/arts15100231
Slavica Janešlieva, Ana Frangovska
{"title":"From Print Collection to Living Pedagogical Archive: Artistic Formation and Institutional Memory in Skopje","authors":"Slavica Janešlieva, Ana Frangovska","doi":"10.3390/arts15100231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100231","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Graphic Collection of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje as a material record of artistic formation, institutional memory, and pedagogical heritage. It proposes the concept of the living pedagogical archive not as a replacement for established categories such as teaching collection, university collection, or institutional archive, but as an analytical framework for examining the changing relationships between pedagogical production, institutional preservation, and subsequent reactivation. The framework is articulated through four interconnected processes—preservation, transmission, production, and reinterpretation—and explored through a qualitative case study combining archival research, institutional history, visual analysis, and comparison of seven purposively selected diploma portfolios produced between 1984 and 1997. The analysis identifies contrasting relationships between diploma-period formation and subsequent professional trajectories, including continuity within printmaking, expansion across media, methodological transformation, and professional redirection. It further reconstructs the institutional networks through which different Yugoslav pedagogical traditions became locally embedded in Skopje, while distinguishing such documented genealogies from claims of direct stylistic transmission. The study argues that pedagogical collections can preserve material evidence of artistic formation that remains underrepresented in museum collections and conventional art-historical narratives. In the Skopje case, current cataloguing, digitisation, and research constitute a primarily archival and scholarly activation of this material, demonstrating how educational collections may become newly legible as sources for art history, institutional memory, and heritage formation.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149172757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-15DOI: 10.3390/arts15100232
Ibrahim Uba Yusuf, Abiodun Salawu
{"title":"Beyond Rhythm: Peacebuilding Themes in Selected Hausa Music","authors":"Ibrahim Uba Yusuf, Abiodun Salawu","doi":"10.3390/arts15100232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100232","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines peacebuilding themes in Hausa music to highlight their contributions to the restoration of peace in northern parts of Nigeria. The study analyses two purposively selected examples of Hausa music that contain peacebuilding messages and were produced by different musicians. Adopting conflict transformation theory, the study explores how the musicians articulate peacebuilding messages and examines the use of music as an instrument for preaching peace in northern Nigeria. Findings from the content analysis and interviews with the musicians reveal that the music is largely attuned to the goal of forging peace. The results further show that various media organisations in northern parts of Nigeria and beyond are using these pieces of Hausa music in packaging programmes related to conflict and peace. The study concludes that Hausa music for peacebuilding represents one of the important perspectives through which peacebuilding messages have been articulated to audiences in northern Nigeria.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149172861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-10-03DOI: 10.3390/arts15100230
Flavia Galli Tatsch
{"title":"Bone Ecologies: Matter, Technique, and Figuration in Trecento Italian Cofanetti","authors":"Flavia Galli Tatsch","doi":"10.3390/arts15100230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100230","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes an ecological approach to bone cofanetti produced in central and northern Italy between the Trecento and early Quattrocento. The analysis follows bone as a material with its own biological, economic, and technical trajectory, from animal remains to carved plaques, examining the relations among its physical properties, workshop practices, images, and handling. To this end, the article proposes the notion of “bone ecologies” as a framework for understanding how organisms, natural substances, artisanal knowledge, visual conventions, and embodied use converged in the making and reception of these objects. The argument unfolds through three interrelated axes: the ecology of matter, encompassing economies of breeding, slaughter, reuse, and anatomical properties of bone; technical ecology, centered on carving, polishing, composite construction, and assembling; and the ecology of the image, which examines how vegetation, fauna, landscapes, and natural phenomena structured biblical, classical, and courtly narratives. The relations between materials and motifs are understood as historically contingent and mediated by technical practices and visual conventions. This article argues that these cofanetti emerged from a relational field in which biological matter, artisanal practice, figuration, and haptic engagement jointly shaped the finished object.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"9 1","pages":"230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149092875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-09-30DOI: 10.3390/arts15100229
Ianick Takaes
{"title":"The End Times in and After Philippe Thomassin’s Last Judgment (1606)","authors":"Ianick Takaes","doi":"10.3390/arts15100229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100229","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how Philippe Thomassin’s Last Judgment (1606) engraving traveled from Rome to the colonial Spanish Americas, acting as a powerful tool for reshaping both local belief systems and the physical environment. Moving beyond simple artistic analysis, I show how this image promoted a worldview that prioritized human salvation over the survival of the natural world. I connect this historical visual culture to the modern destruction of the Amazon rainforest by apocalypticist religious groups, who view clearing the forest not as an environmental disaster but as the preparation of a divine paradise. By linking early modern prints to today’s climate crisis, I argue that art history must address the active role of eschatological images such as Thomassin’s: they do not just depict the end of the world but can actively help bring it about. This case study reveals how colonial visuality continues to shape the precarious future of the Amazonian biosphere.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"11 1","pages":"229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ArtsPub Date : 2026-09-29DOI: 10.3390/arts15100228
Marco De Mutiis
{"title":"Image Decoys","authors":"Marco De Mutiis","doi":"10.3390/arts15100228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15100228","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the emergence of the image decoy as a tactic in contemporary digital and networked visual culture: an image that exploits the tension between its representational surface and its underlying algorithmic operations in order to deceive, distract, or lure both human and machine viewers. Building on Harun Farocki’s notion of the operational image and its extension by later media scholars, it argues that the operational capacities of digital images—their legibility to machine vision, their circulation through platform algorithms, their role as training data—are not the exclusive property of corporations, platforms, and states, but can be reclaimed, redirected, and weaponised by artists, designers, technologists, and everyday users. Through an analysis of vernacular and artistic practices from the past two decades, the paper maps four thematic clusters of image decoys: Hiding in Plain Sight, which conceals messages within ubiquitous images; Image Triggers, which baits or evades automated machine vision; Occupy the Internet, which reclaims algorithmic visibility through tagging and search; and Superspreaders, which infiltrates the infrastructures of circulation themselves. Together these cases sketch an adaptable grammar of counter-operational tactics, positioning the image decoy as a form of tactical media suited to a condition of continuous technological adaptation.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"26 1","pages":"228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}