Arts最新文献

{"title":"“Cats Will Be Cats”: Exploring the Negotiated Gaze in Belle Johnson’s Feline Photography","authors":"J. Keri Cronin","doi":"10.3390/arts15080194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080194","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on a series of cat photographs taken by Belle Johnson, a photographer from Monroe City, Mo., in the early years of the 20th century. These photographs were included in a project called With Other Photographers, an initiative from 1909–1910 which showcased the studio set-ups and techniques of professional photographers. Through this set of photographs we see not only the finished results but also process shots of Johnson working with the cats in her studio. In this article I explore how these photographs were part of a larger discussion around two very different approaches to photography in the United States at this time while also insisting on seeing these cats as individual subjects with agency who played an active role in the creation of these images.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148815621","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}

{"title":"From Spectacle to Regeneration: Animal Performance, Dominion, and the Environmental Imagination in British Visual Culture","authors":"Farah Benbouabdellah","doi":"10.3390/arts15080192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080192","url":null,"abstract":"Britain’s historical spectacles of animal performance, from Victorian circuses and travelling menageries to early visual media, did more than entertain, they shaped how humans imagined, controlled, and valued nonhuman life. Animals were transformed into objects of fascination and domination, while hunting and poaching practices reinforced imperial authority over wildlife. These performances codified visual and moral frameworks that positioned Britain as arbiter of “wildness,” embedding hierarchies of power and ethical order into the cultural imagination. This paper draws on performance studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and visual anthropology to trace how circus rings, menageries, and early animal films laid aesthetic and ideological foundations that resonate in contemporary British environmental art and regeneration discourse. By historicising these visual legacies, it reveals how dominion, spectacle, and exploitation persist as underlying structures in Britain’s engagement with nature. Yet contemporary environmental arts are not merely reactive, they reinterpret these histories, transforming frameworks of control into imaginative possibilities for ethical, regenerative, and multispecies representation. By linking past and present, this study demonstrates that understanding the visual politics of historical animal performance is essential to imagining sustainable and inclusive futures for human and nonhuman life in Britain.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"494 1","pages":"192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899016","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}

{"title":"On Presence, Three Artists and Their Practice (1938 to 2026)","authors":"Maureen Kendal,Alana Lake","doi":"10.3390/arts15080191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080191","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the practices of three women artists working across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and Vilém Flusser’s analysis of technological mediation, it considers how their practices respond to changing conditions of production across analogue and digital technologies. The methodological approach is informed by autoethnography, using situated first-person experience to extend broader social and cultural critique. While one practice spans the transition between analogue and emerging digital modes, the other two operate within post-digital conditions in which material and technological processes are increasingly entangled. Across these contexts, the artists share recurring concerns with relation, ethics, embodiment, and a renewed emphasis on materiality and the tangible. Rather than treating technology as a determining force, the paper argues that changing technological conditions sharpen philosophical questions of presence, relation, and mediation. Through close attention to materials, processes of making, and artistic encounter, it proposes three interconnected ways of understanding presence as encounter, trace, and mediation. Together, these perspectives demonstrate how relationships become materially tangible through forms of embodiment, residual marks, and technologically mediated environments. In doing so, this paper positions presence as a relational and material site of meaning, showing how contemporary artistic practice can produce encounters that resist the reduction of the other.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"34 1","pages":"191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899017","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}

{"title":"“Every Tool Is a Weapon If You Hold It Right”: Curating Feminist and Queer Listening Experiences in the Work of Ani DiFranco","authors":"Seán Mac Risteaird","doi":"10.3390/arts15080186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080186","url":null,"abstract":"Widely associated with third- and fourth-wave feminism, Ani DiFranco’s artistic practice creates and curates queer and feminist musical experiences through the tools of songwriting and spoken-word poetry. Since the release of her eponymous debut album in 1990, DiFranco has carved out a distinctive voice within American folk and popular music and has cultivated communities of affiliation across feminist and queer communities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and David Halperin’s conception of queerness as a form of non-normative identity, this article offers close, textual readings of a selection of DiFranco’s earlier songs and spoken-word poems, including “The Whole Night”, “In or Out”, “Lost Woman Song”, and “Self Evident”. In doing so, the article demonstrates how DiFranco’s performances extend beyond musical expression to function as sites of queer and feminist cultural production, where audiences are invited to participate in broader conversations about identity, community, and social change.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"8 1","pages":"186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148703491","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}

{"title":"Autonomous Ornament: The Structural Homology Between Alphonse Mucha’s “Q Formula” and the Eastern Mandala","authors":"Xuezi Zhang, Wonhwa Kim","doi":"10.3390/arts15080185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080185","url":null,"abstract":"Alphonse Mucha’s oeuvre is frequently categorized as a formalist paradigm of ornamentation within the Art Nouveau movement. This study, however, contends that Mucha’s signature Q Formula is far from a mere aesthetic redundancy or a utilitarian embellishment; rather, it manifests as Autonomous Ornament—an autonomous generative process and an inherent rhythm. Adopting a synchronic structural perspective that transcends linear historical causality, this research frames ornament as a dynamic relational medium connecting individual perception with collective evolution across geocultural boundaries. With Theosophy serving as a historical mediation and synthesizing Rudolf Arnheim’s psychology of visual perception with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the ornamental refrain (ritornello), this paper traces the cross-cultural construction of the Q Formula—from Mucha’s Moravian Catholic roots to the avant-garde Theosophical milieu of Paris. Through a horizontal comparative analysis with contemporary fin-de-siècle artists—specifically contrasting Gustav Klimt’s ornamental dissolution and Aubrey Beardsley’s ironic fragmentation—the study underscores Mucha’s distinct integrative strategy. Furthermore, it demonstrates a profound structural homology in topological energy between the Q Formula and the Eastern Kālacakra Mandala. Within this pure and vital ornamental logic, the circular main body acts as a centripetal anchor referencing Emptiness (Śūnyatā), while the boundary-crossing media serve as a metaphor for centrifugal Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) and worldly manifestation through clothed repetition. Such ornamental rhythms collapse the classical hierarchy between structure and surface. Amidst the pervasive anxiety of fin-de-siècle industrialization, these forms exerted a visual soothing function, providing deep emotional and psychological efficacy. Mucha’s ornamental schemata reveal how repetitive and structural rhythms successfully transmuted traditional religious paradigms into channels for the internal integration of the modern subject. The paper thus reaffirms ornament as a form of critical imagination and an independent artistic force, which not only reshapes the psychological homeostasis of the modern subject but also constructs a profound resonance between form and life within a cross-cultural context.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"11 1","pages":"185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148703522","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}

{"title":"Iconographic Analysis of Panthera Depictions on Cylinder Seals from the British Museum","authors":"Yucel Yazgin","doi":"10.3390/arts15080189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080189","url":null,"abstract":"This study presents an iconographic analysis of cylinder seals from the British Museum’s collection belonging to ancient Near Eastern cultures that depict big cats. A total of 542 cylinder seals were examined, from which 171 big cat representations on 101 seals were selected as the sample. The sample was analyzed using the visual analysis method. Data obtained from the analyses were coded with the MAXQDA 2024, version 24.7 software, thematic and sub-thematic categories were established, and content analysis was conducted. The results indicate that only one of the big cat figures can be identified as a leopard, while the remainder represent lions. In terms of formal characteristics, lion figures predominate, followed by hybrid forms such as griffin-lions. Most of the big cats are depicted standing upright on their hind legs with open mouths in aggressive or attacking postures, emphasizing the lion’s ferocity. The figures are generally highly stylized and possess strong representational qualities. Lions also appear in protective forms, such as sphinxes and griffins, symbolizing strength and guardianship. Additionally, heroes and rulers shown defeating lions function as visual expressions of political authority. Overall, big cat imagery on cylinder seals served as a symbolic medium conveying power, authority, protection, and sacredness within ancient societies.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"79 1","pages":"189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899019","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}

{"title":"Breathing Images: Representing Smoke in the Era of Record Wildfires","authors":"Andreas Rutkauskas","doi":"10.3390/arts15080188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080188","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines wildfire smoke as a critical yet disproportionately represented subject within ecocritical photography, arguing that its diffuse, persistent, and atmospheric qualities challenge dominant modes of landscape representation and environmental imagery. While photographic and artistic depictions of wildfire have frequently privileged the spectacle of flame—emphasizing destruction, immediacy, and sublime encounter—smoke operates through ambiguity, duration, and embodied experience. Drawing from my own photographic practice, archival research, and critical engagements with environmental history, this paper investigates how smoke disrupts aesthetic conventions rooted in clarity, distance, and visual mastery. Through a case study of the 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, I consider how smoke functions simultaneously as material condition, photographic subject, and representational problem. The paper situates these questions within the broader context of the Pyrocene, examining how colonial fire suppression practices and contemporary climate change have shaped both wildfire regimes and their visual representation. By analyzing historical archives, contemporary photographic practices, and artistic responses to atmospheric crisis, I argue that smoke offers a critical alternative to spectacular images of burning landscapes. Rather than representing wildfire as a discrete event, attention to smoke reveals fire as an ongoing atmospheric condition—one that complicates the boundaries between landscape, image, and lived experience. In foregrounding smoke, this paper proposes new possibilities for environmentally engaged visual culture that move beyond spectacle toward more embodied and ethically attentive forms of representation.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"153 1","pages":"188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899020","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}

{"title":"John Cage’s 4′33″ as a Zen Experience: Interpreting Experimental Music Through Mahāyāna Concepts","authors":"Yingjie Chen","doi":"10.3390/arts15080187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080187","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the relationship between John Cage’s seminal work 4′33″ and the philosophies of Zen and Mahāyāna Buddhism, while reflecting on the limitations of Western philosophical frameworks in cross-cultural musical analysis. Existing scholarship has primarily focused on musical structure, performance practice, audience perception, and interpretations through Western theories such as those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and postmodernism, with limited attention to the influence of Eastern philosophy on Cage’s creative thought. Drawing on Mahāyāna concepts including emptiness, dependent origination, and the Two Truths, this study argues that the work’s use of silence encourages contemplation of the impermanence and relational nature of all phenomena. The paper further critiques the tendency to impose Western theoretical models upon Eastern thought, advocating instead for an experience-centred approach to cross-cultural analysis. It contends that 4′33″ is not merely an experimental musical work, but also a practical manifestation of Zen philosophy at the auditory and perceptual levels.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"198 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148703492","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}

{"title":"Multipla Gallery (1972–2011) and the History of Multiples in Brazil: An Affaire de Femmes","authors":"Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni","doi":"10.3390/arts15080184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080184","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the contribution of the Multipla Gallery—founded in 1972 by two women, Teresa Nazar and Edla Van Steen—to the introduction of a new artistic modality in Brazil: the multiples. The “motherhood” of this artistic modality was, at the time, attributed to a third woman: the French gallerist Denise René. This case reveals female presence and agency in the Brazilian art market during the 1970s, a period when women played a significant leading role. The feminization of the role of gallery owners is a topic that has yet to be thoroughly explored in Brazil from a historical and sociological perspective. The third part of the article also aims to discuss, based on the case of Teresa Nazar, the extent to which such female agency was not completely immune to gender inequalities.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"15 1","pages":"184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148703527","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}

{"title":"One Head, Two Bodies: A Double-Bodied Sphinx with in a 4th Century BC Scythian Culture as a Phenomenon of Selective Borrowing","authors":"Sergei Polin, Marina Daragan","doi":"10.3390/arts15080183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15080183","url":null,"abstract":"The appearance and spread of the image of the bicorporate sphinx in Scythia of 4th century BC can be regarded as an example of selective borrowing from ancient iconography. In the Greek world, this type is encountered rarely, but it gained considerable currency among the Scythians of the Northern Black Sea region. Its spread coincides with the period of expansion of the fantastic bestiary among the Scythians and the increasing complexity of the funerary rite of the Scythian elite. The predominance of finds in female burials indicates that this image was part of the circle of signs associated specifically with women’s high social status. The doubling of the body enhanced the image’s visual expressiveness and protective nature. More complex interpretations of the worldview are not supported by the sources and cannot be considered proven.","PeriodicalId":30547,"journal":{"name":"Arts","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148698829","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}