How do images shape our worldview ? What do their study bring to our understanding of society ? Through interviews, essays and reviews this dossier shows how the close study of still or moving images has become central to the social sciences. From anthropology to history or literature, taking into account the overwhelming presence of visual representation yields unexpected and original information about human, social and political relationships.
Through the remarkable story of the journey of 264 Japanese miniatures, a world-renowned ceramicist retraces the rise and fall of his family, the Ephrussi, rich Jewish bankers with a dynasty which spread across Europe from Odessa and Paris to Vienna. His book is an example of how history can lie at the heart of literature.
There is a long-standing tradition of contrasting the French and American models of philanthropy. According to four scholars invited to discuss the matter for Books and Ideas, this contrast, which is too quickly reduced to a difference between market and the state-based approaches, is no longer valid.
The curator of the recent La fabrique des images exhibit at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, anthropologist Philippe Descola offers a new approach of pictorial representations on the five continents and shows the four great worldviews they manifest: naturalism, totemism, animism, and analogism.
Towards the end of the 1960s the dematerialized forms of conceptual art transformed the modes of art production. The advent of art works which could be printed and reproduced in the pages of magazines changed the nature of these publications: artists’ magazines thus became an alternative space for artistic production.
Throughout the 1970s, New York’s alternative spaces appeared through the spontaneous initiatives of avant-garde artists whose wish was to emancipate art from the institutional and commercial pressures of the art world. The use of decaying urban spaces was thus one of the main characteristics of these spaces. Most of them have disappeared, others have been assimilated by the commercial or institutional art systems.
American sociologist Howard Becker stands out for his rejection of theory and his attachment to ethnographical observation of worlds in which he is himself an actor. One of his key lessons to sociologists is that they should ask “how” rather than “why”.
The various dance notation systems invented over the years have never succeeded in becoming part of choregraphic practices. Works are almost completely absorbed by the performance and are only handed down by tradition, more gesturally than orally. In dance, the very notion of a work is therefore problematic. This acknowledgement forms the basis of Frédéric Pouillaude’s excellent aesthetic analysis.
Charlotte Guichard highlights the role of the amateur d’art in the XVIIIth century art market. Although he played a key role in the rise of French art in the last half century of the Ancien Régime, the amateur was strongly criticized for his aristocratic notion of artistic taste.
