This research investigates how women are represented in fashion photography produced by three influential female photographers active between 1945 and 1960: Lee Miller, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Lillian Bassman. Goffman’s gender advertisement coding scheme served as the primary analytical framework, through which eighty-two photographs were systematically evaluated across seven dimensions of stereotypical gender representation: relative size, function ranking, feminine touch, ritualization of subordination, licensed withdrawal, body display, and movement. Analysis revealed that images produced by these photographers demonstrated markedly lower incidences of stereotypical gender coding than those documented in comparable studies conducted during later periods. These results suggest that the gender of the photographer played a meaningful role in shaping visual representation, and that the relatively fluid and experimental conditions of postwar fashion photography further enabled more independent and self-possessed portrayals of female subjects. The study concludes with a discussion of the broader significance of these findings for scholarship in art history, media studies, and feminist theories of the gaze.
Calls for cultural engagement in sustainability are growing as global ecological crises continue to escalate and efforts to foster sustainability lag. Scholars are increasingly encountering ways in which the arts and environmental sustainability can intersect to advance new forms of engagement and insight toward sustainability goals. However, scholarship at this intersection is highly cross-disciplinary and disparate as a result. This article initiates an exercise of conceptualizing the scholarly field of Sustainability and the Arts (SATA). The research presented here explores literature on the core concepts of sustainability, the arts, and scholarship, and seeks to examine the spaces where these concepts intersect. Understanding this scholarly landscape will be critical to identifying priorities for making impactful and significant scholarly contributions in an emerging field. Literature was collected through snowball sampling and targeted literature searches, with the goal of identifying foundational and influential texts informing how these concepts are framed in diverse contexts. From the literature, we outline some of the key elements that characterize each of these concepts and complicate their operationalizations. This article articulates the first functional definition for SATA as a field which integrates traditional and expanded understandings of scholarship and the arts, applying these combined capacities through the lens of sustainability. We characterize SATA as a cross-disciplinary, emergent, and pluriversal scholarly field. This research provides critical insight to scholars and artists working in SATA, allowing for a cohesive body of scholarly work which can amplify the impact of collaborative activities between the arts and environmental sectors.
Manuel Felguérez was one of the earliest artists experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) in creating new art-making methods through the computer, foreshadowing generative and AI-based art-making. He developed an iterative process with rule-definition, randomization, and selection as experimental methods. His originality in creative method reflects the very foundational logic of today’s machine learning and has been recognized as an icon in the global history of experimental art and technology. This research analyzes Felguérez’s significance in art and aesthetic development, based on Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, as well as late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discourse on phenomenology, intuition, cognition, imagination, human faculties, and AI aesthetics (“Aisthetics”). It examines his approach, which connects the rational with the emergent. It also challenges the Romantic notion of the artist-genius by proposing a distributed authorship between human and system. At the same time, it reasserts the ethical and interpretive dimensions of aesthetic judgment. In this framework, the artist is positioned as both mediator and master of the machine.
Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections anticipated how internet aesthetics, tropes, and memetic performance would evolve into potent vectors for ideological manipulation. This article uses dynamical systems theory (DST) to examine how visual and affective patterns shape belief systems. Through a case study of Ulman’s work and the phenomenon of “Pastel QAnon,” I argue that if artists can model the affective architecture of influence—its aesthetic contours, feedback loops, and attractors—they can also reroute these systems. By disrupting harmful attractors, introducing emotionally coherent counter-aesthetics, and exposing algorithmic biases, art can intervene within the systems it critiques.
In the contemporary digital era, museums face the urgency to evolve and adapt by embracing and integrating new technologies. While the latter function as innovative tools and platforms for the art world, they simultaneously give rise to new media artworks that demand new frames of presentation, exhibition, and mediation. As such, it can be said that the technological and digital developments of recent years not only create new possibilities for the arts but also introduce disruptions and challenges for cultural institutions. New media art reshapes the relationships between art, the public, and museums, primarily through its technicity, i.e., digital materialities, and objectualities that largely differ from more traditional artworks. Moreover, it inaugurates different forms of mediation and reception, based on participation, interaction, and immersion, while suggesting a different configuration and use of the gallery space. Consequently, standard museum frames, namely the modernist white cube, no longer apply, and new exhibition models and architectures must be created. This, alongside the new dynamics introduced by digital technology, leads to a reconfiguration of the museum’s structure. At the same time, new exhibition platforms emerge, that are efficient and somewhat autonomous from institutions, such as the internet. As a result, there is a rupture with the understanding of the museum as the only, or the main, space for the arts. Within this context and drawing on André Malraux’s concept of the “imaginary museum”—a museum without walls—this article elaborates on what the new museum of the digital era might be, and how it can structurally and conceptually evolve in response to digital transformation. It proposes a museum frame that is hybrid and applicable to the current technological context while aiming to contribute to the studies in this area.
