The Social Production of Art

Abstract

Communications has been defined as the conveying or exchanging of information and ideas. This wide definition is taken as the starting-point for this series of books, which are not bound by conventional academic divisions. The series aims to document or analyse a broad range of cultural forms and ideas. It encompasses works from areas as esoteric as linguistics and as exoteric as television. The language of communication may be the written word or the moving picture, the static icon or the living gesture. These means of communicating can at their best blossom into and form an essential part of the other mysterious concept, culture. There is no sharp or intended split in the series between communication and culture. On one definition, culture refers to the organisation of experience shared by members of a community, a process which includes the standards and values for judging or perceiving, for predicting and acting. In this sense, creative communication can make for a better and livelier culture. The series reaches towards the widest possible audience. Some of the works concern themselves with activities as general as play and games; others offer a narrower focus, such as the ways of understanding the visual image. It is hoped that some moves in the transformation ofthe artful and the scientific can be achieved, and that both can begin to be understood by a wider and more comprehending community. Some of these books are written by practitioners-broadcasters, journalists, and artists; others come from critics, scholars, scientists and historians. The series has an ancient and laudable, though perhaps untenable, aim-an aim as old as the Greeks and as new as holography: it aspires to help heal the split between cultures, between the practitioners and the thinkers, between science and art, between the academy and life.

Creativity from constraints in engineering design: lessons learned at Coloplast

“…Mednick 1962, Wolff 1981, Amabile 1982, and Amabile (1982) argues that discovering plus defining the task and constraints is an important part of creative activity. As it is impossible to initiate a creative process from nothing (Rosenman and Gero 1993), constraints are a precondition for creativity, and what is not constrained cannot be considered creative (Johnson-Laird 1988, Horowitz 1999.…”

Visual aesthetics in dementia1

“…In other words, do we have brain cells that determine aesthetic responses or do we trust to something more in the mind: intuition which is probably socially produced? Wolff (1993) defines the 'aesthetic experience' as both socially produced and as 'an essential human attribute or mode of being' (p. 141). She describes the debate between those who believe that beauty is defined by the discourse of its time and place and is therefore forever constructed and reconstructed, and those who believe that there are innate principles which define beauty.…”

Knowing the Public. A Review of Museum Marketing Literature and Research1

“…115-166). Wolff (1993), among many other writers, de-romanticises and de-mystifies the notion of art as the creation of 'genius', by arguing that art is a social product which is "embedded in and informed by broader social and political processes and institutions, with economic forces historically playing a particularly important rôle" (p 139). These sociological writings have contributed to exposing social and political forces playing a role in the creation of art, which disguises itself as aesthetic (Wolff, 1993: p. 7).…”