This book sees public art outside the normal confines of art criticism and place it within broader contexts of public space and gender. Using different perspectives, it explores both the aesthetic and political aspects of the medium.

This book examines public art outside the normal confines of art criticism and places it within broader contexts of public space and gender by exploring both the aesthetic and political aspects of the medium.

Citizens, nonprofit organizations and local public officials--in increasing numbers--are using the arts and culture as vehicles to improve their downtowns, as well as to enhance general economic conditions within their communities. Public officials especially are learning that they can plant the seeds of urban renewal and, at the same time, promote their city's culture and arts. This not only renews their neighborhoods and downtowns, but also attracts tourists and private investment. A new eclectic economic development model has evolved and is beginning to work in a number of politically, economically, racially and culturally diverse communities throughout America. From Atlanta and Reno to Philadelphia and Seattle, this work includes numerous case studies that demonstrate the ways in which cities and towns are now using the arts to stimulate both downtown and neighborhood revitalization. The future of the arts in cities is also examined. Five appendices are included, as well: "Cities with Arts, Cultural, and/or Entertainment Districts in the United States," "Regional Resource Directory," "National Resource Directory," "National Directory of State Art Agencies," and "National Directory of Regional Arts Organizations."

Collating the views of international museum professionals, architects, designers and academics, this book highlights the complexity and significance of museum space, studies recent developments in museum architecture and exhibition design.

Seoul is a colossus both in its physical presence and the demand it places on any intellectual effort to understand it. How did it come to be? How can a city this immense work? Underlying its spectacle and incongruities is a city that might be described as ill at ease with its own past. The bitter rifts of Japanese colonization persist, as does the troubled aftermath of the Korean War and its divisions; the economic “Miracle on the Han” that followed is crosscut by memories of the violent dictatorship that drove it. In Seoul, author Ross King interrogates this contested history and its physical remnants, tacking between the city’s historiography and architecture, with attention to monuments, streets, and other urban spaces. The book’s structuring device is the dichotomy of erasure and memory as necessary preconditions for reinvention. King traces this phenomenon from the old dynasties to the Japanese regime and wartime destruction; he then follows the equally destructive reinvention of Korea under dictatorship to the brilliant city of the present with its extraordinary explosion of creativity and ideas—the post-1991 Hallyu, the Korean Wave. The final chapter returns to questions of forgetting and memory, but now as “conditions of possibility” for what would seem to underlie the present trajectory of this extraordinary city and culture. Seoul can be read, King suggests, in the context of the hybrid ideas that have characterized Korean cultural history. It may be their present eruption that accounts for the city of contradictions that confronts the contemporary observer and that most extraordinary of Korean phenomena: the rise of an alternative, virtual world, eclipsing both city and nation. Has the very idea of Korea been reinvented even as the weakly defined nation-state slips away?

The Beijing 2008 Olympic ceremonies were spectacular performances and technological accomplishments by the People’s Republic of China. However, the audience in Beijing was only the most overt element of a global audience receiving the message of the Games. For this global audience, the Beijing performances were a harbinger of wider regional and international ambitions; a message of intent that pointed to a larger Chinese plan to a degree not seen since the Ming dynasty. New Chinese ambitions embrace both soft power and hard power. The actor in this political drama of international scope is the Chinese state and its political ambitions on the world stage. The Beijing Olympics can be seen as its opening act, and the audience as global. Rather than the kind of "morality" play that is typically used in China to educate the people in politics, this new production – a production on many levels – was one aimed at audiences all around the world, and one that was a calculated expression of realpolitik. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The 2014 International Conference on Energy, Environment and Green Building Materials (EEGBM2014) was held November 28-30, 2014, in Guilin, Guangxi. EEGBM2014 provided a valuable opportunity for researchers, scholars and scientists to exchange their new ideas and application experiences face to face together, to establish business or research relat

In Art, Space, Ecology, internationally renowned curator and critic John K. Grande interviews twenty major contemporary artists whose works engage with the natural environment. Whether their medium is sculpture, nature interventions, performance, body art, or installation, these discussions, complemented by eighty stunning photographs, reveal the artists' diverse backgrounds and methods, expressions and realizations.Ultimately, the natural world serves as a canvas to explore the intersections of art, space, and the environment, thereby raising questions about our relationship with landscape itself. The essence of the art form is a dynamic interactivity, and the dialogues between Grande and the artists mirror the encounter of object and environment, artist and audience, society and nature. This work is rounded out with an engaging introduction by writer and curator Edward Lucie-Smith, who sets the stage for some of the most insightful and compelling discussions on art to be found.

'Studio' presents an extraordinary anthology of visual and verbal insights into the way paintings are made, and the complex blend of motivation and inspiration that sustains the painter in his or her solitary search for meaning.

Jason Benjamin is a young Australian painter whose career as an artist began in the US after studies at the Pratt Institute in New York. Since then, from his Sydney base, he has exhibited widely throughout Australia and has been a regular contributor to the Archibald Prize. His international career begins this year with and exhibition in Rome. Benjamin's subjects are drawn from those around him and the environment in which he dwells. While his paintings are loaded with atmousphere and are evocative of the emotions felt in the presence of his subjects, the paintings conform to long-held traditions in western art. They are - in the final instance - landscapes, still-lifes and portraits. These are moody paintings, aptly titles and certain to draw empathetic responces from those who view them.