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The study critically reclaims participatory art beyond its co-option as a fuzzword of neoliberal governance. It examines a range of artistic practices from community theatre, immersive performance and the visual arts in different sites around the world. It offers a refreshing theorisation of participatory art as gesture.

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects. Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world-in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.

Jack Shadbolt was inspired in his formative years by his contact with Emily Carr and with her brooding works portraying the remnants of Indian villages against the overwhelming wilderness. He made sketches of Indian artefacts and the Cowichan Reserve in the 1930s, but it was only after World War II that elements of Indian art began to show up in his style. Marjorie Halpin finds in the changes in the way Indian forms occur in Shadbolt’s paintings an appropriate expression of the changing attitudes of British Columbians to Native society and the political will the Native people now manifest. The place of Indian motifs in Shadbolt’s painting can be broadly correlated with the cultural quickening of Indian society in recent years. They reveal his emotional sympathy with Kwagiutl, Haida, and Tlingit forms and his deep response to the Indians' spiritual and historic presence in the British Columbia environment.

The years between 1922 and 1961, often referred to as the “Dark Ages of Northwest Coast art,” have largely been ignored by art historians, and dismissed as a period of artistic decline. Tales of Ghosts compellingly reclaims this era, arguing that it was instead a critical period during which the art played an important role in public discourses on the status of First Nations people in Canadian society. Hawker’s insightful examination focuses on the complex functions that Northwest Coast objects, such as the ubiquitous totem pole, played during the period. He demonstrates how these objects asserted the integrity and meaningfulness of First Nations identities, while simultaneously resisting the intent and effects of assimilation enforced by the Canadian government’s denial of land claims, its ban of the potlatch, and its support of assimilationist education. Those with an interest in First Nations and Canadian history and art history, anthropology, museology, and post-colonial studies will be delighted by the publication of this major contribution to their fields.

This book is about the destruction of art, both in terms of objects that have been destroyed – lost in fires, floods or vandalism – and the general concept of art operating through object and form. Through re-examinations of such events as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 and the activities of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, the book proposes an idea of solvent form hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency, whereby art, while attempting to make secure or fixed, simultaneously undoes and destroys through its inception. Ultimately, the book questions what is it that may be perceived in the destruction of art and how we understand it, and further how it might be linked to a more general failure.

Piracy. It is among the most prevalent and vexing issues of the digital age. In just the last decade, it has altered the music industry beyond recognition, changed the way people watch television, and dented the business models of the film and software industries. From MP3 files to recipes from French celebrity chefs to the jokes of American standup comedians, piracy is ubiquitous. And now piracy can even be an arbiter of taste, such as in the decision by Netflix Netherlands to license heavily pirated shows.In this unflinching analysis of piracy on the internet and in the markets of the Global South, Tilman Baumgärtel brings together a collection of essays examining the economic, political, and cultural consequences of piracy. The contributors explore a wide array of topics, which include materiality and piracy in Rio de Janeiro; informal media distribution and the film experience in Hanoi, Vietnam; the infrastructure of piracy in Nigeria; the political economy of copy protection; and much more. Offering a theoretical background for future studies of piracy,A Reader in International Media Piracyis an important collection on the burning issue of the internet age.

The question whether or not seventeenthcentury painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens created the paintings which were later sold under their names, has caused many a heated debate. Much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed. For example, did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint their works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings? How did a painting’s price relate to its quality? And how did connoisseurship change as the art market became increasingly complex? The contributors to this essential volume trace the evolution of connoisseurship in the booming art market of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. Among them are the renowned Golden Age scholars Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi. It is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the Old Masters and the early modern art market.

Installation art has become mainstream in artistic practices. However, acquiring and displaying such artworks means that curators and conservators are challenged to deal with obsolete technologies, ephemeral materials, and other issues concerning care and management of these artworks. By analyzing three in-depth case studies, the author sheds new light on the key concepts of traditional conservation-authenticity, artist's intention, and the notion of ownership-while exploring how these concepts apply in contemporary art conservation.

Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.