Kathryn Brown
Kathryn Brown is Reader in Art Histories, Markets, and Digital Heritage at Loughborough University. She holds a D.Phil in French (University of Oxford) and a PhD in Art History (University of London). Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Ashgate, 2012; paperback 2016), Matisse's Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist's Book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Henri Matisse (Reaktion, 2021), Dialogues with Degas: Influence and Antagonism in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), and (as editor and contributor) The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Ashgate, 2013), Interactive Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris, 2014; paperback 2016), Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2017) and the Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History (2020). Brown is a Rhodes Scholar and has taught and held visiting fellowships at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), the University of British Columbia (Canada), Tulane University (USA), the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (Canberra) and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (Washington DC). Brown is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic. Her research has been funded by the British Academy, the Independent Social Research Foundation, French Studies, and the Association for Art History.
Address: School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Loughborough University
Epinal Way
Loughborough LE11 3TU
United Kingdom
Address: School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Loughborough University
Epinal Way
Loughborough LE11 3TU
United Kingdom
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Books by Kathryn Brown
The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching.
In Interactive Contemporary Art, essays tease apart notions of ‘interactivity’, ‘collaboration’, ‘performance’, ‘relational aesthetics’, and ‘social art’ for the purpose of clarifying a range of conflicting approaches to the making and reception of art and promoting a dialogue between art historians, curators, and artists. They ask: what are the ways in which audiences experience contemporary interactive and collaborative art? Do participatory art forms generate a new form of aesthetic education that is capable of shaping social and political behaviour? What degree of co-operation is required for such artworks to be successful? What approaches do curators take to such works when organizing exhibitions? Through close analysis of interactive artworks in a range of media, this collection examines the most recent debates in this field and proposes new ways of conceptualizing participatory practices.
The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d’artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Having regard to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.
Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives enhances our appreciation of the interaction between popular culture and law by underscoring this interaction’s multinational and international features. Two dozen authors from nine countries invite readers to consider the role of law-related popular culture in a broad range of nations, socio-political contexts, and educational environments. Even more importantly, selected contributors explore the global transmission and reception of law-related cultural products and, in particular, the influence of assorted works and media across national borders and cultural boundaries.
The circulation and consumption of law-related popular culture are increasing as channels of mass media become more complex and as globalization runs its uncertain course. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives adds to our critical understanding of the worldwide interaction of popular culture and law and encourages reflection on the wider implications of this mutual influence across both time and geography.
Papers by Kathryn Brown
for the transaction of art assets. Much of the rhetoric employed by the auction houses to publicise online auctions suggested a utopian conception of technology capable of encouraging artistic innovation and broadening access to art markets. In contrast to the idea that these online formats constitute democratic change in the artworld, this
article argues that the control of new technological infrastructures represents an extension of institutional power and maintains the socio-cultural elitism of urban centres in which physical art auctions at the top end of the market have traditionally been conducted.
Print Quartertly, Vol. XXX1, no. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 395–405.
The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching.
In Interactive Contemporary Art, essays tease apart notions of ‘interactivity’, ‘collaboration’, ‘performance’, ‘relational aesthetics’, and ‘social art’ for the purpose of clarifying a range of conflicting approaches to the making and reception of art and promoting a dialogue between art historians, curators, and artists. They ask: what are the ways in which audiences experience contemporary interactive and collaborative art? Do participatory art forms generate a new form of aesthetic education that is capable of shaping social and political behaviour? What degree of co-operation is required for such artworks to be successful? What approaches do curators take to such works when organizing exhibitions? Through close analysis of interactive artworks in a range of media, this collection examines the most recent debates in this field and proposes new ways of conceptualizing participatory practices.
The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d’artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Having regard to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.
Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives enhances our appreciation of the interaction between popular culture and law by underscoring this interaction’s multinational and international features. Two dozen authors from nine countries invite readers to consider the role of law-related popular culture in a broad range of nations, socio-political contexts, and educational environments. Even more importantly, selected contributors explore the global transmission and reception of law-related cultural products and, in particular, the influence of assorted works and media across national borders and cultural boundaries.
The circulation and consumption of law-related popular culture are increasing as channels of mass media become more complex and as globalization runs its uncertain course. Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives adds to our critical understanding of the worldwide interaction of popular culture and law and encourages reflection on the wider implications of this mutual influence across both time and geography.
for the transaction of art assets. Much of the rhetoric employed by the auction houses to publicise online auctions suggested a utopian conception of technology capable of encouraging artistic innovation and broadening access to art markets. In contrast to the idea that these online formats constitute democratic change in the artworld, this
article argues that the control of new technological infrastructures represents an extension of institutional power and maintains the socio-cultural elitism of urban centres in which physical art auctions at the top end of the market have traditionally been conducted.
Print Quartertly, Vol. XXX1, no. 4 (Dec 2014), pp. 395–405.
I argue that during the 1870s and 80s the acts of inhabiting and reading about the city stood in a reciprocal relationship. Newspapers ranging from women’s magazines to mainstream dailies were designed to solicit the individual’s observational curiosity and played a key role in bridging these two forms of engagement with urban life. In contrast to critical literature that interprets the newspaper as a token that differentiated female and male interests during the nineteenth century, I show ways in which newspaper culture and its depiction in visual art and literature both expressed and encouraged women’s participation in the sensational life of the city.
I argue that during the 1870s, the flâneur was displaced by the newspaper reader: an ‘internal reader’ with whom individuals were invited to identify on a daily basis irrespective of class or gender. This has important consequences for conceptions of women’s experience of city life and the ways in which that experience was portrayed in cultural products of the period. Not only were women depicted as newspaper readers in public spaces, but their virtual experience of the city through the act of reading eroded the dichotomy between the public and private spheres. No longer a locus of experience that was opposed to the urban life of the flâneur, domestic space became an arena in which women participated in public affairs and envisaged themselves as members of a national reading community. The portrayal of women as newspaper readers thus unsettled essentialist assumptions about female reading practices and reinforced women’s active participation in a self-consciously modern metropolis.
This paper examines the idea that visual art provokes reflection on, and stimulates a model of, cosmopolitan citizenship in contemporary Europe. Focusing on large-scale, public artworks by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that have been presented in various European cities over the past fifteen years, I first examine the national histories and identities that these works project, critique, and ironize. I then turn to the forms of social and aesthetic participation that are fostered by interactive computer art. I examine why works in electronic media have played a minor role in recent discussions of the relationship between art and community and argue, by contrast, that such works are often designed for the purpose of prompting exchanges across national boundaries and cultural identities. I outline a model of cosmopolitanism that is offered by interactive computer art and consider its implications and limitations for the construction and communication of a transnational idea of Europe.
I argue that Matisse’s illustrated books locate the act of reading in the context of broader sensory experiences. Focusing on the transformation of reproducible texts into unique artefacts that were intended to be displayed as much as they were intended to be read, the book objects I examine engage the individual as both reader and viewer and trigger new types of physical engagement with the form of the book. In each case, the reader’s typical range of sensory experiences associated with the look and feel of a book are subtly altered as new patterns of aesthetic engagement are demanded. Far from being a disembodied presence, the reading body emerges as the figure for whom sensory worlds are persistently and innovatively evoked in multiple formats within the covers of the book. The repeated motif of the female face is shown to be central to this experience by inviting an experience of beauty not through language, but through visual perception.
In addition to reconceptualizing the individual’s physical relationship to the book format, I examine ways in which Matisse’s livres d’artiste impose new rhythms on the act of reading itself. Through the rearrangement of text on the printed page, the insertion of illustration, the use of unexpected page breaks, and the management of white space, the reader’s progress through language is halted, and new rhythms affect the sense of the underlying text. Books are no longer required to be read in a strictly linear way. Instead, the repetition and variation of key visual motifs invite the reader/viewer to inhabit the imaginative space of the book for a longer period, to go backwards as well as forwards, and to linger over visual material that calls textual meaning into question.
Series Editor: Dr Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
Acquisitions Editor: Margaret Michniewicz, Bloomsbury Academic
Advisory Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke (Christie’s Education, New York); Christel H. Force (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Charlotte Galloway (Australian National University); Alain Quemin (Université Paris-8); Mark Westgarth (University of Leeds).
Les langues de cette journée d'étude sont le français et l'anglais.
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