This edited volume breaks new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by providing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of chapters and visual essays by researchers and artists. The book is a collection of approaches from several disciplines where the spatial, conceptual, and theoretical hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ are challenged. Chapters provide a diverse collection of viewpoints, analyses, and provocations on ‘peripherality’ through bringing together international specialists to discuss the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, and legal implications of ‘peripheral approach.’ The aim is to illuminate the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in the society at large from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives. The book is designed to assist established researchers, academics, and students across disciplines who wish to incorporate novel, arts and practice-based research and critical approaches in their research projects, artwork, and academic writing. Providing both a consolidated understanding of the peripheries, visual studies, and artistic research as they are and setting expansive and new research insights and practices, this book is essential reading for scholars of arts and humanities, visual culture, art history, design, philosophy, and cultural studies.

This book excavates the depths of creative purpose and meaning-making and the extent to which artist autonomy and authenticity in art is a struggle against psychological conditioning, controlling cultural institutions and markets, key to which is representation. The chapters are underpinned by examples from the arts, and the narrative weaves a trail through a range of conceptualizations that are applied to various aspects of visual culture from mainstream canonical arts to avant-garde, community and public art; social and political art to commercial art; and ethereal art to the popular, edgy and kitsch. The book is wide-ranging and employs various aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, political, psycho-social and sociological debates to highlight the problems and contradictions that an encounter with the arts and creativity engenders. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, arts management, cultural policy, cultural studies and cultural theory.

Focusing on the ‘postinternet’ art of the 2010s, this volume explores the widespread impact of recent internet culture on the formal and conceptual concerns of contemporary art. The ‘postinternet’ art movement is splintered and loosely defined, both in terms of its form and its politics, and has come under significant critique for this reason. This study will provide this definition, offering a much-needed critical context for this period of artistic activity that has had and is still having a major impact on contemporary culture. The book presents a picture of what the art and culture made within and against the constraints of the online experience look, sound, and feel like. It includes works by Petra Cortright, Jon Rafman, Jordan Wolfson, DIS, Amalia Ulman, and Thomas Ruff, and presents new analyses of case studies drawn from the online worlds of the 2010s, including vaporwave, anonymous image board culture, ‘irony bros’ and ‘edgelords’, viral extreme sports stunts, and GIFs. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, and digital culture.

This study focuses on street art and large-scale murals in metropolitan Miami/Dade County, while also foregrounding the diasporic and aesthetic interventions made by migrant and second-generation artists whose families hail from the Caribbean and Latin America. Jana Evans Braziel argues that Caribbean and Latinx street artists define and visually mark the city of Miami as a diasporic, transnational urban space. These artists also help define Miami as a cosmopolitan city, yet one that is also a distinctly Caribbean and Latinx urban space, and simultaneously resist but also (at times reluctantly) participate in the forces of gentrification and urban re/development, particularly through the myriad and complex ways in which street art contributes to city branding and art tourism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban studies, American studies, and Latin American/Caribbean studies.

This study concentrates on the discourses around animal death in arts and the ways they changed over time. Chapter topics span from religious symbolism to natural history cabinets, from hunting laws to animal rights, from economic history to formalist views on art. In other words, the book asks why artists have represented animal death in visual culture, maintaining that the practice has, through the whole era, been a crucial part of the understanding of our relation to the world and our identity as humans. This is the first truly integrative book-length examination of the depiction of dead animals in Western art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, animal studies, and cultural history.

Offering an alternative mode of visual cultural analysis to the prevalent discursive model, this book proposes to situate analysis of Image within ‘formal’ analyses of culture experience. Specifically, the discussion draws on theories of affective aesthetics with the view of addressing the sensual form of culture (i.e. ‘cultural form’). Therefore, the volume puts forward a mode of formalist analysis in visual cultural research which takes purchase on the idea of ‘cultural form’. A continuum of formalist attention between Image analysis (visual media, industrial design) and probing of ‘cultural forms’ establishes the theoretical underpinning of the book. These concepts are expounded through a case study which looks at formal experimentations and debates arising from 1960s avant-garde artistic practices in London.

With increased mobility and transnational interaction worldwide, internationalism in contemporary visual art is no longer exclusively a western issue. Contemporary visual art includes works by expatriate artists who have settled in the west, as well as artists outside the west reflecting on everyday events in a globalized world. Peripheral Insider examines the conditions of expatriate artists from various angles: the historical and colonial roots of the issue, positions among theorists dealing with expatriate artists in the west, the role of established art institutions, and examples of recent developments in the field. Peripheral Insider argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences. The contributors elucidate the book's main theme on various theoretical levels and set forth their analyses of a number of issues relevant to new interpretations of "the post-colonial agenda."