Search results

This paper focuses on one of the key facets of the global art market, the art fair. Art fairs, which have proliferated in recent years and can be found in large numbers all over the globe, provide a crucial infrastructure for the sale and exhibition of works of art. Despite their current popularity, however, the history of the art fair, the development of its organisational form, and its importance to the market and society have largely been neglected in scholarly studies. Therefore, this paper adopts an evolutionary approach to better understand the development of the art fair, including its network-like structure, and how it became the core business structure of the contemporary art world. This paper demonstrates that art fairs inherited a great number of business practices from previous times, such as observational principles for the creation of prices, aesthetic features, and branding strategies to emphasize their outstanding and almost religious nature. Furthermore, the paper shows that the network-like structure of the art fair has contributed to its contemporary success.

"This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agri-environments during the transition process by referring to examples of agri-environmental problems faced in Central and Eastern European countries. It is often stated that the replacement of institutional structures in post socialist countries would bring a unique opportunity to implement new policies and institutions needed to ensure that economic growth is environmentally sustainable. This idea stems from the assumption that the breakdown of the socialist system resembles that (of the Schumpeterian type) of creative destruction - a process that incessantly revolutionizes economic structures from within. However, not all kinds of institutions, especially at local level, can simply be implemented, and even more, not incessantly. Instead, they evolve as a response to ecosystem and social system characteristics, and this is a rather slow process. A central question therefore is whether the required institutional arrangements for achieving sustainability in the area of agri-environmental resource management can be built more easily in periods of transition as they fill institutional gaps, or whether processes of transition make institution building a more difficult and far more time consuming task than previously thought. Above all, we want to find out, how these two processes of institution building at different scales affect the sustainable management of resources such as water and biodiversity in agriculture? It will become clear that the agri-environmental problem areas faced during transition are complex and dynamic and require adequate institutions both by political design and from the grassroots, to be developed by the respective actors involved. Transition from centrally planned to pluralistic systems has to be considered as a particular and in some respect non-typical process of institutional change. Popular theories of institutional change do not necessarily apply. The privatisation experience from many CEE countries will serve as an example. Finally, we will provide some examples of missing or insufficient interaction between political actors or agencies and people in CEE countries. Substantial investments into social and human capital, particularly regarding informal institutions are needed for institutions of sustainability to evolve." (author's abstract)

"Juridical concepts -specialized terms used in legal reasoning- have adaptive properties which allow for their coevolution with the social relations that they describe and constitute. Concepts form a bridge between empirical facts and legal norms. As such they allow data about the social world to enter legal discourse and frame normative judgments. Their defeasibility allows them to adjust to changes in their social and economic context. Studying juridical concepts in their historical context opens up new perspectives on institutional change and contributes to our understanding of social reality." (author's abstract)

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the 'evolutionary algorithm' that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin's famous theory, and vice-versa.

Comprised of seven chapters, with several musical examples, figures and definitions of terms, this original and accessible book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relationships between music and evolutionary thought. Jan guides the reader through key evolutionary ideas and the development of human musicality, before exploring cultural evolution, evolutionary ideas in musical scholarship, animal vocalisations, music generated through technology, and the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon.

A unique examination of how evolutionary thought intersects with music, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music is essential to our understanding of how and why music arose in our species and why it is such a significant presence in our lives.

"In this book, Kate Distin proposes a theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Distin introduces the concept that humans share information not only in natural languages, which are spoken or signed, but also in artefactual languages like writing and musical notation, which use media that are made by humans. Languages enable humans to receive and transmit variations in cultural information and resources. In this way, they provide the mechanism for cultural evolution. The human capacity for metarepresentation - thinking about how we think - accelerates cultural evolution, because it frees cultural information from the conceptual limitations of each individual language. Distin shows how the concept of cultural evolution outlined in this book can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, relating her theory to a range of subjects including economics, linguistics, and developmental biology."--Publisher's description

In this book, Kate Distin proposes a theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Distin introduces the concept that humans share information not only in natural languages, which are spoken or signed, but also in artefactual languages like writing and musical notation, which use media that are made by humans. Languages enable humans to receive and transmit variations in cultural information and resources. In this way, they provide the mechanism for cultural evolution. The human capacity for metarepresentation - thinking about how we think - accelerates cultural evolution, because it frees cultural information from the conceptual limitations of each individual language. Distin shows how the concept of cultural evolution outlined in this book can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, relating her theory to a range of subjects including economics, linguistics, and developmental biology

"First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson's L'évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson's most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers. A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues in Creative Evolution against a mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all life emerges from a creative, shared impulse, which he famously terms élan vital and which passes like a current through different organisms and generations over time. Whilst this impulse remains as forms of life diverge and multiply, human life is characterised by distinctive form of consciousness or intellect that is modelled upon how objects or parts of objects are juxtaposed in space. Yet as Bergson brilliantly shows, the intellect's fragmentary and action-oriented nature, which he likens to the cinematograph, means it alone cannot grasp nature's creativity and invention over time. A major task of Creative Evolution is how to reconcile these two elements. For Bergson, the answer famously lies in intuition, which brings instinct and intellect together and takes us "into the very interior of life." A work of great rigour and imaginative richness that contributed to Bergson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Creative Evolution played an important and controversial role in the trajectory of twentieth-century philosophy and continues to create significant discussion and debate. The philosopher and psychologist William James, who admired Bergson's work, was writing an introduction to the first English translation of the book before his death in 1910. This new translation includes a foreword by Elizabeth Grosz and a helpful Translator's introduction by Donald Landes. Also translated for the first time are additional notes, articles, reviews and letters on the reception of Creative Evolution in biology, mathematics and theology. This edition includes fascinating commentaries by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilles Deleuze"--