Analyzing Art and Aesthetics

This ninth volume of the Artefacts series explores how artists have responded to developments in science and technology, past and present. Rather than limiting the discussion to art alone, editors Anne Collins Goodyear and Margaret Weitekamp also asked contributors to consider aesthetics: the scholarly consideration of sensory responses to cultural objects. When considered as aesthetic objects, how do scientific instruments or technological innovations reflect and embody culturally grounded assessments about appearance, feel, and use? And when these objects become museum artifacts, what aesthetic factors affect their exhibition? Contributors found answers in the material objects themselves. This volume reconsiders how science, technology, art, and aesthetics impact one another.

Anne Collins Goodyear is Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Previously, she was Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and Professorial Lecturer in Art and Art History at The George Washington University. She is coeditor, with James W. McManus, of Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 2009) and has published numerous essays exploring intersections between modern and contemporary art and portraiture with science and technology.

Margaret A. Weitekamp, PhD, is a curator in the Space History Division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where she oversees over 4,000 pieces of space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. She wrote Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (2004), winner of the Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature from the American Astronautical Society. She earned her BA at the University of Pittsburgh and her PhD at Cornell University.

Series Preface by Martin Collins
Foreword by G. Wayne Clough
Acknowledgments
Introduction
 
Models as Aesthetic Objects
Section Introduction
Chapter 1 Using Science to Parse the Body: Some Artful Methods for Learning Medicine by Katherine Ott
Chapter 2 The Disappearing Model: Harvard’s Glass Flowers and the Perils of Trompe l’Oeil by Ellery Foutch
Chapter 3 “A Track Across What Is Now a Desert”: A. H. Munsell’s Quest for a System of Color by Erin McLeary
Chapter 4 Models: Assembled Realities in Architecture and Engineering by Dirk Buhler
 
Aesthetics of Technology
Section Introduction
Chapter 5 Karsh: Image Maker:Bringing Artifacts to an Art Show by Bryan Dewalt
Chapter 6 Softening the Orbiter:The Space Shuttle as Plaything and Icon by Margaret A. Weitekamp
Chapter 7 The Kilmer Complex: Artificial-Tree Cellular Towers and Landscape Aesthetics by Bernard Mergen
Chapter 8 Form Over Function? Technology, Aesthetics, and Identity at the National Museum of Scotland by Alison Taubman
Chapter 9 Split + Splice: An Experiment in Scholarly Methodologyand Exhibition Making by Martha Fleming
 
Artists Interpret Science and Technology
Section Introduction
Chapter 10 Mercurial Pigments and the Alchemy of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark by David Bjelajac
Chapter 11 C. A. A. Dellschau: An Outsider Artist and the Dream of Flight by Tom D. Crouch
Chapter 12 African Cultural Astronomy and the Arts: A Preliminary Enquiry by Christine Mullen Kreamer
Chapter 13 The Mathematical Paintings of Crockett Johnson, 1965–1975: An Amateur and His Sources by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell
Chapter 14 Art in the Context of a Science Institution: A Case Study of the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences by J. D. Talasek
Chapter 15 Retaking the Universe: Art and Appropriated Astronomical Artifacts by Elizabeth A. Kessler
Chapter 16 The Medium as Message in Contemporary Portraiture by Anne Collins Goodyear
 
Collaboration in Action: Three Perspectives on the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program
Chapter 17 Contemporary Art Informed by Science: The Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship by Jane Milosch
Chapter 18 The Influence and Inspiration from Taking Part in the Smithsonian’s Artist Research Fellowship Program by Shih Chieh Huang
Chapter 19 Light at the Museum by Lynne R. Parenti
About the Contributors
Index