Art historian James Elkins, in his book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, tells a story of a sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago titled 14 Stations of the Cross. Elkins teaches at the school and was interviewing students about their own religious-themed art. This Stations was “a large ceramic church, about two and a half feet high” covered with a “gray an...

Associating certain forms and designs in Islamic Arts with the promised Heaven may be widely observed in the works of many historians and critics of the field. It is believed that Islamic Art has been derived from the imagination of the Paradise as depicted in Holy Quran. To express this meaning in technical words it should be said that the main concept in Islamic Arts has been the gardens of h...

An exposure to the arts is an essential part of every undergraduate's curriculum, but we feel that the course offerings adopted by most universities to acquaint their engineering students with the fine arts fail to meet their objective. Herein we describe a different type of fine arts course for engineers that approaches the subject matter through an avenue that they can see as valuable and emp...

In this paper we review recent sociological research dealing with the consumption of culture produced in the fine and popular arts realms. We note that most of the initial theoretical developments in the sociological study of culture consumption were first developed to explain audience segmentation in the fine arts realm under what we refer as the “cultural capital” paradigm developed by Pierre...

ollection management in art history requires a diverse and multifaceted approach to collections activity. Not only does the librarian require a strong grounding in art historical and fine arts librarianship, but a sound appreciation of research and publishing trends inherent to art history. Among various approaches to selecting for art history, mapping dissertation research trends may not alway...