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This article reconstructs the process through which Chinese dress objects transferred from wearing to display, and the collectors, curators, and dealers responsible.
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My grandfather must have bought me the Junior School Dictionary soon after it was published, because my mother and I left India in 1982. I imagine carting this volume across the oceans, from Madras (it was still called Madras then) to Bethesda, Maryland…
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This essay explores the significance of a corpus of square-based, mold-blown, and gilded glass vessels that were made in India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and have been cast under the wider rubric of “Mughal glass.”
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Color Reproductions of Mexican Frescoes by Diego Rivera was a relatively small MoMA exhibition that has been largely overlooked by scholars of modern art and design.
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Treating writing as a “cultural technique,” this article investigates writing in material culture in Arabia from the sixth to the eighth century CE to show that practices such as writing on shoes reflect a deliberate prioritization of the materiality of writing over its semantic content.
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An examination of the display and treatment by the British of the Koh-i-Noor diamond with an emphasis on the feminization of the jewel, the Indian subcontinent, and Queen Victoria herself.
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This article brings together for the first time all archival and material evidence detailing the history and appearance of three little-known works of neoclassical chinoiserie by Robert Adam.
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Understanding the Viennese artist Hans Makart’s studio requires looking beyond style to matters of science and commerce, subjectivity and power.
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Since the middle of the nineteenth century, archaeology has been firmly established as a specific way of exploring the past. So where, then, is the dividing line between history and archaeology?
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Examining the development of a specific gendered discourse driven by the electrical industry that united key beliefs about feminine beauty, identity, and the domestic interior.
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Within the framework of an overall theory of the cultural history of materials, this article reconstructs the role of tempered glass in the modernist imagination.
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What does Lauren Conrad have in common with Rimsha Masih? One is an American reality TV star who parlayed her MTV persona into a do-it-yourself website, a fashion line, and several semiautobio-
graphical novels; the other is an illiterate Pakistani Christian. -
How does one portray the human subject of speed? Both in terms of able bodies and quick wits?
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What does it mean to “replace the government of persons by the administration of things?” And what do we do about all this paperwork?
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This article considers the relationship between self-conscious cultural reawakening in early Pahlavi Iran and the cotemporaneous vogue for Persian art and aesthetics in the United States.
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The Last Connoisseur: “We are dinosaurs left over from an epoch whose participants are mostly dead. There is no one to take our place.”
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What do art history and material culture studies have in common? Why have the two been so poorly integrated with each other? Should art-historical practices play a greater role in the examination of the social lives of objects?
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We have come full circle in a world built around performance as flow; a world in which spinning disks signify sampling, mixing, busting moves and rhymes and singing songs; a world in which the pulse of the ideal life is a synthetic drum track.
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Clothing’s portability grants it a history of embodiment and transmutation, moving among bodies, cultures, nations, and economies.
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“Machines should work — people should think — machines — should work — people — should think — machines — should — work — people — should — think.”
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Putting mater (and pater) back in materialism. Roland Barthes’s take on writing, paperwork, the materiality of communication, and its unconscious dimensions.
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How important is it to understand the method by which an object comes into being? What does knowledge of these methods reveal about the object itself?
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A major evaluation of one of the most visually productive collaborations in the history of cinema.