The Red Gown: Reflections on the Visual History of Menstruation in Scotland

Over the last decades, menstruation has become more present in public discourse in Scotland.While scholars are increasingly documenting this change, little attention has been paid to therole of menstrual art made in Scotland. In this article, we explore the historic contexts ofmenstrual art in the town of St Andrews and in Scotland during the late twentieth and earlytwenty-first century, and ask what this reveals about menstrual absence and presence in publicdebates. We do this in collaboration with artist Bee Hughes, whose practice focuses on thevisible and invisible aspects of menstruation, and who was artist in residence at St Andrews in2020. Due to a university strike and a pandemic, our collaboration changed and subsequentlyfocused more on the histories of menstrual art. We thus assess symbols and collections ofmenstrual visual culture in Scotland, including the use of the ceremonial red gown at theUniversity of St Andrews, and menstrual art collections at Glasgow Women’s Library and StAndrews Special Collections. Together, we reflect on how their histories might be both present(institutionalised) and absent (when not on display). 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INNOVATIVE TEACHING METHODS IN A CULTURE INTEGRATED ENGLISH LANGUAGE COURSE

The relevance of the study is dictated by the demand of the state for training competitive specialists who are ready to maintain an intercultural dialogue in their professional field. The main goal of modern language education is the development of innovative integrated courses that enable students to enrich their subject knowledge and to master the ability to use this knowledge at the international level. This article considers Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to be promising ways of implementing the integrative approach into the education system. Many methodologists and linguists have proven the effectiveness of interconnected teaching foreign languages and cultures, resulting in the selection of a culture-based course designed in English as an object of the research. With a view to developing students’ professional foreign language competence and enriching subject knowledge, the educational process includes using digital tools provided by museums around the world (the State Hermitage Museum, the Louvre Museum, the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Uffizi Gallery, The Vatican Museums), as well as the tasks based on these authentic resources. The study reveals that digital archives, online art collections, ‘Virtual Visit’, audio and video resources are valuable sources of authentic materials that can be used in the process of professionally oriented English teaching.

The Geopolitical and Socioeconomic Factors of Digitization in Vietnam: Technology Adoption in the Art and Cultural Sector During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper argues that there is an emergent digital culture in the art and cultural sector in Hanoi, which is producing a paradigm shift in the nature of work for cultural professionals, the way of preserving and displaying art collections, as well as the nature of international connections. The advent of the “fourth industrial revolution” in Vietnam has brought about advances in digitization. While this transition is crucial in achieving national sustainable development goals, Vietnam remains at a disadvantage on a global scale due to country-specific challenges in digitization that include lack of human, technical, and financial resources. These challenges are hindering the pace and quality of the digitization process and impeding the ability of cultural professionals to utilize digital platforms. In addition, the global digital divide is having impacts on access, inclusion, and representation. This shows that the challenges faced in the digitization process are not only about access to technology but also about much more deep-seated issues related to culture, history, and social inequalities. This is especially pertinent during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has highlighted inequalities in access and inclusion. The research draws on 20 semi-structured interviews with cultural professionals across Hanoi. The interviews were carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic and addressed its impact on digitization projects and the use of digital technologies for work. The findings show how geopolitical and socioeconomic factors can suppress the ability to adopt new digital technologies, which is hindering the ability to exploit the opportunities of digitization. Yet, the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed more time to focus on digitization projects and to utilize digital tools and platforms, especially with free open-source software or platforms such as Facebook. This has become one route toward exploiting the opportunities of digitization for increased exposure, creation of digital resources, and rebalancing the discourse and amount of content circulating online regarding Vietnamese art and culture.

Large-scale interactive retrieval in art collections using multi-style feature aggregation

Finding objects and motifs across artworks is of great importance for art history as it helps to understand individual works and analyze relations between them. The advent of digitization has produced extensive digital art collections with many research opportunities. However, manual approaches are inadequate to handle this amount of data, and it requires appropriate computer-based methods to analyze them. This article presents a visual search algorithm and user interface to support art historians to find objects and motifs in extensive datasets. Artistic image collections are subject to significant domain shifts induced by large variations in styles, artistic media, and materials. This poses new challenges to most computer vision models which are trained on photographs. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a multi-style feature aggregation that projects images into the same distribution, leading to more accurate and style-invariant search results. Our retrieval system is based on a voting procedure combined with fast nearest-neighbor search and enables finding and localizing motifs within an extensive image collection in seconds. The presented approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and search time on various datasets and applies to large and inhomogeneous collections. In addition to the search algorithm, we introduce a user interface that allows art historians to apply our algorithm in practice. The interface enables users to search for single regions, multiple regions regarding different connection types and holds an interactive feedback system to improve retrieval results further. With our methodological contribution and easy-to-use user interface, this work manifests further progress towards a computer-based analysis of visual art.

Investigating preferences in art collecting: the case of the François Pinault Collection

This article focuses on private art collections that play a relevant role on the art market while reducing its information asymmetry. Knowledge of how art consumers such as private art collectors show preferences for specific artworks may allow to identify collecting patterns based on the preference of some artworks’ signs. Understanding these patterns is essential for evaluating the impact of art collectors on the art market. The evolution of the art market shows complex consumption systems that shape the cognition and behavior of actors such as private art collectors. Consequently, to be a key art collector and to progress as such in today’s art world implies a constant reinterpretation about what it means to consume and to collect art. This paper explores the collection of one of the most important art collectors in the world, the French tycoon François Pinault. More precisely, his background as a key collector was examined, and a number of preferences toward particular signs which connote his collected artworks were identified. All the collected artworks were observed through a descriptive data analysis of the Pinault Collection’s exhibition catalogues, published from 2006 to 2015, enforced by the statistical decision tree classifier. Results show how the Pinault Collection is shaped by collecting preferences that can be described as collecting patterns. As a preeminent collector and owner of one of the two major auction houses in the world, Pinault’s consumption preferences and decisions may impact the art market, for instance through signals and by influencing other art market players or the artists’ careers.

‘NATIONAL COLLECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART’: PROGRAMME OF THE MINISTER OF CULTURE AND NATIONAL HERITAGE TO FINANCE PURCHASES OF CONTEMPORARY ART WORKS IN 2011–2019 PART 1. HISTORY: FINANCING

The ‘National Collections of Contemporary Art’ Programme run by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN) in 2011–2019 constituted the most important since 1989 financing scheme for purchasing works of contemporary art to create and develop museum collections. Almost PLN 57 million from the MKiDN budget were allocated by means of a competition to purchasing works for such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN), Museum of Art in Lodz (MSŁ), Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (MNW), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cracow (MOCAK), or the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (CRP). The programme in question and the one called ‘Signs of the Times’ that had preceded it were to fulfil the following overall goal: to create and develop contemporary art collections meant for the already existing museums in Poland, but particularly for newly-established autonomous museums of the 20th and 21st century. The analysis of respective editions of the programmes and financing of museums as part of their implementation confirms that the genuine purpose of the Ministry’s ‘National Contemporary Art Collections’ Programme has been fulfilled.

The Dominicans as Conveyors of Mesoamerican Objects to Italy and Europe

It has been customary to trace back to the early shipments sent by the Spanish conquistadors most of the Mesoamerican artefacts held in ancient European collections. Early 21st-century scholarship, however, has demonstrated that Dominican friars such as Domingo de Betanzos (1480–1549) had a key role in bringing indigenous objects from Mexico to Italy during the 16th century. This new understanding allows a rethinking of the ideological motivations that ignited the transatlantic circulation of indigenous artefacts; textual analysis of relevant sources, in fact, reveals that they were observed and understood within a missionary discourse on indigenous ingenuity, rationality, and convertibility. Once in Italy, the objects entered local art collections in Bologna, Rome, Florence, and other Italian cities, where they aroused an antiquarian approach to their study. The investigation of the collection history of these objects, which in some instances ended up in museums in other European countries, shows that our knowledge of many of the most iconic Mesoamerican artworks known today can be traced back to the actions of the Dominican friars.

ARCO 2020: The first edition of the international conference on art collections in Florence

The International Conference ARCO 2020 has been promoted to focus the attention on art collections, joining different issues which play a fundamental role in their valorization, such as Cultural Heritage, Safety, Design and Digital Innovation. Each of these areas have produced important contributions, becoming essential research assets. Each research, in these years, has been developed within its proper field, and presented in many specific Conferences. ARCO 2020 has been promoted with the belief that all the subjects focused on art collections should be developed jointly, or – at least – not ignoring each other. The strong awareness of the multidisciplinary value of art exhibitions has increased within the research activity developed in these last years by some of the promoters of the Conference. The research team which promoted the Conference was born in 2016, with the research project named “RESIMUS” focused on the resilience of the art collections exhibited at the Museum of Bargello of Florence. The research, promoted by Stefania Viti and Giacomo Pirazzoli, activated many studies and projects, involving many researchers belonging to different fields, which started working together and producing many relevant contributions.