<p> The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the contemporary art gallery model has been adapted in order to suit a post-2008 global recession marketplace. Using Culver City as a case study, I have analyzed how three local gallerists have changed their business practices made in response to a rapidly changing economic environment as well as the demands of the current "Knowledge Age" and also demonstrated how these adaptations follow from historical developments in American gallery culture. My findings suggest the degree to which socioeconomic changes inspired shifts within the design of the current gallery business model, which enabled galleries in Culver City to survive the most challenging economic recession of their time. Findings from this study can benefit future gallerists, collectors, artists, or historians engaging in the contemporary art marketplace.</p>

The imagery of Jan van Eyck's The Stigmatization of St. Francis, looked at in the context of contemporary illustrated manuscripts, devotional images, and prayer manuals, suggests that the artist was using the Agony in the Garden theme to portray St. Francis as a type of Christ. The viewer would be able to identify certain mnemonic images within the painting as "markers" to instances in Christ's life and death. This led to a mental visualization of Christ's entire ministry, from the Annunciation to the Cross, as called for in Pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations on the Life of Christ, a Franciscan prayer manual for Christocentric meditation.

In the fall of 1952, George Platt Lynes created one of his most memorable photographs: the image of two nude men--one black, one white--reclining in an intimate embrace. Lynes titled the print Man in His Element, but due to its overt homoeroticism and interracial content he could not show it in public. Instead, Lynes privately distributed the photograph and its variants through the mail and told the story of their creation in letters to a close friend. Lynes's letters were an integral part of his artistic and voyeuristic activities. Through writing Lynes framed the ambivalent racial coding of Man in His Element and its variants, and in doing so, he asserted his authority as a white, socially privileged man. Lynes's writings also functioned as a form of confessional discourse which enabled the photographer to document and speak the truth about his marginalized sexual identity and artistic production.

Located within one of Houston's oldest African-American neighborhoods, Project Row Houses blends art and community revitalization under the repeated roof-peaks of once-decrepit shotgun row houses. Eight of the twenty-two houses shelter changing art installations that form the heart of the project; the rest provide settings for activities ranging from an after-school arts program to transitional housing for young single mothers. This thesis traces the importance of place in the development of Project Row Houses, and in the nature of the art exhibited there. It also proposes characteristics of place-based art. "Place" here denotes physical location as well as the layers of history and culture that are created, sustained or recovered by those who have meaningful interaction with a location. In a contemporary world often described as fragmented and place-less, Project Row Houses' founders, by embedding their project in the specificity of a place, have activated a community and brought art into vibrant contact with the whole of life.

At some time around the first half of the fifteenth century the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai commissioned the architect Leon Battista Alberti to design a shrine which could serve both as Rucellai's tomb and as a reflection of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In so doing Alberti created a work that could function not only as a family and religious shrine but could also refer to the history of the city of Florence. The Florentines at this time saw their city as the center of commerce, the arts, humanistic studies, and religion. All these activities converged in the idea of Florence as a "New Jerusalem."

The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904--1980) and painter Wifredo Lam (1902--1982) draw upon Surrealism in their representations of an Afro-Cuban religiosity in their early Negrista works. Through a comparison of Carpentier's &iexcl;Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933) and "Historia de lunas" (1933) with a selection of Lam's works of the 1940's---"The Jungle" (1942), "The Eternal Presence" (1945), "The Wedding" (1947), and "The Visitor" (1950)---this analysis uncovers how both writer and artist use collage and a surrealist mood in representing certain aspects of Afro-Cuban religiosity, specifically Abacua ceremonial incantations, Itutu, and trance or possession. This thesis also attempts to unmask the limitations of these techniques as a representational paradigm in limning the Afro-Cuban.

Mount Hood's Timberline Lodge built in 1936 and 1937 is the realization of the collective goals of the influential Portland businessmen of the Mount Hood Recreational Association, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, and the Works Progress Administration. The resolution of the sometimes conflicting needs and aspirations of these organizations contributed to the selection of the talented architectural team responsible for the design of the lodge. The consulting architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood participated in the initial development of the Timberline Lodge project, and offered his counsel during the development of the project. As the previously unknown documentation of their background reveals, the Forest Service architects, William Irving Turner, Linn Argyle Forrest, Howard Lester Gifford, and Dean Roland Edson Wright, were men well qualified to carry out the project. The final design of Timberline Lodge is the result of their collaboration.

Theoreticians of the problem of the other have overlooked a crucial distinction between two competing modes of alterity: The Other, a classic strategy of metaphorical, externalized singularity, and The Double, a modern strategy of metonymical, internalized multiplicity. The discovery of these two modes of alterity untangles many of the difficulties encountered in attempting to reconcile the theories of writers frequently seen as inimical to one another, including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Edward Said, and Tzvetan Todorov. These two strategic modes enable women and men, artists and writers, to create "constellations of desire"--traditional and non-traditional "imaginary" psychological outlines constructed from the fixed points or reference in our lives--to deal with loss and alterity. While this paradigm can be profitably applied to many eras of loss, one particularly enlightening local instantiation of the problem occurs in the Victorian era, specifically in the life and works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. The Rossettis rall under the sign of Gemini in the Victorian constellations of desire: brother and sister poets, standing in the same place, they yet face in opposite directions and follow reversed trajectories with reference to their fixed stars or family, faith, and the female. The strategies of The Double and The Other occur repeatedly throughout their lives, in their interactions with their father and their siblings, where questions of voice and textual incest become prominent; in their problematical relationships to ascEtic, aesthetic, and erotic forms of faith; and in their relationship to the female--mother, fallen woman, and beloved epipsyche--both as lived experience and as envisioned/revisioned object of the gaze. Particular eruptions materialize in poems and paintings such as Dante Gabriel's "Jenny," "Blessed Damozel," "Proserpine," "Ecce Ancilla Domini!," "Sister Helen," "Ave," "Hand and Soul," "A Last Confession"; and Christina's "Goblin Market," "A Royal Princess," Sing-Song, "Maggie A Lady," "Maude Clare," and "Monna Innominata," as well as her drawings. The picture that emerges allows Christina the strength as well as the anguish of her faith, making her a more complex and interesting writer than previously acknowledged, while it recuperates Dante Gabriel's reputation from accusations of chauvinism and obscurantism.

This dissertation defends state support of the arts as an educational public good. It begins with a critique of the traditional justification for subsidy, the appeal to cultural perfection. By challenging the perfectionist position from two distinct perspectives--political and aesthetic--this critique reveals the potential value of constructing a plausible, nonperfectionist alternative. The dissertation then works to develop such an alternative by appealing to the instrumental potential of art as an educational public good. Unlike the perfectionist approach based on the intrinsic value of art, this justification is founded on a general commitment to democratic self-rule. After defending a particular account of this commitment and its implications for educational policy, the dissertation works to show how art can serve as a valuable component in an overall scheme of democratic education. The positive argument for art's democratic value consists of three distinct elements. The first draws on Aristotle, Kant, and Hannah Arendt in explicating several structural similarities that exist between aesthetic and political judgments. The second element describes how interpretation is essential to both engaging art and participating in politics. Taken together, these first two elements of the argument describe how art and politics both engage--and thus practice--many of the same skills and abilities. The third element of the argument explores the potential political value (and political risks) of the state's encouraging citizens to engage a diversity of cultural expressions. The dissertation concludes by describing several policy implications of the democratically-based justification of subsidy (e.g., increased local control over subsidy decisions), and by evaluating the justification in light of the best arguments against subsidy. These include a libertarian argument from self-ownership, Joel Feinberg's argument based on the Benefit Principle, an objection from moral offense, and several objections from state neutrality.

<p> Abstract not available.</p>