Collection preserves books by current and former faculty and staff.
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Art Appreciation
Cynthia Costa, Georgia Southern University
2025
Art Appreciation by Cynthia Costa offers an accessible and comprehensive journey through the world of visual art, exploring how creativity shapes—and is shaped by—human experience across cultures and centuries. Designed for students and general readers alike, this textbook thoughtfully introduces essential concepts, from the elements and principles of design to the rich variety of artistic media and techniques.
Costa provides clear frameworks for understanding symbolism, iconography, and the complex ethical and philosophical questions that art raises. The book situates works of art within their historical and global contexts, examining how art reflects, challenges, and transforms societies. Chapters examine pressing issues, ... Read more
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Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics
Jason Hoelscher, Georgia Southern University
10-2021
In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference ... Read more
