This is an edition of Oscar Wilde's essay in dialogue form, on the theme of art versus life. Two fashionably decadent talkers engaged in the "chit-chat" of the day - both an intellectual comedy of manners, and a provocative treatise on aesthetics.

Preface A.Carr & P.Hancock PART 1: ART AND AESTHETICS AS A WAY OF KNOWING ORGANIZATION Art and Aesthetics as a Way of Knowing Organization A.Carr & P.Hancock Art as a Form of Knowledge A.Carr Looking Into/Out Of Organisations Through the Rear Window: Voyeurism and Exhibitionism in Organization Studies G.Cairns & T.Jeffers Reconciling Aesthetics and Justice in Organization Studies M.Boyle PART 2: WORK AS AN AESTHETICALLY ORDERED ACTIVITY Introduction P.Hancock & A.Carr We're All Partying Here: Target and Games, or Targets as Games in Call Centre Management C.Alferoff & D.Knights The Power of Organizational Song N.Nissley, S.Taylor & O.Butler On the Manager's Body as an Aesthetics of Control N.Harding PART 3: CRITICAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH AESTHETICS AT WORK Introduction P.Hancock & A.Carr The Barren Landscape: Reading US Corporate Architecture A.Kersten & R.Gilardi An-aesthetics and Architecture K.Dale & G.Burrell Aestheticizing the World of Organization P.Hancock

The Decay of Lying

Art and Aesthetics at Work

Sight is our dominant sense modality in the acquisition of environmental knowledge. Cultural, personal and academic contexts, however, mean that the relationship between sight and knowledge is reciprocal and ambivalent in nature. A wide variety of examples illustrate how knowledge both widens and narrows vision. Mode of explanation and ordering of knowledge, though embedded in previous conceptions, rely heavily on insight and current perception. We live in a visual world. Our environment consists of outward and visible expressions of our culture, in the transmission of which the visual has always played a prime role, be it building, ritual, dress--or blackboard. Moreover, for the most recent generations the advent of television has dramatically widened the eye of immediate comprehension. While psychologists debate its influence as an electronic child-minder and entertainer, its power is recognized and sought by advertiser and politician alike. The written word has therefore undergone revaluation. Steiner has written generally on the retreat of literary culture,1 which, ironically enough, has occurred during a period of exponential growth in the amount of material published. The devaluation of textual expression or argument, epitomized in tabloid, or 'popular' newspapers, may occasionally be discerned among weightier publications. One recent venture, for instance, a ten-volume encyclopaedia, demoted the written text to only two of its volumes, the bulk forming a 'colourpaedia' of illustrations.2 Geography is to such an extent a visual discipline that, uniquely among the social sciences, sight is almost certainly a prerequisite for its pursuit.3 Visual aids characterize its classroom teaching, while outside field observation and inculcation of an eye for country are essential complementary requisites. Geographers therefore are--or should be--strongly interested in the nature of seeing, and in the consequent ramifications of such findings for their exercise of describing and understanding man-environment relationships. Certainly the advance of radical and humanistic approaches in general, and of perception and image studies in particular, have reawakened recent interest. The aim of the present essay is to reflect on various aspects of the relationship between sight-including insight, foresight, even hindsight-and the acquisition, evaluation and ordering of environmental knowledge.

Sight and knowledge

Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (hereafter RTT), whose twentieth anniversary falls in 2013, was designed in the main as a theoretical intervention. It mounted an argument — against what are often, if not wholly satisfactorily, termed ‘positivistic’ modes of enquiry — about how classical texts mean and how they may most profitably be interpreted, an argument that was at first fiercely resisted, though later, with the book’s growing respectability, more often ignored. In the event the principal impact of RTT proved instead to be institutional, as it contributed to a major reconfiguration of Classics as a discipline, at least in the UK; a growth in classical reception studies has been one of the most notable features of the past twenty years. By now the battle for taking reception seriously within Classics has long been won, significantly with ‘reception’ as the key term, the word of power, which has not been the case, at least to the same degree, elsewhere within the humanities. The signs of institutional success are everywhere. Rather bizarrely, ‘reception’ is included as a category within what we must now learn to call the Research Excellence Framework (formerly the Research Assessment Exercise) — as though reception were a subdisciplinary field of Classics, like Latin literature or ancient visual culture, which in my view is not the case. There is the journal within which I am writing, wholly devoted to classical reception studies. There are

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Reception — a new humanism? Receptivity, pedagogy, the transhistorical

Cartography is in the process of change. Like all technological developments, the computer makes our work both easier and more difficult — and multimedia cartography is not easy. How must cartography react to these changes? We have to begin using new definitions in cartography. The word “map,” for example, should perhaps be redefined to refer to an interactive map display. If the presentation of the information is not controlled by the user — it’s not a map. If there is no interaction — it’s not a map. If there is no potential for animation — it’s not a map. We may eventually realise that what we call maps today are simply static map elements — as much a piece of the puzzle as a single symbol on a map.

Elements of Multimedia Cartography

The traveler arriving at Newark airport-provided he is seated on the right side of the plane and the weather is good-notices the towers of Manhattan. In the late afternoon, as the sun reflects on the glass walls and reddens the brick partitions, it appears like a magic city made of crystal and porcelain, a city filigreed like a work of art, a transposition of the celestial Jerusalem dreamt up by the painters of the Middle Ages. But in front sprawls a sort of hell, or purgatory: cranes, immense bridges spanning platforms lined with containers, refineries and factories between which are creeping swamps, everything in poor condition and rusted out, as though irreparably polluted yet somehow endowed with a strange beauty. In their brutality, these "steps" to Manhattan create a landscape, a somewhat frightful landscape, but much more real in its crudeness than the distant sparkling of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. Inspired by this kind of experience, which one can have in cities other than New York, I would like to start out with what may seem a fairly simple question: How is it that, turning our back on several centuries of tradition that generally associated the contemplation of landscape with the idea of a certain peace of mind, we are so often disconcerted, indeed even anxietyridden, by landscapes of this type? The fringes of Manhattan, with their infrastructures in ruin and their fragments of filthy land, make up just one case among many others of such disturbing landscapes. Such a question emerges, one might imagine, in direct connection with that of technology, since we are not disturbed by views of untouched countryside. These are places where nature seems to have obliterated itself or at least yielded to man-made artifacts. In the same way that it does in New York, the entanglement of infrastructures and buildings that composes the periphery of European metropolises seems particularly perturbing. The entryways into big European cities like Berlin, London, and Paris, just to mention a few, are hardly more reassuring than those of their North and South American counterparts.

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The Decay of Lying

Citations

Art and Aesthetics at Work

Sight and knowledge

Reception — a new humanism? Receptivity, pedagogy, the transhistorical

Elements of Multimedia Cartography

Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust

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