Test 1 Flashcards
(52 cards)
CGI?
Computer Generated Images
Politics of representation?
Art historians that instead analyze the impact of race, gender, class, sexuality and colonialism on the process of art making.
Mass media?
- Goals of the Mass media
- Appeal to as large of an audience as possible
- Reinforce dominant cultural value
- Make a large profit
- According to Berger, “Advertising turns consumption into a substitute for democracy.” Advertising urges us to make purchases, rather than engage in rebellion, freedom or activism.
- We are told we can have power, liberation and freedom through the purchase of cigarettes and underwear.
Visual literacy?
the critical study of art and popular culture images
Marshall McLuhan?
Canadian literature professor Marshall McLuhan began his pioneering media studies in the middle of the twentieth century. He sought to understand the way new media affect human perceptions.
John Berger?
linked the language of the fine arts tradition of Western Culture with that of the mass media, particularly advertising (which, in his British way, he termed “publicity.”)
Human sight is intelligent?
Berger came up with the idea that human sight is intelligent: “They way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”
Walter Benjamin?
wrote the first important study of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin argued that ancient art served a ritual function. Such original artworks had a kind of aura that was inherent in the direct experience of the art. In our mass media society, the experience of the artwork is distorted and diminished by multiple reproductions.
Ferdinand de Saussure?
Swiss theorist. One of his most important points was that the relationship between a word (or “signifier”) and the object or concept to which it refers (the “signified”) is always culturally constructed, which is to say, always arbitrary.
Signifier & signified?
Signifier=word
Signified=the object or concept to which it refers
Claude Levi-Strauss?
Anthropologist. Instead of limiting his cultural studies to comparative descriptions or chronologies, the French anthropologist sought to uncover the way various cultural institutions were structured within a society.
Bipolar oppositions?
many cultural theorists have asserted that all cultural products from art to language to value systems are human constructions rather than “natural” forms. Many such cultural products are based on conceptual contrasts that might be termed bipolar oppositions. Example: good/evil heaven/hell black/white self/other male/female culture/nature.
Jacques Derrida?
grew up during World War II. He began to examine the philosophical foundations that allowed the war and the Holocaust to occur. He began to suspect that fixed structures in Western thought led some people to objectify and devalue others; such fixed conceptual categories may have led to the thinking that made the Holocaust possible. By the 1960’s he was analyzing the fixed structure of bipolar opposition.
Edward Said, Orientalism?
the way that Western cultural texts and images depict Near Easterners as immoral and uncivilized, in marked contrast to the upright and sophisticated Europeans.
Fredric Jameson, reification?
the transformation of a human or a human product into a thing.
Andy Warhol, Pop Art?
the emphasis on mass media subjects and themes, including a direct use of photographs and photographic processes by this movement, which became known as Pop Art.
Keith Haring, graffiti art?
formerly been considered crude markings and illegal assaults on private property–were exhibited and discussed as art. The paintings of New York artist Keith Haring, which began as subway graffiti, were shown in fine art galleries in New York and Tokyo
bell hooks?
Cultural critic
Icon?
The term icon traditionally has referred specifically to a culture’s religious images. But since our culture today is not primarily represented by such religious images, popular art and fine art images can be considered as icons insofar as their appearance in the mass media shapes and reflect our culture’s basic values.
Culture?
defined as the shared pattern of customs, ideas, beliefs, images, and languages that unite a group.
Myth?
tends to mean a lie or a fable—something that is not true, something unscientific. In relation to culture, however, myth does not mean a lie. A culture’s myths inevitably give explanations of how the cosmos (sun, stars, earth) was born. They also tell who men and women are—in their own relationships and in their relationships with the gods, with the sprits of the ancestors, with nature, and with death.
Jacques Louis David, Oath of the Horatii?
Bipolar oppositions are also evident in examples from the fine arts tradition of Western culture. French academic painter Jacques Louis David painted his large historical canvas, The Oath of the Horatii. David’s canvas depicts the moment when three brothers (the male figures on the left) swear to their father (the central patriarchal figure) that they will fight to the death for their rights. On the right side of the painting are wives, sisters, and children responding tearfully to the imminent departure of their sons, brothers, and husbands.
When it was originally painted, The Oath of Horatti represented?
The painting, when exhibited in Paris, was embraced as a call to fight for one’s liberty. It has often been interpreted as an incitement to revolution, inspiring the French people to rise up against monarchical abuse and establish a nation of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” the clarion call of the French Revolution.
Today we can read the Oath of Horatti as?
Today, we can “read” David’s painting from many viewpoints. A feminist perspective allows us to see that the image reinforces traditional gender roles.
