Autumn term overview

They can subvert
ontology by assembling available image fragments into pseudo-photographs that convincingly match accepted conceptions of what some nonexistent thing would be like – much as sixteenth-century entrepreneurs manufactured specimens of mermen and mermaids, furry fish, sea bishops, unicorn horns, and griffin claws and their nineteenth-century counterparts produced grotesque ‘medieval’ torture devices and sinister-looking chastity belts to satisfy expectations aroused by got...

Rizzoli

Selected further reading:
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1986) “The Culture Industry: Entertainment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1947), Verso pp.120-167

Barbican Art Gallery (2002) Martin Parr: photographic works 1971-2000, London, Barbican

Chris Barker (2002) Making Sense of Cultural Studies, Sage

Pierre Bourdieu (1989) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (first published in French 1979), Routledge

Thomas Crow (...

The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.”

They can subvert
ontology by assembling available image fragments into pseudo-photographs that convincingly match accepted conceptions of what some nonexistent thing would be like – much as sixteenth-century entrepreneurs manufactured specimens of mermen and mermaids, furry fish, sea bishops, unicorn horns, and griffin claws and their nineteenth-century counterparts produced grotesque ‘medieval’ torture devices and sinister-looking chastity belts to satisfy expectations aroused by got...

That is, it can be construed as a kind of ultimate Modernism, a
striving to hitch the last, and hence most up to date wagon, on to a train coming
from history.

The emergence of modernity is signalled by European artists and writers of the 19th and early 20th century art taking up contemporary life as a vital and valid subject of representation, challenging long established hierarchies in European arts, where historical and mythological subjects were held in esteem, but scenes of ‘the everyday’ were classified as ‘genre’, fit only for entertainment not edification.

This was a good thing, but it had a negative side: transcendental contempt for the real, for work for example…
Henri Lefebvre (2002), “Work And Leisure In Everyday Life” [1958] in Highmore, B. (2002) The Everyday Life Reader, London, Routledge p.

They can subvert
ontology by assembling available image fragments into pseudo-photographs that convincingly match accepted conceptions of what some nonexistent thing would be like – much as sixteenth-century entrepreneurs manufactured specimens of mermen and mermaids, furry fish, sea bishops, unicorn horns, and griffin claws and their nineteenth-century counterparts produced grotesque ‘medieval’ torture devices and sinister-looking chastity belts to satisfy expectations aroused by got...

“For the critic in the modernist tradition the measure of art lies not in the
vividness with which it represents the experience of modern life, but rather in
its achievement, under the contingent conditions of the modern, of a level of
quality for which previous art furnishes the only meaningful standard.

Discussion reading:
Rene Descartes (1997), “Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditations 1 & 2” in Descartes, Key Philosophical Writings, Wordsworth Press

Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis (2008) “A life more photographic; mapping the networked image”, Photographies, Routledge

Both texts are available on Blackboard

Selected further reading:
Dawn Ades (1986), Photomontage, Thames and Hudson

Roland Barthes, (2000), Camera Lucida, Vintage Classics

Roland Barthes ( 1996) “The Photograph...

Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (1980) POPism: the Warhol ΄60s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.50

“The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the ‘total occupation’ of social life…it is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.”