| Description |
xi, 212 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm |
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regular print |
| Contents |
1. Understanding Visual Culture. Understanding visual culture. So, who understands visual culture? Can we tell when we understand a piece of visual culture? What kind of thing are we doing when we understand a piece of visual culture? What is understanding? -- 2. Explanation and Understanding: Visual Culture and Social Science. Explanation and understanding: science and social science. Hermeneutic traditions. Structural traditions -- 3. Interpretation and the Individual. Fifteenth-century Italy: a church-going business man with a taste for dancing. Twentieth-century England: a fashion-conscious pansy with a taste for violence. The strengths and weaknesses of the hermeneutic account -- 4. Expression and Communication. Expression. Auteur theory. Psychoanalysis: unconscious expression. Strengths and weaknesses -- 5. Feminism: Personal and Political. Feminism and understanding. Feminism: personnel, objects, institutions and practices. Strengths and weaknesses -- 6. Marxism and the Social History of Art and Design. Marxism, understanding and structure. Arnold Hauser. Nicos Hadjinicolaou. Tim Clark. Gen Doy. Griselda Pollock. Strengths and weaknesses -- 7. Semiology, Iconology and Iconography. The sign. Denotation and connotation. Structure: narrative, syntagm and paradigm. Strengths and weaknesses -- 8. Form and Style. Form and style: Clive Bell, Heinrich Wolfflin and Clement Greenberg. Strengths and weaknesses. Dick Hebdige and Ted Polhemus -- 9. Conclusion. Hermeneutics and structure.n. Remediation |
| Summary |
This book introduces the principal approaches that have been used to understand art and design - stylistic, formal, expressionist, Marxist, feminist, iconographical and semiological approaches, for example. Using a wide variety of examples from European and American visual culture (including film, advertising, architecture, painting, fashion, automotive, typographic, interior and furniture design), this book identifies the main proponents and explains the most important ideas, debates and achievements of these approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of each approach are assessed, demonstrating that a method which helps us understand film may be no use with architecture or interior design, for example. Finally, each chapter provides further reading, suggesting alternative and more in-depth applications of the approaches |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Visual sociology.
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Visual communication.
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Visual perception.
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Communication and culture.
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Culture.
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Art and society.
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| LC no. |
00048318 |
| ISBN |
0333772873 |
|
0333772881 paperback |
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