Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, Apr 1, 2014
Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as pop... more Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and 1800s by an aesthetic of emotion. Under Modernism, a rhetoric of emotion was repressed when addressing fine art, but it was used to denigrate emotional appeals in popular culture. Where Western fine art was understood to express the uniquely felt emotional reactions of individual artists, popular mass culture was condemned as merely exhibiting emotional symptoms and deliberately arousing viewers’ emotions for base purposes. However, with regard to emotional appeals, many connections exist between Premodern fine art and today’s popular mass culture. Examples include images of emotionalism, sentimentality, horror, violence, exoticism, and eroticism; these appeals are enabled by a similar use of realistic styles, narratives, and formulas.
... The trash taste of tabloid culture represents counter knowledges that act to unsettle cultura... more ... The trash taste of tabloid culture represents counter knowledges that act to unsettle cultural classifications and provide a low other. Women body builders and the Riot Grrrl punk band are sites of resistance to conventional constructions of femininity (Heywood, 1998), and ...
International Journal of Education Through Art, Apr 1, 2005
The article provides both theoretical support to and a historical perspective on the recent shift... more The article provides both theoretical support to and a historical perspective on the recent shift in art education towards consideration of contemporary, global sites of visual culture, while simultaneously seeing this as problematic. Cultural sites employing violence and highly sexualized imagery are conceptualized in terms of an aesthetics of embodiment. The article begins with an examination of modernist aesthetics as derived from Kant and his followers that focused on a narrow range of perceptual sensations and ignored the full range of bodily sensations. By contrast, an aesthetic of embodiment reintegrates aesthetics with vulgar, crude, and sensationalist experiences. Historically, it is linked to medieval carnival, and the return of carnival in mediated form is linked to a hedonistic consumer body. The case is made that an aesthetics of embodiment is a necessary theoretical construct for dealing with many cultural sites of corporate, global capital.
Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, Jul 1, 2015
The author examines his own journey in art education over the past 30 years, largely with referen... more The author examines his own journey in art education over the past 30 years, largely with reference to 13 articles published in Studies in Art Education. Five issues are described in which the past and present are compared. These include the shift from an attempt to validate copying when learning to draw to validating today’s youth remix culture on the net; the shift from popular culture to the more inclusive concept of visual culture; the shift from the focus of visual culture on the visual to multisensory, multimodal forms of communication; the shift from Neo-Marxism to New Times; and a shift from critical theory and critical pedagogy to a playful, dialogic pedagogy.
Drawing upon earlier critiques of what Takacs calls post-9/11 “fictional militainment,” this chap... more Drawing upon earlier critiques of what Takacs calls post-9/11 “fictional militainment,” this chapter examines the popular 2017 film Megan Leavey. Cultural responses to the war-on-terror have come, and continue to come, in many forms. They include film, television programs, video games, comic books, graphic novels, memorials, T-shirts, and toys. The perspectives offered range from gung-ho support for military action to scathing criticism of military and political ineptitude. Although their narratives and visual rhetoric are often complex, multilayered, and contradictory, they have been overwhelmingly supportive of military intervention. Yet the film ably demonstrates, first, how the now popular, post-sentimental, post-heroic visual culture of the war-on-terror is different from the popular visual culture of past military conflicts and, secondly, how after 16 years these visual strategies are perpetuated to the point where they are now normalized.
Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, Apr 1, 2014
Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as pop... more Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and 1800s by an aesthetic of emotion. Under Modernism, a rhetoric of emotion was repressed when addressing fine art, but it was used to denigrate emotional appeals in popular culture. Where Western fine art was understood to express the uniquely felt emotional reactions of individual artists, popular mass culture was condemned as merely exhibiting emotional symptoms and deliberately arousing viewers’ emotions for base purposes. However, with regard to emotional appeals, many connections exist between Premodern fine art and today’s popular mass culture. Examples include images of emotionalism, sentimentality, horror, violence, exoticism, and eroticism; these appeals are enabled by a similar use of realistic styles, narratives, and formulas.
... The trash taste of tabloid culture represents counter knowledges that act to unsettle cultura... more ... The trash taste of tabloid culture represents counter knowledges that act to unsettle cultural classifications and provide a low other. Women body builders and the Riot Grrrl punk band are sites of resistance to conventional constructions of femininity (Heywood, 1998), and ...
International Journal of Education Through Art, Apr 1, 2005
The article provides both theoretical support to and a historical perspective on the recent shift... more The article provides both theoretical support to and a historical perspective on the recent shift in art education towards consideration of contemporary, global sites of visual culture, while simultaneously seeing this as problematic. Cultural sites employing violence and highly sexualized imagery are conceptualized in terms of an aesthetics of embodiment. The article begins with an examination of modernist aesthetics as derived from Kant and his followers that focused on a narrow range of perceptual sensations and ignored the full range of bodily sensations. By contrast, an aesthetic of embodiment reintegrates aesthetics with vulgar, crude, and sensationalist experiences. Historically, it is linked to medieval carnival, and the return of carnival in mediated form is linked to a hedonistic consumer body. The case is made that an aesthetics of embodiment is a necessary theoretical construct for dealing with many cultural sites of corporate, global capital.
Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, Jul 1, 2015
The author examines his own journey in art education over the past 30 years, largely with referen... more The author examines his own journey in art education over the past 30 years, largely with reference to 13 articles published in Studies in Art Education. Five issues are described in which the past and present are compared. These include the shift from an attempt to validate copying when learning to draw to validating today’s youth remix culture on the net; the shift from popular culture to the more inclusive concept of visual culture; the shift from the focus of visual culture on the visual to multisensory, multimodal forms of communication; the shift from Neo-Marxism to New Times; and a shift from critical theory and critical pedagogy to a playful, dialogic pedagogy.
Drawing upon earlier critiques of what Takacs calls post-9/11 “fictional militainment,” this chap... more Drawing upon earlier critiques of what Takacs calls post-9/11 “fictional militainment,” this chapter examines the popular 2017 film Megan Leavey. Cultural responses to the war-on-terror have come, and continue to come, in many forms. They include film, television programs, video games, comic books, graphic novels, memorials, T-shirts, and toys. The perspectives offered range from gung-ho support for military action to scathing criticism of military and political ineptitude. Although their narratives and visual rhetoric are often complex, multilayered, and contradictory, they have been overwhelmingly supportive of military intervention. Yet the film ably demonstrates, first, how the now popular, post-sentimental, post-heroic visual culture of the war-on-terror is different from the popular visual culture of past military conflicts and, secondly, how after 16 years these visual strategies are perpetuated to the point where they are now normalized.
Images of Childhood: A Visual History from Stone to Screen, 2023
Beautifully illustrated with 150 colour images, Images of Childhood: A Visual History From Stone ... more Beautifully illustrated with 150 colour images, Images of Childhood: A Visual History From Stone to Screen by Paul Duncum examines historical constructions of childhood and how they reinforce or challenge the prevailing view of childhood as a state of innocence. Artistic representations of the child are analysed and compared with viewers' perspectives, while changes throughout history and with age are tracked carefully. The result is a text far
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