Rena King:
“Don’t you feel such shows [of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence] contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise, and do you care?”
Max Renn:
“Certainly I care. I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations…”
Category Archives: Art History
The ‘Chinaman’ in the basement: Visual den narratives of the late-nineteenth century
Historically, art and literature have served a fundamental role in mirroring (and perhaps creating) a society’s cultural climate; they have become the means through which a society comes to ‘know’ itself. By artistically or literally depicting categories of people, or ‘social types’, one is easily able to comprehend society at large. Yet the socio-cultural worldview […]
iMac – the making of an iCon
The PC was first upgraded from its status as an advanced professional tool to an intentionally popular, available lifestyle-companion upon the introduction of the Apple Computer’s 1998 PC, the “iMac‿. This machine’s clean, sleek aesthetic presence, paired with its functionality, lead to its overwhelming success and eventual place (alongside the microwave, the telephone, and the corset) in cultural memory. Furthermore, I believe the PC’s success is symptomatic of a larger theme among all objects of popular culture: an inherent symbiosis between design and technology, form and function, medium and message, art and science. Objects of popular culture, it would seem, can only become so upon an appreciation of both function (science and technology) and form (aesthetics).
The Blue Jean – Cultural metaphor & masculine icon
Perhaps the ‘blue jean’ is not only a product, a piece of commercialism. Rather, this cultural icon has become a gauge of changing interpretations of masculinity in mainstream American culture. The ‘blue jean’, symbolically, is the white, middle-class, ‘All-American’ man.
Art as myth
Barthes believes that this constant creation of myth is how a culture invents its beliefs and narratives, and is able to find meaning in the world. This premise draws a particular parallel in our contemporary society: for it is my hypothesis that our culture now locates meaning through mythological art (whether fine, commercial, popular, industrial etc.). Has art truly become myth?