An Introduction to Visual Culture - University of Texas at ...

1 Practices of Looking An Introduction to Visual Culture Second Edition Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright New York Oxford OXFORD University PRESS 2009 OXFORD U NIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press. Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University 's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright 2009 by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

2 198 Madison Avenue, New York. New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted, in any form or by any means. electronic, mechanical. photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sturken, Marita Practices of looking : an Introduction to Visual Culture I Marita Sturken and lisa ed. p. em. ISBN 978-0-19-531440-3 1. Art and society. 2. Culture . 3. Visual perception. 4. Visual communication.

3 5. Popular Culture . 6. Communication and Culture . I. Cartwright. lisa, II. Title. 2009 701'.03-dc22 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2008042118 acknowledgments Introduction chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 contents IX 1 I mages, Power, and Politics 9 Representation 12 The Myth of Photographic Truth 16 Images and Ideology 22 How We Negotiate the Meaning of Images 26 The Value of Images 34 Image Icons 36 Viewers Make Meaning 49 Producers' Intended Meanings 52 Aesthetics and Taste 56 Collecting, Display, and Institutional Critique 62 Reading Images as Subjects 69 Encoding and Decoding 72 Reception and the Audience 75 Appropriation and Cultural Production 82 Reappropriation and Counter-Bricolage 86 Modernity: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge 93 The Subject in Modernity 94 Spectatorship 101 Discourse and Power 104 The Gaze and the Other Ill The Gaze in Psychoanalysis 120 I v Gender and the Gaze 123 Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism 279 Changing Concepts of the Gaze 130 Brands and Their Meanings 289 chapter 4 Realism and Perspective.

4 The Marketing of Coolness 293 From Renaissance Painting Anti-Ads and Culture jamming 300 to Digital Media 141 chapter 8 Postmodernism, lndie Media, Visual Codes and Historical Meaning 143 and Popular Culture 307 Questions of Realism 145 Postmodernism and its Visual Cultures 311 The History of Perspective 151 Addressing the Postmodern Subject 316 Perspective and the Body 157 Reflexivity and Postmodern Identity 322 The Camera Obscura 161 Pastiche, Parody, and the Remake 328 Challenges to Perspective 164 lndie Media and Postmodern Approaches to the Market 334 Perspective in Digital Media 174 Postmodern Space, Geography, and the Built Environment 337 chapter 5 Visual Technologies, Image chapter 9 Scientific Looking, Looking Reproduction, and the Copy 183 at Science 347 Visual Technologies 183 The Theater of Science 350 Motion and Sequence 185 Images as Evidence: Cataloguing the Body 355 Image Reproduction: The Copy 190 Imaging the Body's Interior.

5 Biomedical Personhood 364 Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction 195 Vision and Truth 369 The Politics of Reproducibility 199 Imaging Genetics 373 Copies, Ownership, and Copyright 204 The Digital Body 377 Reproduction and the Digital Image 212 Visualizing Pharmaceuticals 381 chapter 6 Media in Everyday Life 223 chapter 10 The Global Flow of Visual Culture 389 The Masses and Mass Media 224 The Global Subject and the Global Gaze 390 Media Forms 229 Cultural Imperialism and Beyond 397 Broadcast, Narrowcast, and Webcast Media 233 Global Brands 401 The History of Mass Media Critiques 236 Concepts of Globalization 404 Media and Democratic Potential 242 Visuality and Global Media Flow 407 Media and the Public Sphere 247 Indigenous and Diasporic Media 413 National and Global Media Events 250 Borders and Franchises: Art and the Global 417 Contemporary Media and Image Flows 255 glossary 431 chapter 7 Advertising, Consumer Cultures, picture credits 467 and Desire 265 Consumer Societies 266 index 477 Envy, Desire, and Belonging 275 VI I CONTENTS CONTENTS I VII r:, I I Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W.

6 Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, [1947] 2002. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. King, Peter. "The Art of Billboard Utilizing." In Cultures in Contention. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier. Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985, 198-203. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 1999. Lasn, Kalle.

7 Culture jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge-and Why We Must. New York: Quill, 1999. Lears, T. J. Jackson. " From Salvation to Self-Realization." In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays of American History 1880-1980. Edited by Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon, 1983,3-38. Lears, T. J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images ofWeii-Being. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1990. McBride, Dwight A. Why I Hate Abercrombie ({Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.)}

8 New York: New York University Press, 2005. Mooney, Kelly, and Nita Rollins. The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World. San Francisco: New Riders Press, 2008. O'Barr, William M. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994. Paterson, Mark. Consumption and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2006. PBS Frontline. Merchants of Cool. (2001) PBS Frontline. The Persuaders. (2003) Schor, Juliet B., and Douglas Holt. The Consumer Society Reader. New York: New Press, 2000. Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society.

9 New York: Basic Books, 1984. Sivulka, Juliet. Sex, Soap, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Boston: Wadsworth, 1997 Turow, Joseph. Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Walker, Rob. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. New York: Random House, 2008. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Soyars, 1978. 306 I ADVERTISING, CONSUMER CULTURES, A N D DESIRE Postmodernism, lndie Media, and Popular Culture chapter eight J ia Zhang-ke's 2004 film The World (Shijie) takes place in a vast amuse-ment park, called World Park, outside of Beijing.

10 Since 1993 about one and a half million people have visited this park each year to experience "the world" through small-scale replicas of iconic buildings and structures that are major tour-ist destinations throughout the world: a replica of lower Manhattan (with the Twin Towers still standing), the leaning Tower of Pisa (where, as in Italy, people pose for pictures as if they are holding up the tower), the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Egyptian Pyramids, the Tower of London, and a replica of China's own Red Square. These sites can be visited on a "global voyage" taken by foot, speedboat, or battery-operated car. There are several World Parks in China, each a site where Chinese citizens, whose ability to travel outside China is still restricted by the government, are invited to "visit" the world through these replicas.