Essay about Summary and Analysis on Practices of Looking

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement branches its roots in the mid to late 20th century as a response to modernism. “It refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle”. Therefore, there is no well-shaped definition or sets of rules for postmodernism as it is a critique of structures and what we refer to as real but for postmodernism, there is no “absolute truth”.

"Never Just Pictures" by Susan Bordo, is about how today's society looks at different types of media to get an idea of what they should look like. In this essay, the author tries to get the readers to take a closer look at today's

Through visual anthropology, images, ads, and cartoons are constantly changing individual’s views and the world in which they live in. Images are not merely pictures to state the obvious, they are pictures that have a deeper meaning. Whether the meaning is shown or not shown, they convey representation of something more meaningful in the end. Stuart Hall

The term postmodernism has been defined in different ways over the past years but it still hasn’t had its official definition. Postmodernism is a daunting subject because of the disagreements between people of how they interrupt texts and art. Postmodernism is a critic of what we assume to be real or a fantasy of what we want to be real. Postmodernism raises an importance of identity. Postmodernism is a style and concept of the arts, architecture and the criticism that shows a break from modernism. Postmodernism highlights ideas and theories. It can include different artistic styles in art. For example, an artist can mix pop art with an icon image such as Marilyn Monroe, or make recycled garbage into new art. Watchmen

The first two chapters of “The Practice of Looking” touch upon the idea of interpretation of images. For the purposes of this essay, an image is a piece of media that has a tangible visual effect, such as a picture, book, or TV series. The authors talk about how many people can have different interpretations of the same image and the idea that the audience gives an image meaning, which are valid arguments, but they fail to recognize that a single person’s interpretation of an image can change over time. Interpretation can change constantly, whether it’s many people looking at the same image or one person looking at the same image repeatedly over time; sometimes, the author’s intended meaning is more easily interpreted than at other times.

Throughout history, adventurous people have defied others people’s thoughts, leading them to discover new things, new places, inventing things for a better future. Thanks to them the world has become a better place for everyone. Of course they could have conformed to the knowledge given at their time, but instead they followed their passions, what make them happy and what make them different than everyone else in their generation. Nowadays is not different in the sense that there are still many things to discover and experience, the world is full of interesting stuff, the universe full of unknowns and mysteries awaiting to be discovered for us to. Moreover, Mrs. Elizabeth Kirk and Mr. Jean Kiekel in their article Visual Rhetoric: Constructing

The essay will make use of the works of photographic artists who engage in one of the two schools of photography, Pictorialism and Modernism. The artists that will be used for this essay are Paul Strand who has been selected for the Modernist development together with a Russian artistic photographer Alexander Rodchenko and As White remained rooted to Pictorialism, his stance on his methodology and set up in the 1920s and 1930s led to occurrence of the stirring up of quite a number of understudies to handle his visualization style which was fresh and innovative (White, Clarence H., Jr. and Peter C. Bunnell 1965). In the process of talking about the two schools of photography, Pictorialism and Modernism rather than focus on the clash and disagreements that occurred from Pictorialism and Modernism it is more suitable to examine the merits in both the method and styles used in the two schools of

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is considered by many to be a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of modern art. Demoiselles is a “great manifesto of modernist painting” as Picasso had abandoned all known form of traditional art, a radical break from the Western tradition that very much led to the Cubism movement (Bishop, 2002). What made Demoiselles revolutionary was that "in it Picasso broke away from the two central characteristics of European painting since the Renaissance: the classical norm for the human figure, and the spatial illusionism of one-point perspective" (Fry, 1966). Cubism had “destroyed […] the realist conventions for three-dimensional perspective which had been dominant in art since the Renaissance” (Butler, 2010). While generally credited as the first Cubist painting, art historians such as John Golding have argued that it was only a “starting point for the history of Cubism” (1958). Indeed, the picture predicates key characteristics of Cubism like the distortion and break down of objects and figures into distinct shapes, rather than being itself a Cubist painting. This analysis will concentrate on the elements of Cubism in Demoiselles and how it led to the movement.

Visual opulence, creativity, inimitable vision, and a style that is highly influential are the many characteristics of an admired movement in art history, that being of the Post-Impressionism movement (1875-1892). This movement, which was a by-product of the Impressionism movement, is the bridging gap between the two movements known as Realism and Expressionism. Post-Impressionism takes on some of the stylistic characteristics of these movements; however, it does not contain the all too glossy visuals of Realism or the heavily fantastic visuals of Expressionism, rather it is the intermediary of these two poles. My paper will discuss why this link was absolutely essential to the history of art movements, and I will be specifically using the

This is a relatively new development and there are few sources that present clear and

Postmodernism is a term which is highly contested in the sociological world, where it is used to indicate a significant detachment from modernism. It is easier to give the uses of the term; ‘to give a name to the present historical period, to name a specific style in arts and architecture and to name a point of rupture or disjuncture in epistemology’ (Buchanan, 2010). For this,

In detail this paper will show how the media played an important role in the culture today. It will answer the questions What were the major developments in the evolution of mass media in the last century? It will also ask How did each development influence American culture? And What is ment by the term media convergence and how it affected everyday life?

To fully appreciate the differences and similarities between Postmodernism and Modernism, it is required to understand exactly what they are. Modernism is the term we give to the accumulated creations and activities of designers in the early 20th century, who had the theory that traditional forms of literature, religion, social organization, and most of all, art and architecture, had become outdated in the new social, political, and economic environment of a fully industrialised world. One of the main characteristics of Modernism is self-consciousness, which typically caused exstensive experimentations of form and function. The creative process of generating work was also explored, forming new techniques in design. Modernism rejected all ideology of realism and prefers to reference and parody works of the past. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a radical rejection of Modernist design. Taking place in the late 20th century, it is a movement in art, criticism, and architecture that disputes the majority of modernist tendencies. The Postmodernist analysis of society and culture lead to the expansion of critical theory and advanced the works of architecture, literature, and design. This entire re-evaluation of the western value system of popular culture, love, marriage, economy, that took place from the 1950s and 60s, leading to the peak of the Social Revolution in 1968, is commonly referred as Postmodernity which influenced postmodern thought, as opposed to the term

Susan Sontag discusses the difference in viewing art in physical form versus viewing in through a lens. Throughout the essay “In Plato’s Cave”, Sontag thinks both Plato’s cave images and photographs represents, “the mere image of truth” (Sontag 3). With that, Sontag repeatedly uses the terms “truth” and “reality”, but does not define what these terms mean to her. The impression Sontag left for these terms is that “truth” or “reality” stand for nothing more than what we can see. Being said, the difference between what we can with our own eyes and what we can see with a camera is reduced to the physical/mechanical differences between the human eye and body camera/lens.

This article Modernity: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge is collected from the book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture written by Marita Sturken, and Lisa Cartwright, published by Oxford University Press, 2001. In modern world an image is not a unleavened embodiment of reality, it is more than that, an image also combines power relations between individuals and institutions. The authors also claim that "the concept of spectatorship allows us to talk about this broader context in which looking is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and rational field" (p-93). The notion of spectatorship also includes the concept of gaze, a rational activity of looking. In this article, the authors bring different ideas to query the