Chapter 6: Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire

The main discussion topic of Chapter six is how art plays a major part in countries' economies because they are selling for high prices. Advertizing, television, books, etc. sells artwork. There are several stages of art. Modernism was aroung the twentieth century (1900). Manet was one of the artists of this time period. This is when the anti-art or dada came to be, after World War I. They think that beauty is not an art. In 1922, T.S. Elliot wrote The Wasteland and Hallowmen. The next stage is Postmodernism which occured around the 60's and 70's. It came to be around World War II. It was a rejection of Modernism. "After Aushchwitz how can you write poetry," one very famous poet asked. Also the idea that are can do anything, it could cure cancer. Media came to be a form of art as well. Pop musicians also formed, people like Radiohead and Moby. Bricolage took dominant art forms, reconstructed them and used them in different ways. Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacah came up that human being hunger or desire something and when that is fulfilled they hunger for something else. Lacah says that there is always a gap or lack of desire. The term "the grass is always greener on the other side" is a good way to explain what they mean.

Chapter 5: The Mass Media and the Public Sphere

The beginning of Chapter Five discusses how current arts include arts on the computer, whether it be games or work; arts in the newspaper, television, or it may be watching a movie. Mass media reaches a large number of people who share the same interests. One paragraph breaks down the meaning of mass media. Media means the way of communication or medium and mass means that it covers a large area of people. In the section titled "The mass media and democratic potential" it explains that mass media may be a great way to spread and explain democratic ideas to the world or a nation. A negative to mass media, is that it does not reach everyone and it can be expensive. Local television stations are low cost and do not reach a large audience. Instead of having the media explain to the people about what their issues are, video cameras have allowed people to have their issues expressed on television. As said above, television and other forms of mass media, such as radio, can be expensive. The people watch the television shows, but unknowingly hear the products that the advertisements are trying to sell, and they go purchase them. There are television shows and stations for all sorts of groups of people, such as, women, children, sports, music, etc.

Chapter 4: Reproduction and Visual Technologies

Sally Mann photographed her children in a lot of positions and situations that many people think is not acceptable. There were a lot of nude photos. Although they were not in sexual positions or portrayed as being trying to show off her children's bodies, I do not think that it is okay to publish them. I understand it being art, but how will they feel later in their life, when their friends' have that photo in their house or when they are even older and trying to get a date. I do not believe that she thought about that. I think they are beautiful photos, but I think that they belong in the family photo album or displayed around the house, in grandma's house or close famliy members, but not made public.

Chapter 4 discusses how social roles have changed. A long time ago, art was seen as something that was meant for the upper class, not middle or lower class. The photograph has played many different roles including art, science, marketing, the law, and personal things for people. Art explains the time period it was drawn in. A real world or the fake world, either world will give away when it was drawn. Reproduction is an important.

Chapteir 3: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge

Chapter three discusses psychoanalysis and other forms of spectatorship, power and knowledge. It describes how art gives us a since of pleasure and allows us to describe our disires through looking at it. Spectatorship and psychoanalysis are based on the theories of a guy who worked in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sigmund Freud. He and a man named Jacques Lacan have similar ideas in that they studied the subconscious.

And example of Hagenamy is when parents try to control their children, the dominant culture is being counterd. Kind of ties in with subculture. Where the smaller culture begins to go agains the dominant culture, like how the government does not change culture as much as religion.

What does it mean to "gaze". It is a way of seeing. In some portraits and photographs children and women begin to gaze back at the camara. They are becoming brave and showing that they can stand by themselves. In Sally Mann's photos of her children, we see that they gaze back at the camara. Laura Mulvey is a theorist from the mid-70s. She gazed objectivly at women she made women goddess-like. She made people less real, held them up on a pedistal. She also argues the movies are made for guys - to see the world as a guy.

Chapter 2: Viewers Make Meaning

When a teacher is teaching a child to read, they teach by meaning. A childres' book is a great example of art that creatings meanings. Chapter two begins with the sentence, "Images generate meanings." Well, I believe this to be true. Let's say a child is reading to you and stumbles across a word they do not know, what do you do? Well, first, you would try to play a sort of Taboo game with them, telling them synonyms to the word and having them try to guess it. If that does not work, then you might say, "Well hey, let's look at this picture to see what is going on here!" This is not a great example of what some people would call, "high art" or "real art" but what is "real art"? Who is to say what "real art" is. When we look at a piece of art and we do not know what the creator was meaning by it, we try to interpret what they were trying to portray, this means we discover the meaning of it. Beyond interpretation we have evaluation, where you say what you think about the artwork. A man named Frederic Jameson 'always historisized' his artwork, this means he sees it is its historical moment, place things in context relating to history. The chapter also discusses aesthetics and taste. Aesthetic is the study of beauty. Artwork is going to be judged by its audience on whether or not it is beautiful. Taste refers to a background and education. The phrase "has taste" usually means they are "in style" or apart of their time period. All images give a little hint towards their meaning to the audience. This is called encoding and decoding. The audience can, then, either disagree or agree with the author's meaning of the artwork. These terms that we use are Dominant-hegemonic reading-not questioning; Negotiated reading- interpreting the dominant meanings; or Oppositional reading- taking a different position by simply disagreeing or by rejecting the piece of art.

Chapter 1: Images, Power, and Politics

The beginning of Chapter one discusses the differences between what it means to see and what it means to look. It defines "look" as making meaning of whatever you are studying and "see" as noticing it for the moment, but not knowing the meaning of it. When someone tells you to "Look!" they are demanding that you look and studying whatever they are pointing at or looking at, they do not tell you to "See!" When we look at something we begin to wonder "What is this thing?" and "What does it do?" We can look at the art in a way of who the artist or creator is, but sometimes that does not tell us what we are looking for. Sometimes an artist will tell as story and it may be in third person. We can also come up with the story of the artwork by determining what the artwork is, what the context is that the creator meant for the piece to be seen in, how the artist wanted their artwork to be produced in, and what "world" did they want the artwork to exist in. But even with all of these puzzle pieces in place, we would not be able to know exactly what the author was thinking while creating the artwork. These are called intentional facilities or the ideas that the author had in mind while working on their creation. In Chapter One, page 15 there is a picture or a pipe, although written at the bottom of the painting it says "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe." So was Rene Magritte being sarcastic or making a joke? Or did he really mean for it to mean something deeper. Or was he being literal, it is not a pipe, it is a representation of a pipe.

Today, people's portraits are everywhere; magazine covers, bilboards, signs outside of buildings, but what is the realism in the portraits. There is a myth of realism in photography, that because there is a picture it is real. The reason this is a myth is because photography can be staged.