What Is Visual Culture And Modernization?

Through the texts included on my booklist, I am examining how culture becomes theorized through a variety of visual means, and how these visual means reflect cultural ideals. The historical debate between emotion and reason as two means for discovering truth are a salient example of such cultural ideals. The following texts range through the topics of anthropology, art history, philosophy and sociology to explore these cultural motives behind a work of art and how, in turn, that art functions within greater society’s ideologies. I particularly want to illuminate the indispensable connection between visual culture and modernization by taking a more sociological approach to the study of visual culture. During the 19th century, the social sciences

In the text, Art as a Cultural System, Clifford Geertz puts into question the highly technical way in which art is analyzed through a Western frame of thought. As an anthropologist, Geertz examines the art object using an alternate set of analytical tools. Geertz argues that the definition of art in any society is never intra-aesthetic; rather the phenomena that exists around the power of aesthetics takes place in the way art fits into other modes of daily life. Non-western art, unlike our understanding of arts purpose, is not spoken about through an academic framework; it exists as part of daily activity. The process of creating an object of art and the feeling for life that animates it are entangled, making the visual signs within a work inseparable from the society in which they are found. For Geertz, the function of art is equivocal to culture itself. Geertz’s theory enables art objects to be viewed as historical documents filled with signs that can be used to determine the meaning of things for the society surrounding them. Such signs indicate what is valued by a specific society, and furthermore, their conscious effort to display such signs through the idealizing medium of

Benjamin argues that the original meaning of art is no longer the same. Due to technological innovations, the original meaning of images is skewed, and “in the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meanings becomes transmittable…When a painting is put to use its meaning is either modified or totally changed” (Benjamin 24). Art evolves with time and technology, causing a shift in value and function. This evolution of art reinforces the reciprocal relationship between art and society and, furthermore, art’s ability to modify the way in which we view the