Videos, You Tube, television, movies, magazines, text messages, Internet, advertising, FaceBook, MySpace.....
We live in a world where visual media and images has a powerful influence on our lives. Visual Impressions are extremely strong and shape our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Visual Culture can shape public opinion. For some, Visual Culture is life lived on screen. People may forget what they read, but they never for get a picture-- or a movie, a video, a news cast, or a magazine cover. Visual Culture can break down walls or build them. If someone does not understand what they are looking at or how to decode images Visual Culture for them becomes a form of mind control.
Studying art is important because our modern society is saturated with images. Studying art teaches us to look for the point of view of the artist or creators. It teaches humans how to decode images more effectively. It teaches us to observe society, and culture and shows us how to understand where attitudes and behaviors come from. Art teaches us to dig deeper and develop our own point of view and helps us to navigate through a world of images.
Very few people take the time to reflect or question the point of view of the person, persons, corporations, organizations, or agencies putting their images before them over and over. Who owns the images you are looking at? He who owns the media rules the world.
8 comments:
Due to being in AL for a funeral at the moment, I will be the first. Therefore the only post I have to comment on is Ms. Whittington. I very much agree with "He who owns the media rules the world."
I personally have been affected by visual arts. I have photos of the recent flood, which took my 94 year old grandmothers entire home. She had lived there for almost 60 years. When you visually see the elderly or disabled in such devistation, for me, it hits home. It makes me realize how lucky our family has been. I now can relate on a personal level with art forms showing other devistations.
I do believe that art really can help society. But only if the person viewing it looks at it with an open mind. We are a society of freedoms that should be cherished. On a personal level each individual does not have to agree with a particular work of art but should respect the artist and allow them their views.
Society uses visual arts to influence many ideas. They can persuade if the one viewing allows. My example is during election years how parties create visual arts in order to discourage or incourage certain outcomes.
I think that visual culture plays a large role in today society, one really cant watch television without seeing a comercial on how to improve ones life or that someone "is Love'n it." its almost anoying but anyway, we are all but creatures of habbit and to see something over and aver again breaks into our minds. And once in our brains the advertisement takes hold and brings us to crave it. i think that we all have been affected by visual culture in the advertising scence. and i think that this avertising scence has actually helpoed shaped our society, an increase in marketing has allowed companies such as coka cola, mc donalds, and starbucks become top leaders in their feild. i think that art ultimately neither hurts or helps society, i think that it allows ones ideas and concepts to be seen and help influence others. it could permit a good cause or bad it depends.
I agree also to "He who owns the media rules the world". Media dictates our lives. Our moods, attitudes, and every day choices are all affected by the media. What I want to eat is influence by what foods are advertised on the TV, my fashion choices are based on the style that I see on the TV, and what music I listen to is what ever I heard on a TV show or movie
The visual culture is very influential in our society. In church yesterday the pastor gave an example of when people are in the midst of a tragedy they remember most WHO was there to support them instead of WHAT was said at that time. Many people are visual learners. Personally I can remember directions by identifying landmarks more so than reading written directions. On Friday, I saw something on the internet that really tugged at my heart. It was a photo of a little girl standing with her dad as he was in formation with his unit that was about to be deployed to Afganistan. I could feel the emotion that the solider and his daughter were experiencing just by looking at the picture. Everyday there is something, somewhere on a variety of media outlets concering the war and many opinons are formed because of this. My brother-in-law will be deployed to Afganistan in six weeks so my sister refuses to look at any reports about the war. Visuals give us opportunities to see many things that we would only be able to hear or read about. Our society is faced with good and bad images unfortunately, but they all have a story to tell and is up to each individual to choose what interests him/her. I agree with CL's post because when you can personnaly identify with an event visually it makes a stronger statement.
I believe that the media is the single-most powerful and influential force in America and I believe that statement to be quite straightforward: Media saturates us at all times. A person doesn't have to be just watching a television or reading a magazine to be bombarded with media. On the contrary, every poster, every emblem on a car, every sign on the road for restaurants, every billboard and radio commercial is media. And while radio commercials aren't necessarily "visual culture", they generally correspond with a television ad so that while you hear the commercial, you you see the visual cues from television in your mind. This visual culture inundates every American's life, but I don't dare claim that every piece is done artistically. I realize that, yes, posters, videos, and most advertisements are art and are open for interpretation, some advertisements and posters are really just presenting face-value for the people to lap up and contribute no cultural value, save to show that people will consume anything put before them. There are some ads that I believe are artistic. Car commercials always display metaphors for their amazing speed and precision with people driving in situations that normal people would never find themselves in, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can see doctor's billboards displaying a doctor with some patients which was clearly just snapped with a normal camera and blown up for a billboard. The message is that the doctor takes care of people, the reason being nobody apparently visits that doctor, so he or she wants people to know he or she exists. some advertisements, some visual culture is simply for profit. It is undeniable to state that anyone who owns the media rules the world because media is so surrounding, so smothering, so consumable that people absorb it even without realizing it. I agree that art should be studied to crack apart some visual culture, but I challenge anyone to prove that all visual culture is artistic. Some visual culture ads to our culture simply because it is not artistic, somewhat in the vein of the Dada movement. It is culture because it is not culture.
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