Buy this book : What Do Pictures Want? Find this book in a library : What Do Pictures Want? Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?
According to W. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.
A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. What images want from us is much more than that. When Mitchell argues that critics should put the image first, he is attempting to open up the field of visual inquiry and avoid any orthodoxy of method, whether psychoanalytic or materialist, that would consider the image as mere symptom or ideological manifestation, an object of iconoclastic destruction of idolatrous esteem.
The strength of What Do Pictures Want? Douglas Kellner. A short summary of this paper. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? In his engaging and only partially ironic titled book What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell the University of Chicago, and editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry. Drawing on a distinguished career as author, lecturer, and editor, Mitchell has pulled together major articles, addresses to scholarly conferences, and new work to present his most comprehensive and probing book to date on contemporary visual culture, one that was awarded the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in His other major works include Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, The text generates engagement with a dazzling panorama of sources and literature, and a wide variety of topics concerning the life in images in culture and society. His vision and tools are highly eclectic, drawing on anthropology, biology, art history, Marxism, Freudianism, semiology, and a broad array of contemporary critics and theorists. Indeed, his footnotes provide a tour through current discussions of a tremendous diversity of issues in cultural theory, aesthetics, media theory, and visual culture.
Although his work may be foreboding to those not versed in the profession of art history and discourses of contemporary theory, Mitchell excels in clear definitions, detailed examples, and provocative and original insights. While pictures can be destroyed, images can continue to live on, haunting, tempting, and perhaps frightening or inspiring us.
Chicago, Ill. After some useful clarification of concept of media ff , Mitchell engages in extremely rich studies of specific media, taking certain key artists or works as exemplary or illustrative of his theoretical perspectives. In each case, Mitchell illuminates the particular medium, key illustrative examples and cases, and makes many original observations and analyses concerning his subject-matters. Mitchell then seems to invite systems theory into part of his media theory f , signaling his openness to a wide diversity of theories — but perhaps also occasional theoretical muddle.
Revealingly, Mitchell does not use systems theory in the studies of specific media in Part Three that privilege art history and cultural studies approaches. And art historians uch ts David Eredergand Has Bling who have pondered the magical cae thier of images "before the ert ofa. Tetine put my ards on tetablea the oust [elee that magical at tudes tard images are just as powerfl inthe modern wold as they trereinaocaled ges offaith, Lala ble thatthe ages of ith were abit Tore skeptical than we giv them credit fo.
Itwould bea dliate critical practice that stack images with st enough ore to make them resonate but not so mich 8 osmash them, Toland Barthes pt the problem very well when he noted that "general opinion. The question of dese sidaly uted forthisingieybeauset buildin athe outset crcial ambiguity. Where does take us? What motivates its appearances? As they age they become, ike persons shabby and disepatable, or eminent and distinguished.
Thats they nee offensive to certain eyes, constituting an afrot or visual insult 0 those who hat and fer modesnity, capitalism, biotechnology, global tion" At the sme time, they are prime tages for offense inte form of esiructive or disiguring actions. Wii did a sheep become the con of cloning nd biotechnology? They have taken on radially new forms the context of ew scientific and technical possiblities, new social formations and new rei ious movement, but ther deep structure remains the same, That strc ture is not imply some prychologca phobin about images, ori itr veil to straightforward religious doctines, laws, and prohibitions that people might fallowo violate.
My sense is that eal idoater as contrasted with the demonic Jmages fantasized by iconoclast ae generally rather Hberal and Hebe bout thir bles. For one thing. Poti, gas, and genial pluralism about gods and godess ithe general tad one asociates with actly entng forms of idole, distinct from the phantasmatic projection of Hollywood movies and cosodastic Phobias, eonoclsn by contrasts mina prot ofthe three great ligions of the Book the same book, basal.
The sttibution of thie srt of practice to oaters makes a good pretest for tnurderng ther, making them into a sacrifice tothe nonimageabe inv ible God who willbe pleased by our moral seriousness. What would be aguate othe ym boi imaginary and zal tauma wrovght by thir destruction?
This ea handy device for 3. Clones just want tobe lke usando be liked by us. In rater stesightfor ward sens, then, the desires of dons ae simply our own human desis to reproduce andto improve. The lone is the image of the perfect servant, the obedient instrument af the master cteators wil. What desires have we projected onto them, and what form do thse desires take the are projected back aus, making demands upon us, seducing us to fevland act inspeciicway?
Rosa Luxemburg. Sandeep Vijayan. Christopher Stevenson. Carine K. Aaron Zephyr. Amanda Anindita Kirana.
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