VCC+Study+Guide

=Introduction=

Well, we were studying for our VCC201 test and Joe, Laura, Lauren and I decided to do our usual study group. Rather than the boring old "split it up and email it around" bit we usually do, I've decided to post this stuff online and hopefully we can colab (and others too!) to make an awesome resource before friday.

The current format will be a single page massive resource, but if someone wants to break it up and relink it, feel free to go ahead.

=Test format=

The test will be broken into three sections.
 * 1) The first is 10 multiple choice questions, worth 20 marks. They will be based on the weekly readings and in class video and lectures, NOT the book. The grapevine holds that only 2 or 3 of the questions are even in the book.
 * 2) The second section is based on key terms and image identification, and is worth 30 marks. There are 6 questions, worth 5 points each. There is 1 mark for providing the artist, title, and year to go with your definition, 2 marks for providing a complete definition and 2 marks for explaining why the image you chose is significant to the term.
 * 3) The last section is long answer, based on key concepts studied in class, and is worth a full 50 marks. You choose five questions from about 10, and provide a full answer to those questions in paragraph form.

=Definitions=

VCC definitions


 * **Culture capital:** Culturally significant knowledge that provides a person a higher status in society based solely on that knowledge (an art critic is an example of someone who benefits strongly from cultural capital)
 * **Photomontage:** a photographic process of combining two or more photos or negatives together in order to make a complete image (not like Warhol’s stuff – look to untitled by Deborah Bright, from the Dream Girl Series, pp. 143)
 * **High culture:** distinguishes culture that only an elite can appreciate such as classical art, music and literature
 * **Low culture/ mass culture:** commercially produced accessible to lower classes
 * **Popular culture:** wide appeal, but segmented by market; targeted
 * **Mimesis:** representation as a process of mirroring or imitating the real
 * **Social construction:** theory claiming that much of what has been taken as fact is socially constructed through ideological forces, language, economic relationships, etc. We can only make meaning of the world around us through systems of representation which construct the material world around us
 * **Myth:** ideological meaning of a sign that is expressed through connotation
 * **Connotative meaning:** social, cultural, and historical meanings that are added to a sign’s literal meaning
 * **Denotative meaning:** the literal, face-value meaning of a sign
 * **Ideology**: the shared set of values and beliefs that exist within a given society and through which individuals live out their relations to social institutions and structures
 * **Sign:** the relationship between a vehicle of meaning such as a word, image, or object and its specific meaning in a particular context
 * **Signifier**: the word, image, or object within a sign that conveys meaning
 * **Signified**: the element of meaning within a sign, so called because it was what is signified by a signifier
 * **Top-down model:** Matthew Arnold -> culture as the exclusive preserve of an educated elite. ie-> capitalism = anarchy
 * **Bottom-up model:** Raymond Williams -> culture comes from the people and is ordinary. ie-> pop music, stars and icons, etc.
 * **Icon**: image or person that acquires symbolic significance
 * **Index**: physical causal connection between the signifier (word/image) and the thing signified because both existed at some point within the same physical space. ie-> smoke and building = fire
 * **Symbol**: signs in which there is no connection between the signifier (word/image) and the thing signified expect that imposed by convention. ie-> language
 * **Semiotics**: a theory of signs concerned with the ways in which things (words, images, objects) are vehicles for meaning
 * **Representation**: the act of portraying, depicting, symbolizing, or presenting the likeness of something; declares itself to be re-presenting some aspect of the real
 * **Referent**: thing to which a sign alludes
 * **Aesthetics**: a branch of philosophy that is concerned with beliefs and theories about the value, meaning, and interpretations of art
 * **Taste**: the shared artistic and cultural values of a particular social community or individual
 * **Habitus**: term to describe the unconscious dispositions, strategies of classification, and tendencies that are part of an individual’s sense of taste and preference for cultural consumption; different social classes have different habituses with distinct tastes and lifestyles
 * **False consciousness:** masses are unaware dupes of the system; the process by which the real economic imbalances of the dominant social system get hidden and ordinary citizens come to believe in the perfection of the system that oppresses them
 * **ISA: Ideological state apparatus: non-physical mediums used to create ideologies. Exmaples: school, family, religion, media**
 * **RSA: Representational state apparatus: physical mediums used to create ideologies. Example: police, prison, military**
 * **Hegemony**: dominant ideologies are “common sense”; dominant ideologies are in tension with other forces and constantly in flux. Indicates how ideological meaning is an object of struggle rather than an oppressive force that fully dominates subjects
 * **Appropriation**: the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others’ meanings to one’s owns ends. ie-> when viewers take cultural products and reedit, rewrite, or change them in some way
 * **Transcoding**: the practice of taking terms and meanings and reappropriating them to create new meanings. ie-> the word queer
 * **Bricolage**: the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand; making do with what one has. The activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own by giving them new meaning. ie-> punks wearing safety pins in their ears
 * **The gaze**: term used to describe acts of looking caught up in dynamics of desire
 * **Psychoanalytic theory**: theory of how the mind works derived by Sigmund Freud that emphasizes the role of the unconscious and desire in shaping a subject’s actions, feelings, and motives
 * **Interpellation**: a term used to describe the process by which ideological system call out to or hail social subjects and tell them their place in the system; in popular culture, interpellation refers to the ways that cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position
 * **Binary opposition**: the oppositions through which reality has been traditionally represented; essential to meaning and how we understand things. ie-> male/female
 * **Panopticon**: theory by Michel Foucault to characterize the ways that modern social subjects regulate their own behavior; in contemporary society, we behave as if we are under a scrutinizing gaze and therefore internalize the rules and norms of the society
 * **Nude vs. Naked**: nude is when the body is on display and naked is more natural, being oneself
 * **Surveillance**: the act of keeping watch over a person or place; one of the primary means through which a society enacts control over its subjects
 * **Mirror phase**: stage of development according to Jacques Lacan, in which an infant first experiences a sense of alienation in its realization of its separateness from other human beings. Useful to understand the emotion and power invested by viewers in images as a kind of ideal, and has been used to theorize about film images in particular
 * **Scopophilia**: the drive to look and the general pleasure in looking
 * **Voyeurism**: the erotic pleasure in looking without being seen
 * **Exhibitionism**: the pleasure derived from being looked at
 * **Impressionism:** an artistic style from late 19th century, characterized by emphasis on light and colour; view of nature as unstable/changable; prominent artists incl. Claude Monet. (Haystack painting)
 * **Challenging the gaze:???**
 * **Female gaze:**
 * **Institutional gaze:** A form of the gaze used by institutions, historically as a means of surveillance, regulation and categorization in order to distinguish "the other". The pictures of "criminal man" from the early 1900s is an example of photographic use of the institutional gaze.
 * **Inspecting gaze:**Think of the panopticon. The inspecting gaze is a form of surveillance... "the camera does not need to be turned on or even in place for the inspecting gaze to exist, merely its potential to exist will have this effect [regulating behaviour]" p99 in the text
 * **Categorical photography:**


 * **Appropriating the male gaze:???**
 * **Realism and the history of perspective:???**
 * **Role of realism in art:???**
 * **Changes in aesthetic style of images:???**
 * **Realism and visual technologies:???**
 * **Fusion of science and art in the technique of perspective:???**
 * **Science as a dominant social force:???**
 * **Enlightenment:???**
 * **Positivism:???**
 * **Mechanical reproduction:???**
 * **Technical determinism: **a position that sees technology as the most important determining factor in social change, positing technology as somehow separate from social and cultural infulence (Marshall McLuhan)**
 * **Autographic:???**
 * **Allographic:???**
 * Photographic truth: The belief that images are an unmediated copy of the real world.**
 * Photographic truth: The belief that images are an unmediated copy of the real world.**
 * Photographic truth: The belief that images are an unmediated copy of the real world.**


 * **The reproductions of images:**


 * **Image as truth?:???**
 * Berger: "Men act, women appear"
 * **Mulvey:???**
 * **Lacan: See Mirror Phase.**
 * **Mulvey:???**
 * **Lacan: See Mirror Phase.**


 * **Foucault- The eyes have it: See panopticon.**

=Key Figures=


 * Matthew Arnold
 * proposed top-down model (fine art, literature)
 * elitist
 * Raymond Williams:
 * Proposed bottom-up model (masses define culture)
 * Walter Benjamin
 * “one of a kind” artwork = special
 * Value comes from uniqueness of the image being the original of many copies (not from being one of a kind)
 * Stuart Hall
 * Proposed 3 types of decoding
 * Dominant-hegemonic (accept unquestioningly)
 * Negotiated (accept only certain aspects)
 * Oppositional (completely reject)
 * Martin Heideggar
 * Wrote the age of the world picture (http://www.art.uh.edu/dif/EC_history.html#heidegger)
 * Wrote for social constructionist theory
 * John Berger
 * Proposed concept of nude vs. naked
 * Roland Barthes
 * Determined two levels of meaning: denotative (literal)/connotative (figurative)
 * Used “myth” to describe connotation appearing to be denotative

Key people in chapter 2: Viewers Make Meaning
 * Ferdinand Saussure
 * Language depends on conventions and codes for its meanings
 * Relationship between words and objects is arbitrary
 * Charles Peirce
 * Meaning is in interpretation of perception and action based on perception
 * Louis Althusser
 * Proposed that we are already constructed as subjects, we are “hailed” by ideologies as the subject (we are interpellated)
 * Antonio Gramsci
 * Hegemonic ideologies often presented as common sense
 * Dominant ideologies are in tension with other forces and constantly in flux

Key people in chapter 3: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
 * Michel Foucault
 * Proposed ideas of inspecting/normalizing gaze
 * Jaques Lacan
 * at 18 months, infant experiences alienation, knowing that they are separate from other people
 * Laura Mulvey
 * Argued that Hollywood offered images geared toward male viewing pleasure  scopophilia and voyeurism
 * John Berger
 * Nude vs naked
 * Louis Althusser
 * Concept of interpellation shows us how viewers are made to recognize themselves and identify with the ideal subject offered by images

Key people in chapter 4: Reproduction and Visual Technologies
 * Walter Benjamin
 * “one of a kind” artwork = special (aura of the original)
 * Value comes from uniqueness of the image being the original of many copies (not from being one of a kind)
 * Authenticity of an image can’t be reproduced
 * Edmund Husserl
 * Father of the philosophy of phenomenology
 * Insisted that experience can’t be known in an objective sense
 * Challenged idea of mind*body dualism (that mind and body are separate)
 * Believed that knowledge and truth comes from subjective human experiences and not from things themselves

=Main Topics, and Their Associated Background and Pictures=

Definition
High culture was once thought of as the cultural items and icons of the upper class; this traditionally was seen to include such items as classical music and opera, fine wine, fine art, and the like. The top-down model, used extensively by Raymond Willams, posits that this type of cutural material serves as great a moral and educational function as the mass culture destroys it. The logic here is that since the mass culture is created to appeal to everyone, it lowers itself to the level of the fools and ignoramuses, bringing down everyone else who watches it.

Applicable Picture
Leonardo DaVinci, __Mona Lisa__, 1505 Also: cultural capital and the top down model

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Mona Lisa Paint by Numbers Postcard, Sprint Corp.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo California, 1936 Using this image requires explanation of why the picture is taken of low culture, yet is considered high culture in format.(the guise here is that she is poor and estitute, low culture, yet this photograph has become famous as a high profile image... lots to talk about)

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Andy Warhol, __Red Elvises__, 1962 Also good for icons

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An icon in one sense is a person who becomes an item of the popular culture; rather than standing for a person, they then stand for an idea. As an example, jesus does not just stand for some guy who was born in 0 A.D. and did some good things. He stands for christianity, miracles, a savior. The textbook defines this on page 36 as "an image that refers to something outside of its individual components, something (or someone) that has great syumbolic meaning for many people". This is very different than the definition put forward by Charles Pierce, who refers to an icon as a sign that resembles the object it stands for in some way in chapter 4 (pg. 140). This is closer to the use of the word "icon" in the sense computers use it - an "icon" on your desktop that looks like a trash bin to refer to items you don't want anymore. This difference is important, so don't mix them up!

Applicable Picture
Note that this is applicable to the first, common sense of the word, not by Pierce's definition.

Andy Warhol, Marlyn Diptych, 1962 Also good for the bottom-up model, pop culture, even mass culture (but that's stretching it).

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Mimesis is a system of understanding representation as only ever mirroring real life. This notion becomes related to a very important philisophical question, whether a picture can have meaning in it's own right, or if meaning is interpreteded from the fixed point of the outside world; this is because if something can only serve to mirror what has been seen or interpreted (the real world) in some way, it obviously is not making it's own system of meaning. Conteporary theory shuns this viewpoint.

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This is the opposing viewpoint to mimesis. The real overarching philisophical question is essentially whether the real world creates meaning for us, or we create meaing in the world. Though the Greeks would have generally argued the opposite, social constructionists argue that the real world only has meaning through interpretation and representation flavoured by context and culture. Each picture is then thought of as reflecting it's own context and societal/cultural interpretation, thus creating its own meaning.

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Deborah Bright, __Untitled from Dream Girl series__, 1989-1990

OJ Simpson Cover, Time Magazine, June 27, 1994.

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Rene Magritte, __The Treachery of Images__, (This is Not a Pipe), 1929 Also mimesis, signs, signifiers, signified, referent, semiotics
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image010.jpg width="332" height="181"]]**

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Black Soldier Saluting French Flag, in //Paris// //Match//, ca, 1958
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image012.jpg width="189" height="204"]]**

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Weegee, Photographers and Star, 1941

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Film still with Jane Russell in Howard Hawks __Gentlemen Prefer Blondes__, 1953.
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image016.jpg width="276" height="217"]]**

Clarence White, __Nude__, ca 1909
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image018.jpg width="185" height="192"]]**

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Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, An Epileptic Boy, Figure 14 from the Book Criminal Man: According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, 1911. Also good for discourse
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image020.jpg width="190" height="282"]]**

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Alfred Hitchcock, Jeffries and Miss Torso in Telephoto Lens, __Rear Window__ (film still), 1954
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image022.jpg width="264" height="209"]]**

Michael Powell, __Peeping Tom__ (film still), 1960

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Jeremy Bentham’s __Design for Penitentiary Panopticon__, ca.1800 DUH!

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"The invention of perspective in the mid-fifteenth century was the result of a Renaissance interest in the fusion of art and science....to make paintings appear more realistic [in translation of 3D to 2D canvas]"

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Fra Carnevale, The Annunciation, c.1448

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Using materials in your surrounding to make something new - "making do." In relation to culture, bricolage refers to taking commodities and changings their meaning for personal use.

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Nikki S. Lee, __The Punk Project__, 1997 Also appropriation, representation

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An art movement against the idea of one-perspective. Cubism focuses on how the human eyes are always moving and looking at objects from different views. Cubisms depicts objects from the simultaneous views.

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Georges Braque, __The Portuguese__, 1911 Also aesthetics and taste
 * [[image:http://www.softwarecreations.net/vcc/image028.jpg width="179" height="264"]]**

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