Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn

By Margaret Dikovitskaya

Book Overview

In recent years, visual culture has emerged as a growing and important interdisciplinary field of study. Visual culture regards images as central to the representation of meaning in the world. It encompasses high art without an assumption of its higher status. But despite the current proliferation of studies and programs in visual culture, there seems to be no consensus within the field itself as to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods. In Visual Culture , Margaret Dikovitskaya offers an overview of this new area of study in order to reconcile its diverse theoretical positions and understand its potential for further research. Her aim is to show how visual culture can avoid what she defines as the Scylla and Charybdis that threaten it: the lack of a specific object of study (given its departure from the traditional hierarchies of art history) and the expansion of the field to the point of incoherence as it seems to subsume everything related to the cultural and the visual. Dikovitskaya gives us an archaeology of visual culture, examining the cultural turn away from art history and the emergence of visual studies. Drawing on responses to questionnaires, oral histories, and interviews with the field's leading scholars, she discusses first the field's history, theoretical frameworks, and methods, and then examines four programs and courses in visual culture -- those at the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Irvine, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Bringing together considerations of theory and practice, Dikovitskaya charts the future of visual culture programs in the twenty-first century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026204224X
• ISBN13: 9780262042246
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

issues and challenges in defining and teaching visual studies

Everyone recognizes that this is a time of visual culture, extraordinarily and in many ways excessively so. The phrase is routinely, and casually, used by many in the media, arts, and even academia. However, there is little comprehension, understanding, or agreement on what this visual culture really is either in terms of a concept or an experience. Dikovitsky steps back from this common use of the term visual culture to try to define and comprehend it by exploring "the history, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and pedagogy of visual culture in the United States." She does this mostly by interviews with college professors in fields ranging from art, film studies, and cultural studies to literature which in one way or another take into account the pronounced and often dominating or suppressive nature of the visual in modern culture. The word "study" in the subtitle connotes not so much Dikovitskaya's study of visual culture--although this is inevitably inherent--as it does the author's chosen task to report how visual culture is being studied mostly in the universities; and along with this answer the question of how it is to be studied so it is understood properly. Without a proper understanding of visual culture, contemporary society cannot be understood properly; contemporary society is a mystery. While not defining visual culture definitively, if this can ever be done, Dikovitskaya's exploration, framing of issues, and probing interviews bring the sprawling, elusive, omnipresent presence and idea of visual culture into clearer focus. Dikovitskaya is a research fellow at the Library of Congress.

A solid guide to current trends

Dikovitskaya does a dutiful job describing the merger of art history and culture studies into the field of visual culture theory. Her first two chapters provide a wonderful survey of current trends in visual culture, and the emerging pedagogy of the field. Her appendices are what really make the book worthwhile, however. Interviews with the best known scholars in the field, such as Douglas Crimp and Nicholas Mirzoeff, make this book stand out as a valuable primer to any student of culture theory and/or art history.