Popular culture and visual voice

Collective consciousness
“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.” – Emile Durkheim

Examples of popular culture:
  • Shops e.g. H&M
  • Football
  • Certain magazines, including celebrities
  • The news
  • Technology/certain apps – Instagram (#...)
  • Films
  • Games
How could this impact my practice?

What do we mean by the mainstream?
  • Widely consumed; popular
  • Represented by mass media
  • Mass-produced; not independently produced
Taste cultures: Theorising the mainstream
(Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A social critique of the judgement of taste, 1984)

Taste cultures: low art vs. High art:
  • Wicked vs. Julius Caesar
  • The fate of the furious vs. The tree of life
  • Ed Sheeran vs. Mozart
  • The Da Vinci Code vs. Wolf Hall
  • EastEnders vs. The Wire
Authorship: Conceptualising the visual voice
Contemporary ideas about authorship and visual media originate from film studies. The idea is that the director is considered the films author. Film authorship is usually determined by a filmmaker whose body of work is accomplished.

The agitators: Theorising the Avant-Garde
“Avant-garde films tend to be made by individuals or very small groups of collaborators, financed by either the film makers alone or in combination with private patronage and grants from art institutions. Such films are usually distributed through film co-operatives, and exhibited by film societies, museums and universities.” – (Murray Smith- 1998)

Task for next week:
  • Who is going against the grain in your discipline?
  • Who are the provocateurs, the agitators?
  • What can you say about their work?
  • Why is their work different to mainstream?
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