Monday, February 11, 2013

Post 1


            In John Berger's book “the ways of seeing”he talks about how publicity begins by working on the natural need of humans wanting more than what they need. However publicity cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no real substitute for the specific pleasure that is needing to be for filled. The better publicity conveys the pleasure, the more aware the spectator-buyer is about how out of the reach the object of pleasure is. The buyer becomes aware of the object and how it offers him or her an opportunity to become glamorous and envied by others. Publicity is always about the future buyer. “Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness. Happiness as judged from the outside by others.”
          
             In Lucy Lippard's Chapter double take, she talks about the beavers family photograph and how it celebrates a reciprocal moment rather than a cannibalistic one where interaction and communication is important. This is a moment in which the subject and object are caught in an exchange in a shared time. In This moment there is an uncultured distance between the white photographer and the Native being photographed. This is an example of an image being taken from an outsider within a different community. Lippard also speaks on how photography was used to exploit and disarm the “disappearance” of Indian nations to keep them in their “place” in the past, and to make them objects of study and contemplation.
                    
              In Barbara Kruger's Remote Control she speaks of what makes high art, high art and what is considered low art. She says how popular culture can have the same qualities as high art. High art can be defined according to Kruger “the ability through visual, verbal, gestural, and musical means to objectify ones experience to the world: to show and tell through a kind of eloquent short hand , how it feels to be alive”. Kruger argues that popular culture has the ability to do some of the same things as high art. Although corporate power has given popular culture a numbing effect, that they are few works of popular culture that emerge that are of worth.
                   In the article “ the Crowd” it speaks about how the working class people are paying taxes on the objects of their consumption. The masses would not except money being taken out of their salary for taxes. Instead a indirect tax being paid daily in smaller fractions on objects of consumption and will not be noticed. If it were replaced by a tax on wages or income of any kind to be paid in a full large sum, it would be easier but would give rise to protest among the crowd.
                The Spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and identification of all human social life with appearances. The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjected them. Society became less concerned of who they are and more concerned of what they own.  

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