Shiny Things , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Timothy van Laar , Leonard Diepeveen

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116 pages

English

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Description

Shiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad attention to popular culture – the wideness of its range is striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter, which many of today’s innovative books also have – it considers how a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful application of contemporary theory.

Interesting, informative, and entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time, with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional academic scholarship.

Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive; its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body, and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness and cleanliness.

Examines the meanings and functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates people.

The book engages primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and other areas of popular and political culture. The art world, however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored.

Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles, Richard Nixon and Liberace.

Will be relevant to academics, scholars and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities: philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising and marketing.

It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics. It is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and theory are embodied through examples and narratives. Will be of interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff, James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit.

Sujets

Philosophie

Esthétique et philosophie de l'art

Popular Culture

PHILOSOPHY

Material culture

Criticism

Contemporary art

Theory

Aesthetics

Art

Cultural Studies

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	24 juin 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781789383805
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Shiny Things

Shiny Things
Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings
Leonard Diepeveen Timothy van Laar
First published in the UK in 2021 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetter: Aleksandra Szumlas
Frontispiece: Detail from Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Turkey Pie , 1627, oil on panel, 95 cm x 75cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (see Figure 4.4).
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-378-2
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-379-9
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-380-5
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website.
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Shiny World
Embodied Shine
Shiny Representation
Smudges
Purity
Anxious Shine
Ironic Shine
Kitsch and Camp
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
In contemporary culture, shininess creates experiences and meanings both banal and profound. These actions and ideas range from trivial fascination to sublime meditation, and can communicate meanings as diverse as optimism and anxiety. Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, Shiny Things examines the meanings of shininess in art and in culture more generally, the multivalent application of the term shiny : its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime, and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. Shininess, then, clearly operates as a sign, but in its different multiple contexts it produces diverse meanings. It is also a particular sort of sign, a motivated sign, tightly attached to its physicality and one s phenomenological experience of it.
Shininess as a phenomenon has contradictory functions that have operated throughout history. Because of its contradictory and simultaneous functions, Shiny Things organizes shininess in terms of these functions, such as hygiene, for example. Hygiene, anxiety, and irony are transhistorical effects of shininess, arising from the physical properties of shine and the perceptual cognitive processes shininess instigates. Thus, this book is a topical and function-driven investigation more than it is a chronology-driven one. (There is a clearer history to the materials that embody shininess, which we take up in our second chapter.) Methodologically, Shiny Things discusses shininess through its affects, an approach that keeps our argument close to the physicality of shiny things, getting at the more metaphorical categories through the attributes of shiny objects; e.g., the frictionlessness of shiny things leads to their being signifiers of efficiency.
This, then, is the theory of shininess as it appears in this book: the physical phenomena of shininess are interpreted semiotically, revealing a particular aspect of semiotics: there is always a tight connection between shininess physical manifestations and its polemics. Shiny objects, then, argue in a sharply embodied way. Our understanding of shininess has some benefits: we can understand more clearly how shiny polemics function; we provide a critical framework for talking about shiny things and the work they do. This theory offers a critical practice: knowing about cleanliness and efficiency in relationship to shininess polemics, say, helps us figure out what cultural objects are doing with their shininess.
Because shininess is a remarkably supple phenomenon, at times going in contradictory directions (for example, being a vehicle for both the precious and the cheap), different chapters turn to different cultural theories, such as the sublime, the uncanny, the abject, the utopian, and the ironic. When Shiny Things works with these pervasive cultural theories, it doesn t develop them so much as it looks at how they are both affected by and contribute to our understanding of shininess. This relationship keeps this book s discussion close to physical shininess. There is a bit of a reciprocity between shininess and these dominant theories: in this book s examination of the shininess of cyborgs, for example, theories of the uncanny help sharpen our understanding of the work shininess does, and the physical phenomenon of shininess reveals unexpected nuances in theories of the uncanny.
As we have stated, while it is rooted in physicality, much of shininess work is semiotic. Understanding shininess semiotically, Shiny Things turns to those areas where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored, particularly visual art. The shine in Anish Kapoor s Cloud Gate is about the sublime and consumer culture, and more. Artworks are made for the purpose of interpretation; in them, shine tends to have a more intensely interpretable purpose than it has in, say, consumer objects. Thus, while all the shiny things in this book use the same vocabulary, artworks are where shine takes on a more obviously polemical function. Sometimes it is an act of inquiry; at other times it is a highly specific use or function of shine. But in both cases art has a focus that directs one to think about the nature of shininess. Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose Cloud Gate is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico, and Gerard ter Borch center the book in an art discourse that has affinities with body building, Richard Nixon, and Lladr figurines.
Shiny objects such as Lladr figurines appear in this book because shininess pervades culture; to neglect its wide range-limiting the inquiry to visual art, say-would impoverish an understanding of the work shininess does. After all, not all of shininess work is inquiry; shininess is bigger than visual art. Moreover, contemporary art has immersed itself in mass culture, and questions boundaries of high and low. As a consequence, the spectacles of Liberace and Olafur Eliasson work with overlapping conceptual frames. Additionally, when contemporary art looks at shininess it often does so through the lens of mass culture and public life, where shininess is massively present. Thus, although the book heavily engages with visual art, it also uses visual culture more generally.
The first chapter, The Shiny World, examines the cultural values attached to shininess in general, from the superficial to the transcendent, and touches on the possible origins of human fascination with shininess, including, some believe, evolutionary causes. The chapter turns to the uses and effects of shininess found in the inherent excess of its surfaces, work rooted in its physics and its affects-disorientation, dislocation, dematerialization.
Turning from the physical and possibly inherent aspects of shininess, and beginning with a history of gilding and electroplating, the second chapter, Embodied Shine, moves from shininess growing ubiquity to the way its allure has dominated consumer culture and the way it frames our views of objects and even the human body. The chapter argues that shininess has moved from a time when rarity, constructed both through labor and precious materials, gave shiny things a fairly direct meaning of power and transcendence. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have modulated to readings of superficiality, irony, and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness, and cleanliness. This complexity is at times written on the shiny human body, as an unstable mix of desire and anxiety revealed in the shiny bodies of fashion photography, body-building, and cyborgs.
Chapters 3 and 4 move to a focused analysis of what it means, in art, to represent shininess. The basic principle that art reveals is that shininess is analyzed when it is represented; in the production of art, shininess is both semiotic and a self-reflexive analysis of its semiotics. The third chapter, Shiny Representation, surveys how shininess has been represented in visual art and how that virtual representation and its resulting displays of virtuosity have been used throughout history: from seventeenth-century Dutch reflexy-const , to late twentieth-century photorealism, to digital animation and Hollywood s use of CGI. The meanings of actual shininess are manifested in its virtual representations, which reveal that representations of shiny things, a hallmark of virtuosity, are highly artificial, a set of technical and semiotic conventions that seem to be as much about artistic power as they are about description. Following this more general discussion of representation, the fourth chapter, Smudges, picks up on an odd anomaly-the shiny representation of things rarely, if ever, represents a dirty smudge on a shiny surface. Ultimately, this says something important about the physics of shininess, the cultural position and power of shininess, and how in representations of shininess the shiny operates as a sign.
Chapter 5 , Purity, signals a turn in the book to a more explicit analysis, in the last four chapters, of how shininess is culturally interpreted, its phys