The “cabinet of curiosities” was originally a personal collection fo things of wonder. The important element is it displays an visual information; it owned by private collection who are wealthy and travel around all over the world to buy collections both natural and man-made objects. These cabinets reached the peak of their popularity in the 17^th Century. The main function of the cabinet was provoke a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer; in many ways they represented a world-view that valued the “wonder” in an artefact much more than the need to analyse and classify the artefact. There were not yet universal systems of scientific classification and each collection sported its own unique organisational struture. The specimens in one corner of the Anatomical Museum in Leiden were grouped by type of defect. These cabinets displayed their owner’s notions of Art, Science and Spirituality in a physical form.

In 18^th Century, cabinet of curiosities transformed to another form—the public museum. Many public museums opened during 1750s to 1790s, like the Museo, the first museum in the Vatican Museums complex, was opened in Rome in 1756; the British Museum in London, was founded in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. the Belvedere Palace of the Habsburg monarchs in Vienna opened with an outstanding collection of art in 1781. These “public” museums, however, were often accessible only by middle and upper classes. It could be difficult to gain entrance. In London for example, prospective visitors to the British Museum had to apply in writing for admission. Even by 1800 it was possible to have to wait for two weeks for an admission ticket. Visitors in small groups were limited to stays of two hours. The first truly public museum was the Louvre Museum in Paris, opened in 1793 during the French Revolution, which enabled for the first time in history free access to the former French royal collections for people of all stations and status. The fabulous art treasures collected by the French monarchy over centuries were accessible to the public three days each “décade” (the 10-day unit which had replaced the week in the French Republican Calendar). The Conservatoire du muséum national des Arts (National Museum of Arts’s Conservatory) was charged with organizing the Louvre as a national public museum and the centerpiece of a planned national museum system. As Napoléon I conquered the great cities of Europe, confiscating art objects as he went, the collections grew and the organizational task became more and more complicated. After Napoleon was defeated in 1815, many of the treasures he had amassed were gradually returned to their owners (and many were not). His plan was never fully realized, but his concept of a museum as an agent of nationalistic fervor had a profound influence throughout Europe.

(to be continued…)

Morden consumption is mediated by market relations and takes the form of the consumption commidities. The consumer’s access to consumption is largely structured by the distribution of material and cultural resources like money and taste, which itself is determined in crucial ways by maket relations-above all the wage relation and social class. Consumer culture is incompatible with the political regulation of consumption that suppresses the market. It does not arise in non-capitalist societies.Consumer culture is often identified with the idea of mass consumption. Market relations are anonymous and in principle universal. The idea that consumer culture serves a general public also promotes a more positive idea that it embraces everyone. We are all formally free and equal, unconstrained in our choices by legally fixed status of cultural prohibitions. Yet, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedon is compulsory.In many important aspects consumption is still the black box of the social sciences–its size and material composition is well known, but its operating principles remain obscure. Patent offices are the mausoleums of new products nobody wants. The question remains what producers chose to manufacture or what makes consumers adopt, modify, change or reject new technology. Mentally rooted in the nineteenth century, the social and economic sciences until very recently were in no position to answer this question, since they all too often shared a productivist perspective. In studies of mass consumption almost inevitably the point of departure was the industrial firm, its manufacturing and research facilities. “New” technology invariably was being “created” by engineers and then “given” to the public for consumption. When it comes to innovations, activity resides with the “makers” of technology and not with the “users”.As long as such a passive picture of consumption exists, there is little hope to achieve more than a mere quantitative description based on the common denominator money. The assertion that consumers tend to maximize the marginal utility of the goods they purchase does not explain what makes them useful in the first place. In overcoming this intellectual deadlock, anthropologists, sociologists, and feminists have been leading historians to investigate consumption as a social and cultural activity shaping twentieth century society at least as much–or even more–as industry, science, and business.

Images were used for politic porpuse in early centuries; such as the Germany’s Third Reich. Adolf Hitler was one of the famousest person in 1900s, he was on the peak of his power during the Second World War. Undoubtful, The Third Reich was resplendent once, and the portrait of Hitler became the spirit of the Germany. Personality cult was encouraged at that time, it made people can fight for their leader- just like Hitler. “Hitler with youth”, and “Hitler with dog” was taken by Heinrich Hoffman in 1932. They were used to record Hitler’s daily life-to show that he is an ordinary leader of a country not a aggresor. It was just a propaganda used by politics. However, these two images might be described as the positive side of a heart of the country. Another image called “Have No Fear-He’s A Vegetarian” was not. This picture was reproduced by John Hearfield. He replaced the butcher’s head with Adolf Hitler and combined with one of the leader of France at that time. This image was also used as politic purpose. It represented Hitler’s real features by using insinuative text. “Mechanically or electronically reproduced images can be in many places simultaneously and can be combined or put with text. These capabilities have greatly increased the ability of images to captivate and persuade.” (Sturken&Cartwright, p.131).

Let’s talk a bit more about the film “Manufactured Landscapes” which produced by Edward Burtynsky in 2006. This film is talked about the relationship between human behavior-espically the morden industrialization, and the landscape. The first scene is in a assembly department of a manufacturer in China. Workers are assembling segments for various of products. In the film, the producer shows lots of images of constrigent cans, metals, steels. China is a developing country with rapid growth rate. To maintain her manufacturing, she needs lots of materials; but there is not enough raw materials she can utilize. Therefore, she has to import those garbage that can be recycled to obtain her daily use. These materials are delivered to many places to sort, recycle; such as used enginees from the GM. One image was shot during this process, the producer asked some children to sit on those metal that already been sorted. I was shocked by those scrapheaps when I was watching the film. They are everywhere in that small town, stacked in houses, farmlands, even backyards. When I saw those smiling faces of childern I was heartrending. How would that place look like when they grown? Will they still having that simle on their face at that time? Frankly, enviornment is sacrificed when China is developing. The government do not have strict laws or regulations to protect the enviornment effectively. People do not have ideas that they will not alive without a good circumstance.

Another scene was startled me was those abandoned cities due to the construction of the biggest dam. Actually, those can not be called cities; ruins are much appropriate. 1,100,000 people have to move their homes to other provinces. The scar that been brought to the enviornment can not be recovered anymore. Human activities have much more negative effects rather than these. The ships graveyard in Bangladesh is another example. Hektares of lands are used to storage used ships, the soil becomes red or even black. Because the matel were used to build ship bodies were eroded during a long period. Abandoned gas tanks still have little storage soaked into soil; the land becomes useless.

“Viewer discretion is advised” will be shown on the screen at the very beginning when every time I am watching “Prison Break”. Because it contains scenes of violence and coarse language for adult audiances, and should be guided when teenagers are watching it. Different people may considered different meanings when he watching an Ad. This may differ from “who is doing the looking”, or “who is the ideal or the intended view”. “We can have intense relationships with images precisely because of the power they have both to give us pleasure and to allow us to articulate our desires through looking.”

An important term we talked about this week is “the gaze”-it is a way that is to look or stare, often with eagerness or desire in common sense. However, the concept of the gaze has been developed to focus on inquiry in both art history and film studies, with different emphases. From the 19th century, photographers use photographs to identify criminals-like the Adam Photographic Cabinet. The public could get informations of how did criminals look like. That was the idea what those images represented. However, some of the them do not look like they could do bad things to the societies from my view point. This is the power of images, it can influnence the mind of what do people thinkings in society. Later, this was widely used to find the murderer of the United States’ president-Abraham Linclon. The United States War Department made a reward poster to encourage citizens to provide information of the murderer of the president. After that, a reporter named Alexander Gardner was picked up by the secret agency to be the only one official reporter who can reported for execution of the murderer. By publishing his photographs, the government appeased the wrath of the public and warned other criminals.

Physiognomy images embark on shown the different styles of different nations. We can distinguish the life style of Arab patrician and European’s from what they wearing, their behaviours, and the background shown on images. Every nation has their own cultures, clothing, architectures, these all can be viewed on physiognomy images. French painter Paul Gauguin made many paintings of the people of Tahiti and other French colonies. These paintings produce meanings of discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. The women in Gauguin’s paintings are specifically coded as other, in particular as the exotic other who represent a world supposedly unspoiled by modern civilization, a paradise. “These images operate within the binary oppositions of civilization/nature, white/other, and male/female, establishing the women in them as exotic, different. and other to both the painter and viewer.”

When I was watching Hockney’s video, I was shocked by his discovery. Did those artists in early centuries cheat? May be they were not, but how can we explain those nearly photographic paintings around 1420? As I can imagine that people can not make paintings in such specific details on polished armor, jewelleries, furbelows with hands and naked eyes. Hockney suggests that artists used a camera lucida (a prism on a stick that causes the scene in front of the artist to be projected on to his sheet of paper) for the initial blocking of features, refocusing to capture the outlines of the costume. He used this way to draw a complex shape of pendant lamp in order to find how does it look like real on the paint.

Go into a very dark room on a bright day. Make a small hole in a window cover and look at the opposite wall. What do you see? Magic! There in full color and movement will be the world outside the window — upside down! This magic is explained by a simple law of the physical world. Light travels in a straight line and when some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a small hole in thin material they do not scatter but cross and reform as an upside down image on a flat surface held parallel to the hole. This law of optics was known in ancient times.

Simpler than the camera obscura the concave lens turns out to project images equally seductive but upside down rather than reversed. Hockney draws a friend as a cardinal using such a mirror (again the drawing itself is less lively than vintage Hockney). The friend must sit outside in bright sunlight while Hockney traces the spectral figure indoors before finishing the work off via the eyeball.

However, there are more than these was mentioned in the video, but I cannot rememerber clearly. Still, it is a great video on early paintings and has so much fun ideas.

As been schduled, “this week” we should working on some materials from the textbook.

Photography was developed in Europe in the early 19th century, when concepts of positivist science held sway. Positivism involves the belief that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence. This is a nonfigurative idea, in my opinion, is something that is proved by scientist or the majoruty part of public. For instance, someone said he saw an UFO in a summer night, how many people will belive his word. Only if he took a photo of it, and some scientists testified according to the shape, lightness of the object, then tell the public it is might be an UFO. This is what does photograph represent-a method of producing images that involves a mechanical recording device (the camera) rahter than hand recording (pencil on paper).

An image can has many different meanings through different individuals, with respect to their education, culture, religions.

What can you read from the image above? It is shows that a car just run away, but its image still reflected in the water on road. For my understanding, the car stands for high speed, it has a powerful engine. This is relate to ideology. The most important aspect of ideologies is that they appear to be natural or given, rather than part of system of belief that a culture produces in order to function in a particular way. Ideologies are influenced through the social institutions in a given society, such as family, education, medicine, the law, the government, and the entertainment industry, among others. In this image, the car is the signifier, and powerful may be the signified. The image and its meaning together form the sign. The production of a sign is dependent on social, historical, and cultural context. In morden society, the requirement of an vehicle is getting as specific as possible. Rather than a good external looking it must has a powerful engine, comforable seats, options on automatic or mannual gearshift and so on. Vehicle manufacturers have to satisfy custmers by providing different ranks of cars and making attractive Ads.

The capacity of images to affect us as viewers and consumers is dependent on the larger cultural meanings they invoke and the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they are viewed.

The reason that i chosed this course was simply-my humanity credit for the win.

What is visual culture? The first thing that came into my mind is fashion: those various of design represent people’s concepts, creation, and attitude of different life styles. The second thing would be paintings and photograpgy. After reading the textbook, I knew that the visual culture is, those aspects of culture that are manifested in visual form-paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, new images, and science images.

 Visual culture has a particular investment in vision as an historically and culturally specific experience, mediated by new technologies and the individual and social formations that they enable. Putting visual objects, image-production and reception at the center of inquiry has allowed scholars to re-organize historical periodization, broaden the disciplinary frameworks of interpretation beyond the history of art and film studies, and identify a new field of interdisciplinary scholarly practice.

fianlly, I got time to update my VISA 1Q98 blog. have being so busy since i was able to go back to class. having chicken pox at this age is now one of the most funniest things that were talked by my friends after i told them. i hate them so badly. ^^

anyway it is time to work harder on my courses and the blog…