"Art" and "Image" chapters

“Art” chapter:  Overall, she seems to be saying that the definition and effect of media are determined by the history and the point in time art is experienced and tools are used.   Before the industrial revolution, media means “two things:  the materials of production and the broader context of media culture.  In the modern to contemporary period, the prevailing belief is that the distinctive identity of art derives from the unique ability of individual artists give formal expression to imaginative thought….art is now as often constituted as a practice or activity as it is by the production of rarified objects.” 

To that end, she traces the “threads” of “attitudes toward the media of production and imagery, the role and function of art, and the concept of the artist through substantial periods of history.  She traces the artist as craftsman, producing ceremonial and religious artifacts, to artist as genius and as having original thought and motivation, to artist as opener of doors to perception, to artist as scribes of society’s tastes and values, to artist as channeling and remediating that which is already known and art as composed of its own media and as not dependent on form or media for its categorization or definition as art but instead, dependent on ideas. 

“The definition of art in an era of mass media depends on our ability to distinguish works of art from other objects or images in the spheres of media and mass visual production” (17).  It’s all in the eyes of the beholder and the beholder’s place in the world and the state of the world where the beholder stands. 

“Image” chapter:  Images have a paradoxical status – they are both “everything” and “nothing.”  They are also thought of as “material pictures or objects in the world” and yet also include “mental images” that are dependent on memory, similar to words depending on memory.

Technology can be measured by the relation of images to media in history but other factors are important in the relation of images to media:  “political, economic, cultural, and social institutions like guilds, trades, professions, and corporations.”   Humans are “deeply ambivalent” to the images we create and this ambivalence “flares-up into crisis at moments of technical innovation.” 

The chapter brings in the C.S. Pierce notion of image as not “merely signify[ing] or represent[ing] something…it must also present ‘firstnesses” that strike our senses…and that resemble something…we experience the image as a double moment of appearing and recognition.”  Images also have motion and had motion before film. 

Defines images as “[t]he uncanny content of a medium, the shape or form it assumes, the thing that makes its appearance in a medium while making the medium itself appear as a medium.”