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book: A General Theory of Visual Culture
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A General Theory of Visual Culture

  • and
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2022

About this book

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision.

Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

Author / Editor information

Whitney Davis is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, most recently Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis and Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond.

Reviews

"[A] magnificent book. This is an ambitious and fascinating work, one that offers a novel perspective on the intertwined projects of art history and visual culture. The sheer scope of the book and the detailed, methodical argument are simply too broad and too detailed to adequately summarize here."---Brian Kane, Art Bulletin --- "Davis's project to develop a general theory of visual culture is a necessary and urgent one."---Derval Tubridy, Visual Culture --- "[Q]uirky and ambitious." --- "Along with David Summers's Real Spaces, Whitney Davis's General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades. . . . As conceptual reorganization of art history's fundamental terms of engagement with objects, the book is exemplary, and it is difficult to imagine a reader who is engaged with the discipline for whom this book is optional reading."---Jim Elkins, CAA Reviews --- "Winner of the 2012 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association"

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    ix
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    Illustrations

    xi
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    Preface

    xv
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  • PART ONE The Successions of Visual Culture
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    Chapter 1 Vision Has an Art History

    1
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    Chapter 2 Vision and the Successions to Visual Culture

    11
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  • PART TWO What Is Cultural about Vision?
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    Chapter 3 What Is Formalism?

    43
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    Chapter 4 The Stylistic Succession

    75
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    Chapter 5 The Close Reading of Artifacts

    120
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    Chapter 6 Successions of Pictoriality

    150
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    Chapter 7 The Iconographic Succession

    187
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    Chapter 8 Visuality and Pictoriality

    230
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    Chapter 9 How Visual Culture Becomes Visible

    277
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    Chapter 10 Visuality and the Cultural Succession

    322
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    Notes

    341
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    Index

    375
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 1, 2022
eBook ISBN:
9781400836437
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400836437
eBook ISBN: 9781400836437
Keywords for this book
Visual culture; Depiction; Formality; Iconology; Iconography; Art history; Theory; Language-game (philosophy); Analogy; Form of life (philosophy); Engraving; Contextualism; Diagram; Visual semiotics; Aesthetic Theory; Work of art; Visual perception; Culture theory; Intentionality; Allegory; Theory of Forms; Aestheticism; Aesthetics; Art criticism; Illustration; Art for art's sake; Consciousness; Thought experiment; Cultural history; Formalism (art); Mental representation; Culturalism; Obfuscation; Subjectivism; Narrative; Mental image; Self-consciousness; Nominalism; Objectivity (philosophy); Ideology; Figurative art; Metaphysics; Subjectivity; Anthropology of art; Languages of Art; Visual arts; Reflections on Language; Perspective (graphical); Connoisseur; Conceptualization (information science); Causality; State of affairs (philosophy); Fine art; Modern art; Visual field; Essay; Historical method; Ostensive definition; Metaphor; Exposition (narrative); Precognition; Symptom; Sense and reference; Truism; Ontology; Explanation; Transference; Reflexology; Theoretical definition; Pragmatics
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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