In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006) 21-38 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Attractions to Violence and the Limits of EducationPaul DuncumThe effects of violent media fare upon young people are of great concern for educators and parents alike. Recently, some visual art educators have attempted to deal with the issue under the rubric of visual culture. 1 Adopting a critical position toward media violence, they have developed programs that (...) attempt to encourage in their students a view of citizenship that rejects an easy use of violence as the solution to resolving real life issues. In consideration of these attempts, this article examines media violence—not to comment upon the efforts of other art educators but to point to the exceptionally difficult, perhaps intractable, forces faced by any form of educational intervention.There can be no doubting that violence—defined as involving intentional physical harm—is highly popular in mass media entertainment and is increasingly gory. Tartar refers to Shakespeare's term "violent delights" 2 as an oxymoron, but delight in violence is exactly what many people appear to find. There appears to be no contradiction in Shakespeare's term—Shakespeare being no stranger to the idea—only a succinctly expressed observation of a particular taste that is both long-standing and nowadays evident in an increasingly visceral, violent mass media.This article addresses three questions: First, what is it about displays of violence that is so appealing? Where is the pleasure in watching bodies being blown apart? Where is the delight in watching barbarous torture, slaughter, and death? What is the lure, the attraction? Or, since one of my arguments will be that there are qualitatively different kinds of violence, is it more appropriate to ask what are the attractions of violence? Second, why are violent spectacles becoming more and more intense? Why are representations of violence becoming increasingly visceral? Third, what are we doing to ourselves by exposing ourselves to so much violent mass media? [End Page 21] What is the societal significance, the real world consequences, of being attracted to violent imagery?There are many kinds of violent spectacles. This article deals exclusively with violence in current mediated popular forms of entertainment, principally television, film, video, and computer games. It is not narrowly concerned with intentionally aestheticized images, for example, through the use of slow motion or when the soundtrack to images of mass slaughter switches from the mayhem on screen to the souring beauties of operatic singing. Such images are included here, but the article deals with an inclusive range of representations of violence typically found in some degree to be pleasurable by large sections of the public. Specifically, four kinds of violence are examined: comic, transgressive, retaliatory, and gratuitous.Of course, not everyone is attracted to violence, and most popular entertainment is not violent. 3 The best-selling video games are violent, 4 but violent films and videos are far outweighed by nonviolent fare, especially comedies. 5 Nevertheless, much media fare is violent. Studies conducted in the mid-to-late 1990s concluded that 60 percent of U.S. television programs contained violence, 40 percent of which was offered as humorous. 6 By the age of eighteen a child has seen around 200,000 violent acts on television, including 40,000 murders. 7 This includes 3 to 5 violent acts per hour on prime time and 20 to 25 per hour during Saturday morning cartoons.Sensory AttractionProfessional critics of film and video often talk about the aesthetic qualities of media violence—for example, of "balletic spectacle" and "orgiastic energy." 8 The New York Times film critic's review of Sam Peckinpah's 1969 film The Wild Bunch, a milestone in cinematic violence, wrote of the climatic massacre as a "blood ballet" and that the director "first highlights the horror of the mindless slaughter and then—and this is what really carries horror—makes it beautiful, almost abstract." 9 Virtually the same words were used recently by eminent U.S. film critic Roger Ebert with regard to Tarrantino's exceptionally... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concept, ContextsPaul DuncumExploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concept, Contexts, edited by Matthew Rampley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 257 pp., $32.00 paper.I review this new introductory text in light of its competition as a textbook for undergraduates and as an introduction for graduate students. Other such texts include Barnard, Elkins, Mirzeoff, Walker and Chaplin, and Sturken and Cartwright,1 which appears to be the most widely (...) used. Rampley's anthology stands up well among these competitors, especially for those who wish to transition from art to contemporary popular visual culture rather more gently than other texts that, for many students, might come as too abrupt a disjuncture from mainstream practice in schools of art and design. As Matthew Rampley states in his excellent introduction, if the book has an original contribution to make, it is to situate an acknowledgment of traditional practices and issues into the makeup of visual culture studies. Unlike other texts, mentioned above, which tend to stress screen and print media, Rampley's agenda is to remind readers of the historical origins of many recent developments as well as the contribution of cultural forms other than two-dimensional ones. Thus, chapters are included that trace the history and continuing contribution of traditional media; art, design, craft, and architecture each receive individual chapters. MacDonald, for example, describes the complex meanings of craft and its relationship to fine art and design from classical times to today, as well as summarizes the characteristics and politics of craft today. Furthermore, the influence of technology is charted principally through conventional art, and the chapters on photography, film, and fashion are likewise cast largely in terms of historical accounts of whether these forms should be considered to be art.The historical bias is equally evident in the pictures used to illustrate the text. While, for example, there are contemporary popular images, such [End Page 118] as a cover of the Sun newspaper and a photograph of Punks, there are as many crossover images—postcards of famous art portraits and a Michelangelo on a T shirt—as well as many conventional artworks. Delacroix, Corbert, Rauschenberg, David, Fuseli, and Van Goyen are each featured. Some of the popular images are also historical, such as George Mêlées 1902 classic film Voyage to Moon and advertisements from the1930s.Sometimes the historical material takes up much of the space, with recent developments given only cursory treatment, and sometimes the material is dealt with in ways that seem rather old-fashioned to this reader. For example, Glyn Davis's chapter on photography and film is primarily a potted historical account of the relationships between these two cultural forms and art. Further, Davis does not just describe the arguments for and against their inclusion as art but is clearly engaged with these issues himself, an engagement that many proponents of visual culture would find rather quaint—that is, rather less interesting than the particular contribution that these forms make to contemporary life and for whom the question, "Is it art?" is no longer of any particular interest. This art orientation also colors Davis's view of Hollywood films. Clearly preferring "art" films, he completely ignores the role of popular film in exploring the fears, anxieties, beliefs, and so on of the wider public. By contrast, Richard Williams argues against architecture as a form of art, with its limited concerns with aesthetics, style, and canonical buildings, in favor of architecture as discourse and spatial experience. He is more interested in the reception of architecture than its production—first with architecture as signs, as meanings that are mutable, contingent, and arbitrary; and, secondly, as ordinary urban lived experience, with how architecture is but one element within the experience of urban environments.Typical of the avoidance of technical terms in the book as a whole, Williams beautifully describes the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism without once mentioning either of these terms, and in a chapter on architecture he manages to use the term "postmodern" only once. Similarly, in Neil Mulholland's chapter on representation and realism, cultural border crossing and indigenization are both described, albeit briefly, though without recourse to these terms... (shrink)

Essays drawing upon a range of disciplines to present arguments that help unravel the complex nature of aesthetic understanding and its relevance to contemporary education.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Aesthetics of Cultural StudiesPaul DuncumThe Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérube. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 208 pp., $26.95 paper, $67.95 cloth.This new anthology of ten chapters and a chapter-length introduction by the editor is primarily intended to act as a corrective to the view that cultural studies is uninterested in aesthetics. Contributors argue that while some cultural studies scholars have given this impression, either abandoning (...) the term "aesthetics" or explicitly rejecting the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies has been, from its origins in England in the early 1960s, deeply concerned with aesthetic issues. Cultural studies is properly understood, contributors argue, as being born out of a desire to extend aesthetic considerations to a wider range of artifacts and experiences than had hitherto been allowable within the modernist philosophical tradition of aesthetics derived from Kant. Contributors deal with many debates within the field of cultural studies—unsurprisingly mostly to do with turf wars within universities—but I will focus here specifically on what they have to say about aesthetics, though I cannot do justice to the multiplicity of views developed by different authors.Since contributors are primarily from North America, where cultural studies has mainly taken root in the English departments of universities, the cultural form most commonly discussed is literature. Exceptions include David Sanjek's chapter, which focuses on popular music, and Steven Rubio's chapter, which deals playfully with phenomenological intertextuality between classical music and popular cartoons. Most of the issues addressed by contributors also apply to other traditional arts, though not, I will argue below, to many contemporary forms of popular cultural experience.Contributors are especially concerned to defend themselves against charges that, in Rorty's view, cultural studies equates to "expressions of political resentment clothed in jargon," or in George Levine's characterization of this position, as "seeing the text as a kind of enemy to be arrested," where the text is reduced to context and the truth of art is denied in favor of the truth of politics (as cited in Rita Felski's chapter). For such critics, cultural studies equates with ideology critique and represents the death of aesthetics. Not so, according to each of these authors. John Frow, for example, argues that from its inception it was not aesthetics per se that cultural studies objected to but the then normative discourse of aesthetics that was positioned above politics.Several authors are concerned to establish the credentials of cultural studies as a unique way of approaching culture and not just any running together of culture and politics. Felski complains of a "semantic drift," which sees cultural studies mischaracterized and condemned for sins that rightly belong to other fields.Complicating a search for the uniqueness of cultural studies, however, is Jonathan Sterne's contribution in what seems a significantly revisionist position. He claims that in cultural studies culture has had to carry too heavy a burden. Culture has been a conduit to politics, he argues; studying culture has been a way of studying politics by other means, and he suggests that sometimes culture can simply be enjoyed for its own sake and not subject to analysis. David Shumway, too, at times just wants to enjoy culture. In the everyday course of living this is surely right, though it is hardly at the center of the scholarly cultural studies' enterprise. As other contributors argue, cultural studies has always seen the need for striking a balance between aesthetics and [End Page 113] ideology. Sterne's unease with cultural studies for seeing aesthetics primarily in instrumental terms—a way of getting at politics—nevertheless serves as a corrective to the idea that cultural studies scholars have a hard time understanding pleasure.Most contributors acknowledge the influence of Raymond Williams—as well they might—and several cite, even at length, from the chapter "Aesthetic and Other Situations" from his 1977 book Marxism and Literature.1 Here Williams succinctly laid out the theoretical framework for many of the authors of this anthology. It is worth considering some of the key threads of Bérube's book through the prism of this chapter.Williams begins by making aesthetics problematic... (shrink)