What do pictures want? : the lives and loves of images
"Why do we have such powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?" "According to W.J.T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their won. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting."--Jacket
Art
xxi, 380 pages, 16 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
9780226532455, 9780226532486, 0226532453, 0226532488
54988888
Images. Vital signs : cloning terror
What do pictures want?
Drawing desire
The surplus value of images
Objects. Founding objects
Offending images
Empire and objecthood
Romanticism and the life of things
Totemism, fetishism, idolatry
Media. Addressing media
Abstraction and intimacy
What sculpture wants : placing Antony Gormley
The ends of American photography : Robert Frank as national medium
Living color : race, stereotype, and animation in Spike Lee's Bamboozled
The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction
Showing seeing : a critique of visual culture