Lecture 7 // Celebrity Culture

This lecture looks at: • The history of celebrity
• The relationship between photography/film/tv and celebrity
• The cultural significance of celebrities
• How contemporary identity and celebrity are
intertwined
Contemporary icons as case studies 

The Artist, 2011

Won golden globes for its portrayal of its era

Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

• Baker costumed for the Danse banane from the Folies Bergères production Un Vent de Folie in Paris in 1927 

Had a pet Cheetah which sometimes escaped into the orchestra pit.
• a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. 

Josephine Baker - American mixed heritage, found fame in france for her exotic dancing, her success coincides with the Art Deco Movement which takes influence from african art.  In the second world war she worked for the resistance, using her film and performance career.  She helped people get visas and passports to help people leave france during the war.  She has a public and private persona.  There are refs to her in contemporary popular culture, Beyonce takes inspiration from her banana skirt costume.  


Marilyn Monroe

• Actress, singer,
• Relationships with Arthur Miller and the Kennedys
• Iconic as a ‘sex symbol’
• Her death freezes this status as her image will never disintegrate 

Andy Warhol- Pop Art
• Her face becomes a mask as it is endlessly repeated in publicity, the news,
• The idea that there is a different woman underneath ie: Norma Jean Baker prevails
• Circumstances of her death seem to confirm/not confirm this simultaneously as she becomes ‘myth’ 

Making a comment about how hard it is to conceive a celebrity as anything but a celebrity.

Audrey Flack’s Marilyn (1977)
• In the tradition of the 16th/17th Century Vanitas painting where objects in the image have symbollic meaning
• Photorealism- airbrush 

Elvis Presley
• Warhol uses an image of him acting the classic American hero- the cowboy
• Blurs our vision, reminds us that the image is all we can see
• His home Graceland is a place of pilgrimage for fans, then a museum after his death 

Warhols Factory photographed by Richard Avedon (1969) 

Warhol perhaps the first person to think of turning normal people into stars by photographing them.  People on the edges of society being made into stars.

The Jacksons as a brand

• Musicians /performers
• 1971 The Jackson 5 had an animated cartoon on TV
• 1976 they star in a comedy where they act as themselves 



Michael Jackson

• The changes in Michaels appearance are interpreted as reactions to the abuse he and his family suffered at the hands of their father.
• He looks less like his father by reducing his African American features: nose, skin colour, afro hair etc. 

Study Task 3 // Panopticism

Choose an example of one aspect of contemporary culture that is, in your opinion, panoptic. Write an explanation of this, in approximately 400 words, employing key Foucauldian language, such as 'Docile Bodies' or 'self-regulation, and using not less than 5 quotes from the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan.

refer also to the lecture, 'Panopticism' (25 /10 /12), and the accompanying seminar.

The panopticon was a building providing the ultimate method of surveillance designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.  The architecture of the building meant that one supervisor could observe all the occupiers of the institution from a central tower “shut up a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.  By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery... constantly visible.”  [Panopticism, Michel Foucault]  The fact that the inmates of the panopticon were constantly being watched meant that they behaved in a way one does when they know they are being watched, unlike in old fashioned dungeons where the inmate is enveloped in darkness and could be getting up to no good.  “So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour.”  [Panopticism, Michel Foucault pg 61.]

In the modern day world, panopticism is visible in many forms.  CCTV Cameras in shops, lifts, museums, nearly everywhere, hospital wards and lecture theatres.  However a fairly new method compared to these is Social Networking.  A great example of this is the social networking site, Facebook, now with over one billion users it acts as a panopticon in the form of information sharing.  Similar to the surveillance method used for patients with the plague at the end of the seventeenth century, which Foucault talks about “a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor... this document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his conditions’”  [Michel Foucault pg 61.]  This has a lot in common with Facebook, however online people choose to share their information.  The concept of viewing someones profile, whether or not you are friends with them and having access to personal information such as name, age, where you live, current and previous job, current and previous places of study, gender, sexuality, interests and pictures acts as a panopticon in a slightly different way from Bentham's architectural design.  Instead of there being one supervisor or “watchman” everyone in the Facebook community can watch other peoples Facebook activity while they themselves may be being watched also.  A user’s presence on Facebook is “constantly visible” which results in many people creating a false representation of themselves online by only adding attractive photo’s and removing the unattractive or advertising a lifestyle they don’t truly have.

Critical Positions on Popular Culture

Critically define ‘popular culture’

• Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’

• Introduce Cultural Studies & Critical Theory

• Discuss culture as ideology

• Interrogate the social function of popular culture 

What is Culture?
• ‘One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’
• general process of intellectual, spiritual & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
• a particular way of life
• works of intellectual and especially artistic significance’ 

Marx's Concept of Base / Superstructure 

Base

forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills, etc.

relations of production - employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc

Superstructure

social institutions - legal, political, cultural
forms of consciousness - ideology *

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx, Communist Manifesto) 

We live in a capitalist society with capitalist relations.  This argues that all forms of culture are a direct reflex and are conditioned by that form of material reality.

Culture is produced by the material reality of the world

4 definitions of ‘popular’
– Well liked by many people
– Inferior kinds of work
– Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
– Culture actually made by the people themselves 

Popular Culture is inferior to real Culture

Popularism  and trying to be commercialised, popular culture made by the masses for the masses, the direct opposite of traditional culture.

Culture made by urban youth for urban youth... What happens when that gets stolen does it become culture?

Heavy industrialisation and urbanisation, a hyper development under capitalism.  Clear class divides started to emerge.  Mass factory work, very clear who the rich were and who the poor were.  Working class area's slums and ghettos and affluent area's for the upper class.  Because of this separation an autonomous separation of the working class began, a culture made by the workers for the workers which was made for profit.  Entrepreneurs started selling and making a living off things like music halls.  What occured here was not just entertainment but a tendency to talk about working class life, political experiences and this gave birth to chartism - to give working class people the vote.

"Culture is disinterested, it doesn't have politics because it's more important than that"  Seeks to minister the diseased spirit of our times

High Culture and Anarchy or High Culture and Low Culture.

Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’

‘The working class... raw and half developed... long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor... now issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an Englishmans heaven born privelige to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it is"

Mass culture represents a threat to social authority

They argued that popular culture actually maintain the ruling class, the social system that we live in.  

Frankfurt School :
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century – era of “late capitalism”
Defined “The Culture Industry” :
2 main products – homogeneity & predictability
“All mass culture is identical” :
‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten’.
‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. ... The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. ... The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle. ... film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part ... all mass culture is identical.’ 

‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own situation, it reactivates the objects produced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition... Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’ 

YCN Brief // Visual Research

Feel Good Drinks Branding:

Below is an image that came with the project pack, so it must mean that it is the most up to date branding for feel good.  It is my job to make it stand out more on the shelf and make people 'feel good.'  I intend to use the knowledge I've gained in colour theory to help the labels make people smile, while still keeping in mind the natural idea behind the brand - eg no fluorescent colours!

Pre-existing advertisements for the brand.

The branding is very natural, using muted colours and quite playful with the spots and banners and little characters.  I think it looks good and trustworthy because of this.

These are even more playful and surely will help people 'feel good,'  just the bottle that needs a little work.

Other similar brands that are out there:

Froosh, froosh seems to be a drink aimed at graphic designers but who knows, I don't want to just use typography in my designs which will then probably limit my target market.

Innocent Smoothies

Every innocent smoothie you buy with a woolly hat, 25p will be donated to Age UK.  This will definitely entice people into buying the product because the hats are quirky, fun and cute, and donating money to charity is an added bonus.

Vitamin Water has more of a medical look than the other drinks, this is something I want to avoid throughout my designs.

'This water' has simple clean and fresh packaging design however they aren't particularly outstanding on a shelf.  The small illustrations are nice but they also seem irrelevant.

Examples of Good Food/Drinks Packaging:

Designed by Yunyeen Yong, thinking outside the box here.  Interesting format and good use of colour.

Clear & Simple, not too much information on the package makes it easy on the eye.

 Interesting concept below, I want these! 

Design for Print // Design Inspiration

http://www.printeresting.org/tag/cmyk-jokes/

James Blakes CMYK EP

This release from James Blake was apparently issued in three transparent vinyl colorways, for nerds.*

Lecture 4 // Cities and Film - Helen Clarke

Handout:

Cities and Film
Helen Clarke helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk
The lecture looks as the city as represented on and in film: through both photography and in various film types (experimental silent cinema, contemporary video works, a Chaplin comedy, Film Noir and Cult Classics). In doing so it looks at the differences in the representation and theorization of urban existence in first Modernism and then Postmodernism.
This inevitably involves consideration of the body in the city. Beginning with Simmel, as the Frankfurt School do, the figure of the flaneur is explored in art, literature and in feminist theory.
To investigate or illustrate some of these ideas, the lecture offers readings of photographers like Sophie Calle, Joel Meyerwitz and Phillip Lorca di Corcia whose work can be critically investigated through theory.
Finally the lecture proposes a post Postmodern city where the body, the psyche and the city are intertwined by the threat (whether experienced or internalised) of terrorism. Lastly looking at how this may be represented through photography, film and video, the lecture considers Citizen Journalism as a visual response which democratises image making and starts to define the experience of the city.
We need to remember that photography established itself in a period when the growth of the city and industry had already provoked a formidable literature and art in response to the increasing influence of urban areas, especially cities such as London, Paris and New York. Photography takes it place in this process, but it does so in a consistently active sense, simultaneously responding to the variety and multiplicity of urban life and experience, and to the question s of how urban space was to be perceived and represented. In brief, its underlying response has been in relation to the visual complexity of a city as both an image and an experience.
(Clarke:1997: 75)

Biblography
•Cityscapes of modernity: critical explorations by David Frisby
•Art of America: Modern Dreams (2/3) Andrew Grahame Dixon BBC 4 21/11/11
•De Grazia, Victoria (2005), Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through 20th-Century Europe, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
•Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)
•Grahame Clarke (1997) The Photograph, Chapter 5 The city in photography
•http://hereisnewyork.org/
•Art in the Age of Terrorism, Terrible Beauties, Bernadette Buckley, (2005)
Fredrick Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991 


Urban Sociology

Lewis Hine (1932)  the resistance of individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social - technological mechanism.  Geor Simmel the metropolis and mental life 1903.

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856- 1924) - "Form follows function."

• creator of the modern skyscraper,
• an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
• mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright,
• Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY 
very organised, a building starts to dictate how a person uses it

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
• Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings 

Fordism: mechanised labour relations

• Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism”
• "the eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them” (De Grazia: 2005:4) 

Stock market crash of 1929

• Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
• Leads to “the Great Depression”
• Margaret Bourke-White 

Flaneur
• he term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"— which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll" 
upperclass gentleman who wanders around town and observes things leisurely.

Charles Baudelaire
• The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flâneur— that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it".
• Art should capture this
• Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd 

Walter Benjamin
• Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• (Arcades Project, 1927– 40), Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century
• Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs)

Susan Sontag On Photography

• Thephotographerisan armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55)