The Visual Culture Reader [Paperback]

Nicholas Mirzoeff (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415141346 | ISBN-13: 978-0415141345 | Publication Date: December 24, 1998 | Edition: 1st

Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in the encounter with visual artefacts, from oil paintings to the internet. The diverse essays collected here constitute a comprehensive exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a first rate collection covering the range and the depth of critical visual studies today. An essential guide for anyone concerned with the power of the image and the image of power." McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, USA

"This 3rd edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Visual Culture Reader is unrecognizable from the collection’s first edition published way back in the last millennium. Its content, character, and urgency are invigorating and galvanizing. If the Reader’s first edition gave shape to Visual Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, this 3rd edition will, I believe, mould visual culture itself." Marquard Smith, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture & Director of Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, UK

"With this volume, Mirzoeff has assembled an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners of visual culture across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Combining foundational texts and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, the Third Edition of the VCR charts the emergence of critical visuality studies and brings the field into the twenty-first century." A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester, USA

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Associate Professor of Art and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (Routledge, 1995).

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1st edition (December 24, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415141346
• ISBN-13: 978-0415141345
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,337,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good if a bit Dated and Trite Reader, February 19, 2009

By 

Daniel Lobo (Washington, DC More often than not.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Visual Culture Reader (Paperback)

"The Visual Culture Reader" is a good introduction to some of the issues touched on visual and cultural studies, highlighting the most common areas of scholar work developed in the last decades, which is part of the framing of visual culture as a body of study. The volume is an updated second edition from 2002 after an original edition from 98. While the update is cogent with the date of its publication, some items have not aged terribly well, in particular those regarding digital theorization, new media and changes in communication experienced since the publication. Nevertheless, this is a relatively small part of the book and the rest of the selection, while very diverse in quality and breadth, still offer a solid outlook into some aspects of visual culture theory.

However the volume feels less authoritative, or comprehensive in its scope than what it might aim to project, at least not so much in the selected material itself but the gaps in areas, such as contemporary art, urban development, or social equity to name but a few, as they relate to visual culture that do not seem adequately covered. Likewise, the topics selected are ,while somewhat logical, a bit trite and predictable as some of the most recurring topics observed in this area of research. And with some exceptions often rather than sensing that one is faced by a selection of essential samplings of currents of research and thought withing the different topics, one feels to be reading random - if often interesting - research and analysis in those areas but not the pivotal texts that a reader might be expected to offer.
But in a way the breadth and nature of this selection, also becomes an asset in actually illustrating recurring patterns, musings, and doubts around the systematic and difficult framing of visual culture.

The interplay of "visual culture" alongside or vs. "cultural studies" is not very well resolved in the reader, and while the explorations offered are not discardable for an introduction in the topic, for a far broader perspective, the older and generalistic readers on cultural studies, such as the one edited by Simon During, seem more relevant and less aged. It is not so much that we need a different " Visual Culture Reader" but that this one 7 years after its publication does need an update.

9 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars nice collection of important texts!, August 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Visual Culture Reader (Paperback)

indeed a very nice collection of important text into the visual culture around us