Visual Culture Research In The Context Of Consumer Society

This is an era in which people show unprecedented enthusiasm for "visual sense". With the more and more opulent life material and the rapid development of technology and communication media, people have been used to perceiving the change and richness of the world with visual sense. Since the visual culture is visualized, high-speed, and varied, it pushes the modern culture into the trend of development with which the written languages replaced by the visual images. And every aspect of culture tends to manifest itself by the way of high visualization though some cultures do not have such conditions. The ubiquitous visual images stimulate a person to be avid for material gain unlimitedly, which has made the "eyeball economy" prosperous. The consuming era produces the visual culture, and makes the consuming society prosperous. While, the visualized images please eyeball, it also gradually empties people's mind. And with the mind are more empty, people more long for being full by visualizing. Consequently, people cannot express themselves properly though they have to gorge on the visual images. Thus, the human beings will finally lose themselves in the siege of images.Nowadays, the spiritual appeals of the beauty are to break the siege, return to the natural visual impulsion, alleviate the visual fatigue and give back the visual freedom. Let all the essence of art be accumulated and precipitated by"seeing"and "thinking" in the way of trying to keep certain distance with the visual object and face with the aesthetic object with more contemplation.This thesis consists of five chapters. The introductory part outlines the process the development of the visual culture, the statement and the dilemma; and briefly introduces the present research at home and abroad. The domestic researches of visual cultural mainly benefit from western theories thus they have few of vivid individual cases, as a result of which it's inevitable for the research of visual culture to be on the shelf. Consequently, the occurrence seems of great importance. The first chapter mainly expounds three basic concepts:culture, visual sense, and visual culture; and then demonstrates inner possibility and necessity of the production and conversion of the visual cultural to clarify the relationship among the three concepts. The second chapter analyzes the historical conversion of the visual paradigm from the longitudinal angle. The theoretical paradigm of visual culture experienced a conversion process—from imitation to mechanically copying to simulacrum, symbolizing characteristic features of culture has been conversed and produced and also the thinking pattern. At present, most of time it's the visual images which perceives us human beings, not the converse of that, for the visual concept experience has oppressed human's visual sense. And the visual concept experience is from rational, centralized and orderly to perceptual, fragment and non-centre.The nucleus of this thesis is the third and forth parts. The third chapter takes the visual culture into consideration by put it into the context of consuming era. Human being who is in an environment that is controlled by the consumption has become the most loyalty servant for the material. And the legend of consumption is coming on the stage shockingly in the form of visual culture. Furthermore, the consuming society is a hotbed of visual culture. And the form of "visual consumption" is to connect the visual culture with the consuming society. As a result, the content of consume includes not only "what to look", but also "how to look", even "look" itself. So the image age has arrived because of the catalyst of consume. The visual culture's numerous characteristics such as:visualization, commercialization, popularization, virtualization, the trend of lust and collage intersexuality have made itself multivariate and complication. The previous characteristics of the age are rightly to provide the rich materials for research. The forth chapter chooses the hot spots from the following four aspects:body, vogue, travel and film to analyze the individual cases. The release of the lust for "look" of the visual culture makes the human body more and more important in the context of consuming society, especially the advertisement which has played the bareness and awakening of body to the extreme. The existence of vogue has to rely on its characteristic of being visual. The vogue seems of greater charming when vogue associated with visual images. Thus consumers'aesthetic taste is embodied in the process of being zealous for fashion, which will influence the existence of visual culture's characteristic features by the taste's level. Sometimes, a piece of photo could remind people of visual memory such as the human landscape or natural scenery which has been stored in the photo by the means of fragments. And such kind of fragments surely will make human being's explanations of the images'deeper meaning missed. Film, especially the spectacle-film brings the visual shocks to people since it appeared. It has instigated the mind to give way to eyes, aesthetics to delight, and mediation to the shocking of sense.While, the phenomenon mentioned above cannot be ended with the appearance of non-visual cultural incident. So the fifth chapter mainly focuses on the visual culture's dilemmas of the time and its methods to get over them. And there are many dilemmas, for example:the generalization of appreciation the images make visual sense content; Kuso and collage are often hired by Art to manifest it; the visual sense tends to make the world a global village; the meditation of a written language read replaced by the image reading which form the shallow-reading, consequently, the charm of written language would gradually be covered with dust; owing to the virtual world, people is far from communicating with others as they please, but forced into the 14-inch space; human beings are gradually disorientated in the illusion that people are in an environment where material is abundant but the ravine in our heart continues to be filled with various desires. The lost people begin to find solutions. The conclusion cannot solve the dilemma that visual culture and consuming society coexist with each other, but intend to answer the question of how to surmount many difficulties of visual culture.