| Popular Culture is a significant academic subject in the 20th century, on which there is no fixed conclusion yet. Since long time ago, they have been likely to be denied simply for their eye-catching shortcomings.From my point of view, its characteristics of commodity, technology andentertainment are its inherent law-with commodity characteristicsbeing its prerequisite, technology its carrier and entertainment its center. The shortcoming of this culture doesn't lie in its own natural flaws, but in the offside of its own commodity, technology and entertainment characteristics.Popular culture does contain commercial property, but it doesn't equal to commodity in this way, art activities can't be fully put into commercial exchange range, nor can benefit, profit and money be considered as the center of art. The introduction and application of technology in popular culture show the victory of human being toward technology but not "Merely" technology, letting technology surpass culture. As a pole of contemporary art, popular culture may not focus on its eternal value, but it can't depart from it, nor can it slander it. To our disappointment, this phenomenon is very common in the misunderstanding of popular culture.Furthermore, from the very beginning of popular culture, it developed with Mass Medium together. The successful association of the two produces an immense effect on the development and transferring of society and culture, especially the popularity of the popular culture leading to a kind of visual culture, which benefits from the further development of mass medium. Medium provides a strong technical support for popular culture, while popular culture fully shows the titanic advantage of medium. Goadedby the common interest, the two cooperate. Thanks to medium, man's visual imagination and space searching range greatly expand, so the possibility of combination, variation, and recondition of visual figure immensely improves, providing more opportunity for visual creation of popular culture. Visual culture has almost become a synonym of popular culture since the Second World War (especially in 70's). "Contemporary culture is becoming into a kind of visual culture, but not a publishing one," which is a global cultural scene. Contemporary culture composed of visual symbols is not the process from subject to image, but from image to subject, with the attractiveness and delight of visual sense being mostly showed. This visual carnival greatly stimulates the audience's desire, and people's requirement of visual expectation and delight has been continuously improved. Visual culture has already transformed the man-made visual symbols into our basic range of recognition, while natural object and real object withdraw to the second line. If image is related to creation, the appearance of visual image is related to copy. On one hand, visual image finishes the noble monopolization of image towards aesthetics, incarnating man's effort to make aesthetics close to reality, discovering some aspects man can't discover or neglect before; on the other hand, this brings about new confusion for human beings. The imagined world begins to replace real world, visual image becomes a kind of "super reality". At the same time, visual image produces attacks towards traditional aesthetic images: in traditional literature, image is a system of profound model of meaning expressing, but visual image obeys the principle of destroying depth and demolishing meaning. The formation of traditional aesthetic image is based on the principle of subject, which is a personal process, while the formation of visual image is based on the principle of technology, which is a non-personal process.While evaluating popular culture, we should put it into the historicaltransferring process of Chinese society. Its vigorous growth is the manifestation of the high development of secular spirits in Chinese special environment with its reasonable and unavoidable contents. Meanwhile, we should be aware that the commercial and consuming characteri...
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