Aesthetic Weakening

The birth of visual culture signifies the diversity of human art which is traditionally communicated by means of printing. Owing to the prosperity of mass media and the upgrading of digital technology, people have easier access to the wide variety of excellent visual art works around the world. The popularization of artistic works brings people's aesthetic faculties to a high level, but at the same time, the pervasion of visual images seems to be weakening people's artistic taste by providing them with too many choices. Unlike traditional visual art works which deserve appreciation and digestion, the miscellaneous visual images that surround us now are simply aimed at making immediate visual impacts on the audience. Besides arousing all kinds of feelings and emotions such as curiosity, admiration, awe, horror and lust among the public, new media are changing the traditional way of reading into an even faster but more superficial and meaningless one.This thesis begins with an introduction to the history of cultural studies and continues to differentiate the definition of visual culture from that of visual arts. Chapter Two analyzes the features of contemporary visual images and gives the reasons why traditional visual aesthetics is losing ground in modern times. In Chapter Three the author points out the generalization of visual cultural studies and calls attention to the quality of modern visual images and the significance of aesthetic values.