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This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to "all of us". One key figure these practices bring into play-the "everybody" (which stands for "all of us" and is sometimes a "new man" or a "new woman")-is discussed in an interdisciplinary way involving scholars from several European countries. A key aspect is how popularisation and communication practices-which can assume populist forms-operate in contemporary democracies and where their genealogies lie. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. on the ways in which visual creations can evoke desire as well as hatred.
List of contents
Introduction
[Anna Schober]
1. The Popular in Philosophy
[Marc Rölli]
2. Authority of Images: Notes on an Iconography of Everybody Figures in the Visual Arts
[Anna Schober]
3. Not just everybody? On past and future attempts to visualise the people in democratic societies
[Wim Weymans]
4. The Ambivalences of Popularisation: The Theory and Practice of the Audience in Visual Art
[Eva Kernbauer]
5. Attraction and Efficacy: Spectacle as Critical Practice in Contemporary Art
[Elisabeth Fritz]
6. The Mask and the Narcissistic Wound: An Anthropological Perspective on Nationalist Leadership
[Lynda Dematteo]
7. Composite Faces: Photographic Constructions of Human Faces between Average and Type
[Raul Gschrey]
8. Duane Hanson's Sculptures of American Everyday Life
[Viola Rühse]
9. Change of Scale: Film Between the Big and the Small Screen
[Martine Beugnet]
10. Estranging the Everyday. On the Creativity of Ordinariness
[Veronika Zink]
11. A Deleuzian Perspective on the Everybody between Visual Culture and recent Protest Movements
[Nina Bandi]
12. Contagion Images: The Affect of Queering the Social through Digital Memes
[Elena Pilipets]
About the author
Anna Schober is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Cultural Analysis at Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria.
Summary
This book examines the iconic figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics in which visual art and visual popular culture attempt to appeal to "all of us," with interdisciplinary contributions from the fields of art history, film and media studies, philosophy, anthropology, and political theory.
Report
"All chapters of the book amount to an impression of a surprisingly consistent sum of articulations, which do provide new insights into the book's enormously challenging subject matter. Therefore, the book sets up a new benchmark of dealing with the urgently needed sharpening of knowledge and understanding of its topics and problems."
--Visual Studies
