What Do Pictures Want?

by Mitchell, W. J. T.

• ISBN13: 9780226532486
• ISBN10: 0226532488
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheepwho, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living imageand the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike.

Author Biography

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of several books, including Picture Theory, Iconology, and Landscape and Power, published by he University of Chicago Press. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Preface	xiii
Acknowledgments	xix
PART ONE: IMAGES
1. Vital Signs I Cloning Terror	5	(23)
2. What Do Pictures Want?	28	(29)
3. Drawing Desire	57	(19)
4. The Surplus Value of Images	76	(35)
PART TWO: OBJECTS
5. Founding Objects	111	(14)
6. Offending Images	125	(20)
7. Empire and Objecthood	145	(24)
8. Romanticism and the Life of Things	169	(19)
9. Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry	188
PART THREE: MEDIA
10. Addressing Media	201	(21)
11. Abstraction and Intimacy	222	(23)
12. What Sculpture Wants: Placing Antony Gormley	245	(27)
13. The Ends of American Photography: Robert Frank as National Medium	272	(22)
14. Living Color: Race, Stereotype, and Animation in Spike Lee's Bamboozled	294	(15)
15. The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction	309	(27)
16. Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture	336	(21)
Index	357