A General Theory of Visual Culture

(Paperback)

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What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolid

Reviews

Winner of the 2012 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association "Along with David Summers's Real Spaces, Whitney Davis's General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades... As conceptual reorganization of art history's fundamental terms of engagement with objects, the book is exemplary, and it is difficult to imagine a reader who is engaged with the discipline for whom this book is optional reading."--Jim Elkins, CAA Reviews "[Q]uirky and ambitious."--Choice "Davis's project to develop a general theory of visual culture is a necessary and urgent one."--Derval Tubridy, Visual Culture "[A] magnificent book. This is an ambitious and fascinating work, one that offers a novel perspective on the intertwined projects of art history and visual culture. The sheer scope of the book and the detailed, methodical argument are simply too broad and too detailed to adequately summarize here."--Brian Kane, Art Bulletin

Author Bio

Whitney Davis is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, most recently Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis and Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond.