What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of ImagesWhy 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 Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and 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. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum |
Contents
1 Vital Signs Cloning Terror | 5 |
2 What Do Pictures Want? | 28 |
3 Drawing Desire | 57 |
4 The Surplus Value of Images | 76 |
5 Founding Objects | 111 |
6 Offending Images | 125 |
7 Empire and Objecthood | 145 |
8 Romanticism and the Life of Things | 169 |
10 Addressing Media | 201 |
11 Abstraction and Intimacy | 222 |
12 What Sculpture Wants | 245 |
13 The Ends of American Photography | 272 |
14 Living Color | 294 |
15 The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction | 309 |
16 Showing Seeing | 336 |
| 357 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abstract painting aesthetics American animal Antony Gormley art history artist become beholder biocybernetic blackface body called chapter Chicago Press cinema cloning concept contemporary Courtesy critical critique desire dialectical dinosaur discourse discussion Émile Durkheim empire essay fantasy fetishism figure film fossil found object Freud Gallery gesture golden calf Gormley’s historian human icon iconoclasm Iconology idolatry idols imperial Jacques Lacan kind Lacan language life-forms living material McLuhan mean media studies medium metaphor modern modernist Museum natural notion objecthood offending images organisms perhaps photographic pictorial Picture Theory pictures want play political produce question relation representation reproduction ritual Robert Frank role Romanticism scene sculpture seems semiotic sense social space specific status stereotype symbolic television things tion totem traditional trans ture turn University of Chicago University Press Videodrome vision visual culture visual studies W. J. T. Mitchell William Blake words York Žižek