Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age

ISBN-13: 9780415907057 / Angielski / Twarda / 1994 / 256 str.

Jim Collins; Jim Collins

Opis

Much of recent theory has characterized life in media-sophisticated societies in terms of a semiotic overload with devastating effects on communication and subjectivity. In Architectures of Excess, Jim Collins argues that, while the rate of technological change has indeed accelerated, so has the rate of absorption. The seemingly endless array of information has generated not chaos but different structures and strategies which harness that excess by turning it into new forms of art and entertainment. Collins concentrates on contemporary phenomena that are also envisioning new cultural landscapes - hyper-self-reflexivity in all movies, best sellers, and prime-time television; the deconstructive vs new-classical debate in architecture; the emergence of the New Black Aesthetic; the development of retro-modernism in interior design and the fashion industries. These analyses address a cluster of interconnected questions: How is the array of information being domesticated'? How has the relationship between tradition, innovation, and evaluation been altered?

Spis treści

Introduction After the End of Early Postmodernism, The Pragmatics of Excess, Home, Home on the Array, Cultural Geography and Ethnographic Mapping,or chacun à son theme park, Taking Time, English Music and Afro-Baroque Blues, Heal Estate is Not Reality, Figurative Mapping and Speculative Subjectivity 2 Appropriating Like Crazy, From Pop Art to Meta-Pop, Mickey is Taken to the Museum, Cindy Goes to the Movies, We Won't Play Other to Your Culture 3 When the Legend Becomes Hyperconscious, Print the..., 4 Retro-Modernism Taste Cartographies in the Nineties 5 Authority, Partiality, Pedagogy

O autorze

Jim Collins is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.