Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (The MIT Press)

Everyone recognizes that this is a time of visual culture, extraordinarily and in many ways excessively so. The phrase is routinely, and casually, used by many in the media, arts, and even academia. However, there is little comprehension, understanding, or agreement on what this visual culture really is either in terms of a concept or an experience. Dikovitsky steps back from this common use of the term visual culture to try to define and comprehend it by exploring "the history, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and pedagogy of visual culture in the United States." She does this mostly by interviews with college professors in fields ranging from art, film studies, and cultural studies to literature which in one way or another take into account the pronounced and often dominating or suppressive nature of the visual in modern culture. The word "study" in the subtitle connotes not so much Dikovitskaya's study of visual culture--although this is inevitably inherent--as it does the author's chosen task to report how visual culture is being studied mostly in the universities; and along with this answer the question of how it is to be studied so it is understood properly. Without a proper understanding of visual culture, contemporary society cannot be understood properly; contemporary society is a mystery. While not defining visual culture definitively, if this can ever be done, Dikovitskaya's exploration, framing of issues, and probing interviews bring the sprawling, elusive, omnipresent presence and idea of visual culture into clearer focus. Dikovitskaya is a research fellow at the Library of Congress.

Dikovitskaya does a dutiful job describing the merger of art history and culture studies into the field of visual culture theory. Her first two chapters provide a wonderful survey of current trends in visual culture, and the emerging pedagogy of the field. Her appendices are what really make the book worthwhile, however. Interviews with the best known scholars in the field, such as Douglas Crimp and Nicholas Mirzoeff, make this book stand out as a valuable primer to any student of culture theory and/or art history.