An Introduction to Visual Culture

This book is a wide-ranging and stimulating introduction to the history and theory of visual culture from painting to the computer and television screen. It will be useful to students of art and art history as well as students of cultural studies. Mirzoeff begins by defining what visual culture is, and explores how and why visual media — fine art, cinema, the Internet, advertising, performance, photography, television — have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He argues that the visual is replacing the linguistic as our primary means of communicating with each other and of understanding our postmodern world.