Visual Culture and Art Theory

Visual culture and art theory examine how images, objects, and performances produce and circulate meaning across different media, historical periods, and social contexts—going well beyond asking whether art is beautiful to ask what it does and how it works. Scholars draw on art history, semiotics, media studies, and sensory research to trace the ways visual forms shape perception, identity, and power, treating everything from Renaissance painting to smartphone photography as legitimate objects of inquiry. A central concern today is intermediality: how meaning shifts when content moves between painting, text, film, or digital platforms, and what gets gained or lost in those translations. Active debates surround the so-called iconic turn—the argument that images operate according to their own logic rather than functioning simply as illustrations of language—and researchers continue to push at the edges of sensory studies, asking how vision itself is culturally trained rather than merely biological.

Works

52,271

Total citations

200,737

Keywords

Visual CultureIntermedialityEkphrasisIconic TurnMedia StudiesSensory Studies