Visual Culture and Art Theory

Visual culture and art theory examines how images, objects, and performances produce meaning across different media, historical periods, and sensory registers — asking not just what art represents, but how visual experience shapes knowledge, identity, and power. Drawing on art history, semiotics, media studies, and cultural theory, researchers investigate phenomena ranging from Renaissance painting to digital photography, tracing how the "iconic turn" in the humanities has shifted attention from texts to images as primary sites of cultural analysis. Active debates center on intermediality — the way meaning migrates and transforms as it moves between image, text, sound, and performance — as well as the practice of ekphrasis, in which one medium attempts to describe or enact another. Open questions include how sensory and embodied experience resists purely semiotic accounts of vision, and how globalization is reshaping whose visual traditions count as the baseline for theoretical frameworks.

Works

52,010

Total citations

199,822

Keywords

Visual CultureIntermedialityEkphrasisIconic TurnMedia StudiesSensory Studies