Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn

THIS IS an odd book. It comprises an introduction, two long chapters: ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, and ‘Institutions and Pedagogy’; and then brief ‘Concluding Remarks’. Appended to these are seventeen interviews conducted by Dikovitskaya with luminaries in the field of visual culture. As such ‘Theoretical Frameworks’ sets out the broad structure within which visual culture incorporates other disciplinary methodologies; whilst ‘Institutions and Pedagogy’ charts the history and emergence of visual culture in the universities, listing, along the way, doctoral theses of the new radical scholars. Dikovitskaya, aware of the raw nerves that have been exposed in the surfacing of the new interdisciplinary work with which she is engaged, treads carefully around the territory of art history. Aesthetics gets mentioned in the first chapter of the book but without much exploration of what the aesthetics of the visual arts is or ought to be. Although the author is clear about the ideological commitments of those who have established and developed visual culture, there is no developed attempt to pull into focus the relationship between visual culture and aesthetics.