“Kant believed that pure beauty could be found in nature and art, and that it is universal rather than specific to particular cultural or individual codes.”(48) == the Golden Ratio? The scientific definition of beauty but found repetitively in nature. 

Right away, I agree with this chapter’s message. It’s (better articulated than) my response to the ‘Nameless Feeling’ article: meaning comes from the viewer’s context and experience. “Institutions like museums function not only to educate people about the history of art, but to instill in them a sense of what is tasteful and what is not, what is “real” art and what is not.”(49) Growing up this was my one complaint of art museums. Many of the works I see in museums are pretty but so very uninteresting to myself. Graffiti, tattoos, unique(often repurposed or repaired) architecture, etc, that’s the art I’ve always found most interesting. Vincent van Gogh is my favorite artist, partly because I enjoy his technique but also because he was my first real inspiration. I know that in his own time, people found my muse to be tasteless and uninteresting… That juxtaposition feels surreal to me. But as this chapter states- culture and context!

// I need to read Bourdieu’s work. His ideas around class/taste sound *very* agreeable

//blending high and low art styles – which is my favorite

I am now uncomfortable with the amount of times I’ve said “that makes sense” in response to Karl Marx. His view on ideology was more focused on capitalism, but ‘false consciousness’ is how I’ve viewed many new social waves over the years. Louis Althusser believed ideology was more about how we interpret the world. “[It] represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”(52, Althusser)  He believed ideology was necessary to process life, based in psychoanalysis rather than consumption.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, to me at least, sounded very much like how I view the current social climate. “Hegemony is a state or condition of a culture arrived at through a negation or struggle over meanings, laws, and social relationships.”(54) One major ideology is too exclusive and allows too many exceptions to fall through the cracks. On the other end of this, not every minor wave or social cause is truly beneficial to society as a whole. Some are just as neglectful or harmful as the ‘big bad’ they fight against. The world is complex, and no one perspective can include every possibility.

In the section on encoding and decoding(57)  I kept relating it to fanfiction. I was thinking that I don’t know any writers who truly take in material without wanting any changes, just as the chapter moves on to negotiation and opposition. Trading is pretty literal with fanfiction, as writers take in a piece of media and then exchange environment/dialogue/character designs with another media. This makes it more enjoyable to some, but it also often comes with a different resolution or moral than the original piece.