a visual dimension underlying better-known picture theories

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Visual Studies
Kevin G. Barnhurst University of Illinois at Chicago kgbcomm@uic.edu
Abstract
Formal theories
reveal a visual dimension underlying better-known picture theories. Patterns of elements such as lines, shapes, and spaces, along with their properties, generate emotional responses and follow visual styles in society. The elements combine into systems that create perspectives on the world. Formal awareness may generate an understanding of visual philosophies and their inherent values and consequences.
Picture theories
start from the tension between scientific invention and artistic expression. From linguistics and philosophy, semiotics provides terms for analyzing pictures as signs that mediate among mind, eye, and reality, operate within codes, and reproduce mythology. From film and literary aesthetics, narrative theory offers analytical structures that reproduce realism through supposed objectivity, rationality, and autonomy in dialogue with conventions and genres. Critical, cultural, and poststructural theories assert the inauthenticity of pictures, social construction of representation, and instability of meaning. Visual aesthetics, analysis, criticism, and ethics have entered flux in digital times.
Keywords.
Aesthetics; Critical theory; Cultural studies; Design; Film/cinema studies; Literary studies; Narrative; Realism; Signs; Social construction of reality
Citation.
Barnhurst, Kevin G. “Visual Theory.”
International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.
Ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen