Image Era Of Aesthetic Criticism

The present-day society has entered a new period--the Age of the Picture and aesthetics has shown two characteristics: truth is usurped by virtuality and desire is mistaken for sensibility. It is due to these two characteristics that aesthetics has become the tool for more business profits, ideology and immoral behavior. People who take advantage of aesthetics for their won purposes have the two tricks: counterfeit and lechery. The former refers to the massive multiplication of the simulacrum while the latter refers to the uncontrolled desires. Only when we stick to the principles that truth is given a priority and desire is surpassed can aesthetics get on the right track.The preface of this dissertation attempts to seek the reasons for the crisis of Literature from inside the literature and aesthetic dimensions and finds fiction and make-up are the major causes. Besides, pictorial culture which is a substitute for literature as a dominant culture type faces the same threat. And unfounded simulacrum and thus resulting desire aesthetics are making aesthetics in the Age of the Picture a tool for gaining business profits and implementing ideology and an excuse for the lack of mores. The first chapter expounds "pictorial turn" diachronically and synchronically and finds the aesthetic views in the contrast between traditional and modern aesthetic views: virtuality and desire, which will be criticized later. The second chapter illustrates the collusive relations between aesthetic views and economy. It reveals how advertisements are used for sales promotion, explains how cultural economy works and explores the ways electronic games are used to make money. The third chapter mainly focuses on the relations between the aesthetic views and ideology. Influenced by the aesthetic views, instinctive impuises and human desires have changed from iiberation forces of the aesthetics into new-style ideological tool. Pictures have therefore, become a kind of power and thus arises commodity fetishes. Cultural hegemony begins to invade as people lose their rationality and historical sense. The forth chapter lists the harms done to morality by these aesthetic views. They confuse aesthetic appreciation of virtuality and reality makes humanity and desires completely show its nakedness and selfishness, reverses the pleasure principle the reality principle and eventually leads people to step over the moral boundary in individual revelry. In this case, violence and love are no more than thorough a pleasant feeling. The fifth chapter ponders over Heidegger's assertion "the world is grasped as pictures" and clarifies the puzzling relations between virtuality and reality and distinguishes two concepts self-as-subject and self-as-desire. Finally the dissertation concludes that in the age of the picture reality, instead of simulacrum, should be given a priority; only if human subjectivity is strengthened can pictorial media really become "extensions of man".