특집1 : 미술사와 시각문화의 정체성 = The Past, Present, and Future of Visual Culture

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The term ``visual culture`` has gained wide currency in recent years, In con-junction with the emergence of post-colonial and trans-cultural studies in humanities since the 1990s, visual culture has become the subject of vigor-ous debate and often a term of abuse and misunderstanding, Numerious books have been published which bear ``visual culture`` somewhere in their title pages, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that visual culture studies have generated a lucrative cottage industry of its own. Despite all the glam-our and lustre surrounding visual culture however, the concept of visual culture is still much in disarray: the questions of what visual culture is, where it came from, and where it is going are all subject to different inter-pretations making the study of it more exciting to some, and frustrating to others, a one yet seems to be certain whether it is a cultural phenomenon or a new field of research, or an emerging discipline. In parricular, its vexed relationship to art history, old or new, remains unsettled, This article aims to provide a simplitled trajectory the often confusing and confused dis-courses on visual culture have taken, witha view to exposing some myths and misunderstandings about visual culture in relation to art history, lndeed the term visual culture was first employed in 1982 by the American art histo-rian Svetlana Alpers, who in turn hinted that she had owed it to the British art historian Michael Baxandall. It is apparent that by visual culture they meant to suggest a wider context of interpretations for past paintings than purely pictorial. By the early 1990s, however, the connotations and denota-tions of visual culture underwent a radical transformation, incorporating a range of contemporary visual media not just in art but in popular culture such as television, commercial advertisement, and the internet. Explaining and analyzing major arguments for and against visual culture, this essay concludes that the identity of visual culture is inextricably intertwined with that of rt history and the future of visual culture studies is prone to be determined not by academic excellence but by academic politics.