[ebooks] Mediated Youth Cultures: The Internet; Belonging and New Cultural Configurations by From Palgrave Macmillan in Arts-Photography

Description

The artists of the seventeenth-century baroque period used spectacle to delight and astonish; contemporary entertainment media; according to Angela Ndalianis; are imbued with a neo-baroque aesthetic that is similarly spectacular. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment; she situates todays film; computer games; comic books; and theme-park attractions within an aesthetic-historical context and uses the baroque as a framework to enrich our understanding of contemporary entertainment media.The neo-baroque aesthetics that Ndalianis analyzes are not; she argues; a case of art history repeating or imitating itself; these forms have emerged as a result of recent technological and economic transformations. The neo-baroque forms combine sight and sound and text in ways that parallel such seventeenth-century baroque forms as magic lanterns; automata; painting; sculpture; and theater but use new technology to express the concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Moving smoothly from century to century; comparing ceiling paintings to the computer game Doom; a Spiderman theme park adventure to the baroque version of multimedia known as the Bel Composto; and a Medici wedding to Terminator 2:3D; the book demonstrates the logic of media histories. Ndalianis focuses on the complex interrelationships among entertainment media and presents a rigorous cross-genre; cross-historical analysis of media aesthetics.