Page 26 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

AESTHETICS

plays a key role. Further, the globalization of communications technologies and of
television in particular has placed visual-based advertising at the centre of an
increasingly world-wide consumer culture. This, it has been argued, is a
‘promotional culture’ focused on the use of visual imagery to create value-added 3
brands or commodity-signs.
The term ‘Coca Cola culture’ encapsulates the global reach of this promotional
culture and highlights the alleged link between global capitalism, advertising and
cultural homogenization. However, the global circulation of consumer goods should
not lead us to assume that their impact is the same the world over since consumer
goods are subject to the processes of ‘localization’. That is, globalized meanings are
amended at local levels in ways that generate a variety of meanings. Similarly,
within the West, the creative consumption of symbolic culture makes the outcome
of advertising less certain than it may at first appear. The majority of commodities
launched and advertised fail, yet it is also the case that without advertising they are
unlikely to succeed in the contemporary market place.
The textual and ideological analysis of advertising within cultural studies has
stressed the selling not just of commodities but of ways of looking at the world.
Thus the job of advertising is to create an ‘identity’ for a product amid the
bombardment of competing images by associating the brand with desirable human
values. Acquiring a brand is not simply about purchasing a product, rather, it is also
concerned with buying into lifestyles and values. Thus, objects in advertisements
are signifiers of meaning that we decode in the context of known cultural systems
associating products in adverts with other cultural ‘goods’. While an image of a
particular product may denote only beans or a car, it is made to connote ‘nature’ or
‘family’. In buying commodities we emotionally invest in the associated image and
so contribute to the construction of our identities through consumption.
However, Baudrillard suggests that sign-value has replaced the use-value or
exchange-value of commodities that is central to this analysis. In his view,
consumerism is at the heart of a postmodern culture that is constituted through a
continual flow of images that establishes no connotational hierarchy and thus no
sense of value. This is said to be a culture in which no objects have an ‘essential’ or
‘deep’ value, rather, value is determined through the exchange of symbolic
meanings. That is, commodities have sign-value established through advertising
that confers prestige and signifies social value, status and power. A commodity is
not an object with use-value but a commodity-sign so that postmodern culture is
literally and metaphorically ‘superficial’.
Links Commodification, consumption, globalization, ideology, postmodernism

Aesthetics Aesthetics is a domain of philosophy concerned with questions of Art and
beauty. Traditionally, aesthetic philosophy has sought to provide universal criteria
for the definition of Art, as in the work of Kant, and as such tends towards
essentialism. An aesthetic judgement seeks to distinguish between what is Art and
what is not Art as well as between good Art and bad Art. It is thus that aesthetic
judgement underpins the drawing up of the artistic or literary canon. Aesthetic