The Judith Lee Stronach Center,
Schermerhorn Hall, 8th Floor
The Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society
In contemporary society, advertising can be regarded as the sphere where images assume a normative power: images possess not only a cognitive or aesthetic function, but also produce an effect on the customs of a given society and influence its way of life. But how does an image embody a normative power? And what becomes of a norm, once it operates by way of images instead of language?
This lecture by Emanuele Coccia will focus on that peculiar moment in the history of advertising when advertising images ceased to be still-life representations of a commodity (focused on the act of purchasing) and instead became representations of a form of life. The lecture will describe the history of this shift from the point of view of the history of marketing and the history of fashion photography.
Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and currently Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. A book on the media and senses came out this year: Sensible Life. A Micro-Ontology of The Image (Fordham University Press 2016, translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian). Among his other publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).
Photo credit: Danielle Dean, ‘True Red, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
