Image & Text

Music infuses most aspects of my life.  Anything percussive drives my workouts.  Music festivals are highlights of my social calendar.  Certain voices, such as Hanna Reid's from London Grammar , serve as revelations.  Debussy is an old friend, and Sirius XMU and Alt Nation keep me company to and from campus.  I have 57 playlists in iTunes, each calibrated for a specific context or to elicit a certain emotion I'm searching for at a given moment. For all my deep commitments as a consumer of all things sonic (and my knowledge of certain musicians within a historical context), I know preciously little about music -- its vocabulary, structure, and theory -- beyond the basics.  This certainly hampers an informed discussion of music, particularly music that is foreign to my own cultural diet.  Nonetheless, as I write this post, I am listening to Pangue Lingua  ("Sing, My Tongue"), a mass (choral music usually used to accompany the eucharistic liturgy...

Patronage is derived from the Latin patronus , which means protector, advocate, benefactor.             This week we would like you to consider the role of patronage in artistic creation.  As you now know, during the Renaissance artists typically worked for a variety of patrons (wealthy merchants, craftsmen’s guilds, monastic orders and the church elite) who commissioned them to execute works of art for a variety of reasons ; sometimes multiple agendas could be served through a single commission.  For example, Giovanni Rucellai, a 15 th -century Florentine merchant, claimed he supported the arts “because they serve the glory of God, the honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself.”  Often, artistic patronage was a means to reinforce social structures fundamental to civic sustainability – loyalty to family, church, and city/state – and the populous clearly benefited from the humanistic ideals expressed thr...

Welcome to the Image & Text Blog. We will use this space to engage each other in dialog concerning class content and themes.  We will debate controversial issues, ponder the application of visual and literary culture to our distracted 21st century lives, share pertinent resources, and cultivate our skills as effective and ethical digital communicators. During the first few weeks of the semester, we (Drs. Hall and Cleworth) will set the tone for our blog conversations and establish topics.  Eventually, this task will fall to all of you -- more on that later. For your first topic this semester, we would like you to think about your "cultural diet."  When we think of a diet, we typically imagine the intake of nutrition for the sake of health.  In the same way, a "cultural diet" represents the manner in which we "consume" cultural artifacts.  You may argue that you have no interest in arts and culture, but you interface with both everyday via advert...