Sunday 18 December 2011

Task 3 : Essay Proposal


How do counterfeits affect society and the aura of big brands?


The difference between a copy, replica and imitation.
How brands sell a certain image to their audience.
How brands are associated with different social classes.
The trickle down theory within fashion and how classes imitate brands.
The demand for design commodities, and the production of counterfeits, how this affects society.
How counterfeits affect the aura of big brands.



Neil Boorman: Bonfire of the Brands/How I learnt to live without labels. (2007) Canongate books Ltd
I picked out this source purely because Neil Boorman breaks down some of the steroitype we connect with different brands and the influences they have on our life. Its quite a fun book and follows him on a trip to burn all the brands he owns, but theirs also good references to social stratification and fashion within classes.

Alison Lurie: The language of Clothes (1983) Random House Inc





Picked out this source because it talks about how clothes communicate to others and how we are assumed by others because of what we wear and the connotations our clothes have with society.

Walter Benjamin: The work of Art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936)

I want to talk about reproduction and the value behind a unique piece of work, I want to talk about how counterfeits add value to the original but at the same time take the value away.

Peter Saunders: Social Class and Stratification (1990) Routeledge


Simmel, Georg. 1957 [1904]. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology.
Very relevant for the trickle down theory.

John Storey: Cultural studies and the Study of Popular Culture (1996) E University Press

Thursday 1 December 2011

Lecture 6 : Cities & Film

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.Arguably the most paradigmatic motive (motif) of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God[8][9] in favor of the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by modernity, initiated around the turn of century by rapidly changing technology and further catalyzed by the horrific consequences of World War I on the cultural psyche of artists.

In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).

The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term "avant-garde", with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".

Details from Guaranty buildingA very ornate skyscraper, an organized and ordered environment. The supported steel structure of the building was made from terracotta blocks, divided into 3 sections bottom to top by alternating brick colour.


Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago 1904Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business and opportunity.




Fordism:Mechanised labour relations

-Coined by Antonio Gtmascie in his essay "Americanism and Fordism"

-The eponymous manufacturing system was designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford workers decent enough wages to buy them. De Grazia 2005. p. 4

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin