the "Wow" Fasination

I completely agree with Caitlin, I am ashamed to say it, but if I see someone like Penelope Cruz using some type of beauty product I want to have it with some outlandish fascination that I will put it on and look like her. I have to wonder though that if advertisers used real people (not people like Dove is trying to use) but real people that you would interact with in their ads if people would feel this unnecessary burden to look/act/be a certain way. I also wonder if that would affect sales, but what would happen if advertisements did use this method? Do you think there would be a difference in self-esteem, especially in teenagers? Or do you think the economy would be better because there wouldn’t be that “wow” factor in the models and that desire and belief of I must have it! may not be there.

Male gaze in art

I have also noticed how, even though men were the first portrayed nude in art, nude women are far more common. I noticed this especially around the Renaissance or 1500s, when art (especially paintings) were more realistic. Paintings such as Venus with a Mirror, Venus and Cupid, Sleeping Venus, the Three Graces, Birth of Venus, and so on all feature nude women. The artists who painted these great works were men: therefore their view, or "gaze," was biased towards women. They painted women because their view towards them was one of beauty because that is what their human instincts tell them to appreciate. This trend of nude women in art has shaped our society today. For instance, the Seinfeld clip below, the Mardi Gras tradition of flashing, and the skimpy clothes that girls wear are all areas of nudity or something along the lines of it that are socially acceptable for women but not for men.

Myth of Photography

In Chapter one, I found the reading on “The Myth of Photographic Truth” pretty interesting. When mentioning the philosophy of positivism and how the use of machines to capture a moment or represent a frame of time were regarded as more reliable than a painting or sketch done by human hand, I had a hard time applying it for today’s world. Granted, this description was formulated in the mid- 19th century when today’s technology was not in existence, but it stated that “a photograph is often perceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world, a trace of reality skimmed off the very surface of live, and evidence of real”, however in today’s world, you can rarely look at a professional photograph that has not be altered in some way. If you checkout this youtube video you can see how easy it is for today’s technology to alter a simple photograph. So, how much of what we really look at in our magazines and television ads are real, and how much are altered in order to appease what we want to see as reality? So when the book defines “myth” as a “hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings are made to seem universal and given to the whole society”, I have to apply it to how people and advertising agencies use the magic of photo shop and all the other fancy gadgets they utilize to create an image of beauty, in this particular case, that influences our society.