Visual culture has always been a major part of art. The first cave paintings depicted scenes of life, hunting, or burial. Then ancient authors and medieval icon painters showed Greek and Roman gods or Christian saints on canvases: Jesus, Madonna, and apostles. Since the Renaissance, artists have focused on portraits, landscapes, and other non-religious subjects. Modern visual culture gives us animation, comics, and feature films with a high degree of realism. Artistic works have a rather high impact on people, including their mentality and perception of the world. Some people are even more attracted to artificial images than the real world. This essay discusses possible reasons why visual works have such an impact on certain social groups.
The first possible reason for such high sensitivity of certain people to visual images is seeing themselves in them and identifying themselves with them. The world depicted by an artist may have a certain level of realism because it was created by a real person, not an artificial intelligence without emotions and personal experience. Most likely, everyone, watching their favorite TV series, reading comics, and analyzing the historical plot in the picture, singled out characters similar to them in real life. If these features are positive, a person begins to feel a stronger emotional connection with the work, to transfer certain moments of real personal life to the projection of the depicted. Therefore, it is possible to think what the observer would do, being in the place of the hero, who is similar to him in some aspects of character or outlook on life. Because of this, a person forms a stronger connection with the whole picture or its element than other viewers.
A more direct way of understanding is also the reason for the formation of a strong emotional connection between a person and a certain work of visual culture. It is useful to analyze this case in the example of a movie. If someone liked a certain film, then such a person seeks to understand better what is happening to the characters in the plot created by the director and screenwriter. It causes a high level of immersion in the events on the screen. This situation is called the fourth wall destruction among film critics and authors. The viewer finds himself next to the heroes of his favorite film and begins to understand deeper the motivation and characters of the main characters, forming a stable emotional contact with the image.
People often use visual art to escape from reality, and scientists call this process escapism. Escapism can be different, and people can take drugs and alcohol. From the point of view of health, deep immersion in watching movies, TV series, and computer games are a safer subspecies of escape from reality. In this case, a person may have certain problems in real life but does not know how to solve them, so they decide to fence off them with a virtual wall. Often works of visual art that bring pleasant emotions help a person to create a certain comfort zone. However, we must remember that such a zone is quite imaginary and often does not help a person get the peace of mind that can come after solving life’s difficulties. At the same time, when the viewer stays in the artificial image shell for a long time, he forms a close emotional connection with it.
In this context, it is also useful to mention the nostalgia that sometimes arises in everyone who encounters visual works. Certain subjects evoke pleasant memories that have remained for a person in the past, but they would like them to return in some form. The image is projected onto a person’s real life, creating the appearance of the return of past situations and events. If someone cannot fully work through life experience, to leave the past in the past, such plots from movies or TV series can cause nostalgia and strongly attach to themselves. Social networks, such as Instagram, are also a place of pilgrimage for escapists, as they allow web surfers to live the lives of others away from them (Kırcaburun et al. 6). It is important to clarify that such situations can be harmful, not allowing the viewer to live a full and happy life in the local reality.
The last interesting or specific situation is the desire of the one who contemplates the picture to be a visual student of its author. In art schools, young students are tasked by their teachers to redraw a world-famous masterpiece as accurately as possible. In this task, the young artist needs to analyze the ideas, ideas and artistic techniques of the author of the picture. When a copy of a famous work is created, an integral emotional shell can be formed for the student who completes it, connecting him with his work and the sample for the scientific task. Thus, people begin to look at art from a different perspective and use someone else’s useful experience to improve their artistic skills.
Ultimately, it is necessary to conclude that visual culture is always important for a person in this world. The works of artists and icon painters are a source of depicting the history of humanity, a monument to outstanding events and characters. Quality paintings, films, TV series, and comics influence people, motivate them and improve their mood. Everyone has something from the field of visual culture that inspired them to do something good. For certain social groups, the built emotional connection is closed. This essay explored the reasons for this strange phenomenon.
Works Cited
Kırcaburun, Kagan, and Mark D. Griffiths. “Problematic Instagram use: The role of perceived feeling of presence and escapism.” International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction 17.4 (2019): 909-921.