|
BOBC |
 |
 |
 |
|
Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2004. Added by: joachim (6/28/13, 10:03 AM) |
 |
| Resource type: Book Language: en: English ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9780262140843 BibTeX citation key: Ndalianis2004 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "Spider-Man", Intermediality, Seriality, Superhero, USA Creators: Ndalianis Publisher: MIT Press (Cambridge, London) |
Views: 28/863
|
Attachments
Table of Contents  [1/80]
|
| Abstract |
|
The artists of the seventeenth-century baroque period used spectacle to delight and astonish; contemporary entertainment media, according to Angela Ndalianis, are imbued with a neo-baroque aesthetic that is similarly spectacular. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, she situates today’s film, computer games, comic books, and theme-park attractions within an aesthetic-historical context and uses the baroque as a framework to enrich our understanding of contemporary entertainment media. The neo-baroque aesthetics that Ndalianis analyzes are not, she argues, a case of art history repeating or imitating itself; these forms have emerged as a result of recent technological and economic transformations. The neo-baroque forms combine sight and sound and text in ways that parallel such seventeenth-century baroque forms as magic lanterns, automata, painting, sculpture, and theater but use new technology to express the concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Moving smoothly from century to century, comparing ceiling paintings to the computer game Doom, a Spiderman theme park adventure to the baroque version of multimedia known as the Bel Composto, and a Medici wedding to Terminator 2:3D, the book demonstrates the logic of media histories. Ndalianis focuses on the complex interrelationships among entertainment media and presents a rigorous cross-genre, cross-historical analysis of media aesthetics. |