Oh my, indeed

I’ve decided to use this opportunity to pose some questions. What are the limitations of aesthetic and vernacular?

I'm having a hard time with the notion of vernacular. Yes, the reading of Goggin assists with an example, but how about another. Can anything be vernacular, especially when this mobile culture allows any text to be picked up and taken home? In regard to aesthetic, is it acceptable for anything I find pleasing to be art even if I know not the language of the curator? Doesn’t the most gruesome image have an aesthetic quality?

I do see the relationship between the vernacular and aesthetic. Personally, I would hope anything I choose as vernacular to me would also be aesthetically pleasing, if of course I claim to have taste. Although, how do we evaluate the aesthetic features, and how do we limit what's outside of this.

We claim that images produce ambiguity, so is not the image both aesthetically pleasing if we position ourselves to evaluate it because it’s rhetorical. Is this not provocative, which makes it initially meet an aesthetic influence.

Is it possible, because of the means of circulation, that most images are vernacular to at least one person, or are the terms of vernacular defined by the success of circulation?

 

Visual rhetoric is where the intersection of these two points meets. We find images  rhetorical because an image can speak to the individual and community.