12.2 Experience, Expression, and Equity
Christopher Byers; Elizabeth B. Pearce; and Carla Medel
If you have only two pennies, spend the first on bread and the other on hyacinths for your soul.
—Arab Proverb
Visual culture is described as the combination of visual events in which “information, meaning, or pleasure” are communicated to the consumer (Mirzoeff, 1998). The information that we take in through our eyes is both immense and psychologically powerful, affecting us in ways that take time and cognition to understand (figure 12.1). It is the intent of this chapter to highlight the ways in which visual culture affects families, both in the way we view ourselves and in the ways we can access resources such as education, employment, and wealth.
Art is one way people share ideas, express themselves, and communicate. Consider the print of Claude Monet’s The Water Lily Pond hanging in your doctor’s office (figure 12.2). What about the graffiti you passed on the way to the bus stop? Artistic expression exemplifies the richness of a culture and energizes our thought processes. We are exposed to art, design, and creativity all day long, whether we realize it or not.
Art is one way in which people share ideas, express themselves, and communicate. How and where an individual is able to access art is largely related to the values and beliefs a culture holds as a standard for determining what is desirable in a society, both by artistic and beauty standards.
Individuals have specific, individualized beliefs but can still share collective values. Values shape how a society views what is considered beautiful and what kinds of art are valued. Beauty is a concept that is flexible and that changes depending on where and when you are living. A family’s access to art that speaks to their culture, interests, and imagination depends on what is available in the popular media and accessible in their geographic region. In Western culture, art was historically housed in museums. In Indigenous cultures, art often takes the form of useful objects, such as baskets, an example shown in figure 12.3, and clothing.
Today, art and other imagery are easily accessible through digitized forms of technology, which are accessed through the internet. These readily available ways that people can use and access visual culture can breed unrealistic expectations for many people.
For example, with the rise of “selfies,” social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat can provide individuals with outlets to shape and shift self-images so that they can conform more easily to the dominant social standard of beauty.
It can be posited then that the dominant culture’s expectation of physical beauty can and has been what has most heavily influenced Western culture. The media and films portray a particular standard of beauty, setting up a tension between conforming to this standard, individualistic preferences, and cultural practices that may conflict with the idealized concept o