Lecture 3: The Body

My apologies for the late post. I had to work at 5:50pm right after lecture :O Anywho, today Kip gave a lecture on the body. I had seen the work of Robert Maplethorpe in my previous art class so I was not too taken aback by the subject matter. I like how Kip addressed his work not only for its controversy but for the message that Maplethorpe attempted to send (at least it is the one that we have got from his work). Although I have seen his work before I did not realize the stereotypes they dealt with, especially those focusing on black men. I do not think Maplethorpe was simply photographing his fetishes or fantasies. His work is a political and social statement about the way that people objectify other people whether it be due to race, religion, or gender. This fact is made clear by the numerous examples we saw of the advertisements. Although nothing I heard today in lecture was necessarily new information I was still shocked to see how little the product is mentioned in each ad. For a little experiment I typed "jewelry ads" into google to see what images I would get. This is a little example of what it gave me:

All similar right? Not only did every single advertisement use a woman but a good percent of these ads featured naked women. For some reason, the company thought that showing the women naked would be a good idea, not that anyone would buy jewelry and wear it with clothes on or anything. The sarcasm in my writing is because Kip's point is made so clear here: the companies are not selling the product, they are selling the IMAGE of the product. Never mind the jewelry, these women could be selling virtually anything. The same goes for almost every product we were shown in lecture today. The message here is that if you but X, you will be like Y. As we all know this is not true. I do not understand why such ads to not promote practicality. If I buy jewelry I would like it not to break, and to look good and be versatile. This ad is showing me none of those qualities and yet it is one of the most popular.