Neo-baroque Aesthetics And Contemporary Entertainment (Media in Transition)

About this book

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 todays 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.