Bach Anxiety

2021 ◽  
pp. 337-360
Author(s):  
Michael Markham
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Similar Images ◽  
Twenty First Century

A recent Twitter post by the composer Nico Muhly aligns with a recurring trope of “Bach-ness” that defines Bach’s public mythic profile. This chapter focuses on similar images of Bach, whether visual or aural. Bach has been most commonly imagined in the popular consciousness as representing not the human but the superhuman, the inhuman, the dehumanized, and the sublime. One can sense in recent writings on Bach an anxiety about how well these attributes can continue to resonate in our current moment of political or cultural relevance tests, and about which works by Bach are most likely to thrive in this new postmodern media world. I will wonder aloud, with some trepidation, whether Bach’s public mythic profile, long solidified along Modernist lines as the encyclopedic mathematical mystic, is undergoing a broad, gradual change; indeed, if it needs to in order for his music to survive in a twenty-first-century media environment and amid a postmodern audience sensibility.

scholarly journals Branding Cannabis in Canada: Challenges for the Cannabis Act’s Promotion Restrictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Asquith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Tobacco Advertising ◽  
Médias Sociaux ◽  
Legal Precedent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Medias Sociaux ◽  
Trade Press

Background: This article examines how Canadian cannabis companies promoted their new brands after legalization in late-2018. Analysis: Nearly 4,000 items were collected from the websites and social media of 20 cannabis brands and triangulated with insight from the trade press. The promotional practices are contextualized in two areas: the history of tobacco advertising in Canada, as legal precedent for the Cannabis Act, and theories of branding.  Conclusion and implications: Brands are navigating the Cannabis Act’s promotion restrictions by embodying what it means to be a brand in the twenty-first-century media environment. This reveals an incompatibility between regulations and contemporary marketing. Contexte : Cet article examine comment les compagnies de cannabis canadiennes ont promu leurs nouvelles marques suivant la légalisation du cannabis à la fin de 2018. Analyse : Sur les sites web et les médias sociaux, on a recueilli près de 4 000 références à vingt marques de cannabis qu’on a triangulées avec des commentaires provenant de la presse spécialisée. On a contextualisé les pratiques de promotion par rapport à deux domaines : celui de l’histoire de la publicité pour le tabac au Canada comme précurseur légal de la Loi sur le cannabis, et celui des théories sur la valorisation de la marque. Conclusion et implications : Les compagnies de cannabis, tout en respectant les restrictions sur la promotion imposées par la Loi sur le cannabis, cherchent à incarner ce que cela veut dire que d’être une marque de commerce dans l’environnement médiatique du 21e siècle. Les contraintes sur les compagnies soulignent cependant une incompatibilité entre la réglementation et le marketing contemporain.

Media ecology in the twenty-first century

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric McLuhan
Keyword(s):  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
The West ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Active Intervention ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Form ◽  
Twenty First Century

With an introduction by Andrew McLuhanIn this address, Eric McLuhan discusses the origins and importance of taking an ecological approach to studying media. In regard to the current media environment, he argues that the West is currently experiencing a new renaissance, and a new form of nomadism. The address concludes with a call for education geared towards active intervention in the media environment.

scholarly journals Twenty-First-Century Sublime

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-35
Author(s):  
Amy Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
First Century ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay looks at the tension between pristine natural beauty and industry and how they have informed, and been represented in, California landscape painting and photography. Amy Scott argues that the influence of the traditional California landscape in art has evolved, thanks to a flexible understanding of the concept of the sublime, which draws upon ideas of nature to respond to external changes—including developments in technology. These changes have shaped the ways in which we imagine both the natural and the built environment in relation to ourselves. Scott traces this evolution through Albert Bierstadt’s mid-nineteenth century painting On the Merced River and through twentieth century works by James Doolin, Ed Ruscha, Karen Halverson, and Michael Light.

‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-560
Author(s):  
Maria Löschnigg
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Northern Alberta

AbstractLiterary reactions to the transformation of landscape by modern technology foreground the fragility of the planet while at the same time suggesting notions of immensity and inspiring awe. Oil mining, in particular, threatens and destroys essential mega-biotopes, as for example two of the biggest wetlands on earth, the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada’s northern Alberta and the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria. While we are flooded, daily, by media reports on environmental damage and by scientifically based scenarios of future catastrophes, it is literature with its specifically ambiguous and multidimensional make-up, which proves to be an ideal medium to foreground the ambivalence of twenty-first century societies regarding their attitude towards a radically modified natural environment. The double aesthetics of the sublime, in particular, proves to be a congenial creative (and critical) approach to these fear- and awe-inspiring landscapes, which have been forged and shaped by technology and industry. In my essay I want to show how twenty-first century Canadian and Nigerian writers have responded to the effects of oil mining in their respective countries by drawing on notions of the sublime as they came to be articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and have been taken up by scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through their narrative and poetic ‘sublime oilscapes’ these authors effectively foreground the problems inherent in the split attitude of contemporary societies.

Sublime landscapes in contemporary British horror: The Last Great Wilderness and Eden Lake

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Hockenhull
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art World ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Landscape, as distinct from setting, presents its own visual authority, particularly in the horror genre. A number of contemporary British films contain pictorial images of the landscape that are not necessarily pivotal to the narrative. By implementing an analysis of these representations in contemporary British rural horror, and drawing on the theories of romanticism and the Sublime of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their emphasis on the spiritual aspects of nature, allows for setting as more than narrative space. It produces an affect that elicits a certain type of emotion from the viewer, who is invited to experience an intuitive response on encountering the pictorial compositions, aiding narrative meaning. This essay examines what Martin Lebebvre describes as impure or spectator landscapes in two recent films: The Last Great Wilderness (MacKenzie, 2002) and Eden Lake (Watkins, 2008), and finds visual correlations drawn from the contemporary art world. This indicates that, from a socio-cultural perspective, the twenty-first century has witnessed an emergence of Romantic and sublime vocabulary in both film and painting, which indicates the existence of, what Raymond Williams might term, a structure of feeling.

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