A study of the largely hidden world of primary media market research and the different methods used to understand how the viewer is pictured in the industry. The first book on the intersection between market research and media, Creating the Viewer takes a critical look at media companies’ studies of television viewers, the assumptions behind these studies, and the images of the viewer that are constructed through them. Justin Wyatt examines various types of market research, including talent testing, pilot testing, series maintenance, brand studies, and new show “ideation,” providing examples from a range of programming including news, sitcoms, reality shows, and dramas. He looks at brand studies for networks such as E!, and examines how the brands of individuals such as showrunner Ryan Murphy can be tested. Both an analytical and practical work, the bookincludes sample questionnaires and paths for study moderators and research analysts to follow. Drawn from over fifteen years of experience in research departments at various media companies, Creating the Viewer looks toward the future of media viewership, discussing how the concept of the viewer has changed in the age of streaming, how services such as Netflix view market research, and how viewers themselves can shift the industry through their media choices, behaviors, and activities.

THE VIEWER tells the peculiar story of a boy whose obsession with curious artefacts leads him to discover an strange box at a dump site. It proves to be an ancient chest full of optical devices, one of which captures his interest; an intricately mechanical object which carries disks of images; scenes of destruction, violence and the collapse of civilisations throughout time. The boy is afraid, but also cannot help but look into the machine time and time again as the images shift and change ...

In The Place of the Viewer, Kerr Houston offers a richly detailed chronological overview of art historians’ evolving attempts to account for the physical position of the viewer in discussing works of art.

The works covered in college art history classes frequently depict violence against women. Traditional survey textbooks highlight the impressive formal qualities of artworks depicting rape, murder, and other violence but often fail to address the violent content and context. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer investigates the role that the art history field has played in the past and can play in the future in education around gender violence in the arts. It asks art historians, museum educators, curators, and students to consider how, in the time of #MeToo, a public reckoning with gender violence in art can revitalize the field of art history. Contributors to this timely volume amplify the voices and experiences of victims and survivors depicted throughout history, critically engage with sexually violent images, open meaningful and empowering discussions about visual assaults against women, reevaluate how we have viewed and narrated such works, and assess how we approach and teach famed works created by artists implicated in gender-based violence. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer includes contributions by the editors as well as Veronica Alvarez, Indira Bailey, Melia Belli Bose, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ria Brodell, Megan Cifarelli, Monika Fabijanska, Vivien Green Fryd, Carmen Hermo, Bryan C. Keene, Natalie Madrigal, Lisa Rafanelli, Nicole Scalissi, Hallie Rose Scott, Theresa Sotto, and Angela Two Stars. It is sure to be of keen interest to art history scholars and students and anyone working at the intersections of art and social justice.

In The Viewer as Poet, Norman Land provides the first comprehensive survey of ekphrasis in literature and art criticism from antiquity through the Renaissance. Land demonstrates, more fully than anyone has so far, that Renaissance art criticism assimilated the poetic tradition of ekphrasis while maintaining its function of analyzing works of art. Broadly speaking, the book shows that purely literary descriptions of art in poetry and prose contain a response like that found in art-critical ekphrasis. This is true in both antiquity and the Renaissance. The response to art in the elder Philostratus's Imagines, for example, is like that found in the descriptions of Apuleius and Lucian. Later Dante, Boccaccio, and Poliziano, among others, respond to imaginary works of art in their poetry in much the same way that Lorenzo Ghiberti, Aretino, and Vasari respond to real works in their writings. Land offers for the first time a synthetic description of the Renaissance response to, or experience of, art as embodied in literature, including art criticism. This book will form the basis for a deeper understanding of Renaissance art than we have now, for it provides not only a tool for viewing works of art as they were originally seen and experienced--that is, from a historical perspective--but also an outline of the tradition out of which modern writings about art grew.

This publication is the result of proceedings from the 2nd Global Conference on Visual Literacy held at Mansfield College, Oxford in July 2008. Although often touted as being a relatively new area of research, the field of Visual Literacy actually has a long history in some research disciplines, Theology, Anthropology, Art History and Iconography.

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.