In the book's three sections - 'Precursors', 'Moderns' and 'Modernities' - internationally renowned art historian T. J. Clark unpicks the nature of capitalist society and its visual culture. He tries to understand the politics of appearance which is now our natural home - the twists and turns of consumerism, the arrival of the 24-hour image-world, the changing modes of symbolic production and the ongoing saturation of life by pictures and 'data' - and take stock of our guilty love affair with the imagery of violence, our attitude to the dream-world of advertising, the power and pathos of screen time
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