Gender Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Gender - Term Paper Example Attfield (2000) says understanding culture through the emotions or ideas of objects â€Å"acknowledges the physical object in all its materiality and encompasses the work of design, making, distributing, consuming, using, discarding, recycling and so on. But above all it focuses on how things have gone through all those stages as part of the mediation process between people and the physical world at different stages in their biographies† (1-7). Thus, it is clear that objects can have multiple meanings. How these elements function together to appeal to the audience’s personal sense of function and appearance is what is referred to as aesthetics. This term is most often used in the art world to designate important works of art. Through the concept of aesthetics, artists such as Robert Maplethorpe explore concepts such as gender in works like the photographic print â€Å"Smutty† exhibited in the Tate Collection. Aesthetics is a very subjective subject as it depends not only on what the artist portrays, but also on what he intended to portray and what the audience brings to the dialogue. John Armstrong (2004) says aesthetics is the process that â€Å"enables one person to find beauty in an object which leaves another unmoved† (4). â€Å"Smutty† by Robert Maplethorpe was produced in 1980 as part of the artist’s collection of somewhat controversial images. The image consists of a half dressed man seated or perhaps squatting down to the ground and looking directly into the camera, but his head is tilted somewhat away from it. The man is a very lean person perhaps in his upper teens or early 20s and the upper portion of his body is bare. If it weren’t, the man might be mistaken as a woman. Both of the man’s arms are covered with tattoos and his style of clothing, what can be seen of it, is much like that of a punk rocker, which was popular in that era. The pant s he wears are black enough that they lose their dimension at the bottom edge of the picture. His