This article was like nothing I've really read before. It talked about denotations and connotations we "naturally" have for things. It was big into racism and that what is portrayed in the art world. A famous artist who plays on typical African American stereotypes is that of Michael Ray Charles. He made lots of artwork that would allow the racist viewer to go along with what they naturally believed went together. I thought this article was pretty interesting. When they used art examples to make this point, it was cool to see what usually happend. It does depend on where you live/lived, family values and other environmental factors to what you usually would associate things with. Towards the end it was sweet to see the author have examples of this in many age groups. Those examples would be a fun project/experiment to do in some class. I think this article teaches us to really look into advertisements and artwork to see what the underlying messages are. This article can also spark us to think outside the box for different items we want portrayed in our artwork and what other people might view them as.
The way the artist was really serious that everyone has a connotation/denotation for everything was kind of scary. Maybe he meant it in that we can come up with them everywhere, not that we are all racist. I feel like OSU plays a lot into stereotypes. I've had to read stuff in many classes or things that really over think/complicate things in my opinion. This reminded me of that. Although it is very interesting to have a different prospective, I feel if we allow ourselves to take this too seriously, we won't get to enjoy the artwork or advertisments. It's good to keep that in the back of your mind, but you also need to live a little.
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