PR, Ars Suprema

Since communication is, as we all know, the highest form of art, it's only natural that an art historian should also have her say on the subject. Right?

It doesn't take an art historian, however, to notice what communication and the world of art - or as it is sometimes referred to, culture - have to do with each other. Through communication - words, symbols, different contexts - the phenomenon we know as culture manifests itself. When we see different types and traditions of communication, we immediately see different cultures. This relationship is so unseparable that it makes the utmost sense to stop and think about the surrounding culture a bit when we want to get a clear picture out of a certain area's communication field, its tradition and practices.

Sadly many regions still, in the era of information technology, seem a bit
unaccessible for us Finns. Take South America... All the researches that find their way to the Finnish academic world seem to be solely written by Northern Americans and thereby from their point of view (and curiously often they tend to focus on Mexico...). But although there's little variety amongs writers, the amount of research material for an interested soul is almost endless. If you want to take a closer look at a certain culture, you'll have to search through the region's history, it's popular culture, its folklore and traditions, study its art... Luckily ye olde realiable Wikipedia is here to give us all a brief idea of what we're dealing with (although I might just be shooting myself in the academic leg by posting this link... but I'll take the risk): CAN YOU PEOPLE SEE A LINK HERE? ON MY COMPUTER IT SHOWS IN THE WRITING MODE BUT DISAPPEARS WHEN PUBLISHED. (Sorry, one humanities student right here, coming through...) Well, I'm sure you can use google too...

Even without the wikiarticle we all know something about the Latin America though.
We know that its culture started shaping as a close-to-nature pagan culture with incas and such, and since then it has been widely affected by immigration, especially from the Latin countries of Europe. The old colonies still bear the mark and atmosphere of imported cultures on many levels, with their créole languages (i.e. a mix-up of old regional language and the language learnt from newcomers) for example. Although the various indian tribes of South America apparently had very effective (mass) communication methods of their own, I think today's communication field is still mainly understood through the integration/fusion of old tradition and the European culture. South America sure provides an interesting cultural climate for the communication methods to thrive and develop.

The future ponderings of this one young art historian in-the-making will hopefully contain more precise thoughts. I will most likely take a look at some of the worst stereotypes we tend to have about the Public Relations -field in South America and try to find some hopefully interesting and funny bits and pieces around the internet and the library to illuminate the continent's culture-communications -atmosphere, its effects and its development, for you.

Here's one book I'm personally reading at the moment concerning the subject, it's well worth taking a look:
James Lull: Media, Communication, Culture - A Global Approach. Columbia University Press, New York, 2000.

Oops, first posts get so long so easily...

Writer: Iina Julkunen