Master's Dissertation, 2023

This dissertation aims to shed light on the way popular acts used the music video as a medium to promote their artistic identity, and on how they utilize representations in the 2010s decade in order to achieve the former. The key question addressed in this dissertation is how music videos belonging in different genres present similarities in their forms and representations. Given the fact that little research has been conducted on the music video as an art form, this dissertation is an opportunity to expand our knowledge on this field, and, especially, on an era where there seems to be a lack of clear focus when it comes to one or few ‘formulas’ that largely dictate the way videos are conceived and produced. According to academic literature, music videos are essentially a creation of the music industry in the 1950s in order to capitalize on an act’s ‘general package’, however, this shifted in the decades that followed, with the 1980s being considered as the ‘golden age’ of the music video, and the 1990s being the ‘experimental’ age, where the convergence between music video, cinema and art video became apparent. As there is little research on the way music videos were produced in the 2010s decade, the aim is to combine all of the existing bibliography of some very popular music videos, while meticulously examining their forms and representations through a thematic analysis derived through phenomenology. A subsequent goal is to find the way several popular music genres present themselves visually to their potential internet audience, and how the latter responded to some of these representations.

Abstract: By what channels are people consuming music videos, and what are music video viewers' motivations? We explore the status of television and the Internet as the main currently used distribution channels for music videos, with results indicating that fewer music videos are consumed in comparison with the 1980s and 1990s. Yet while consumption of music videos via television has significantly decreased, use via the Internet has increased.

This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video’s dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of “music television”. Author Bios: Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College in Washington. Daniel Cookney is Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Salford, UK. Kirsty Fairclough is Director of International and Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK. Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK.

2021

This dissertation discusses the history and evolving relationship between Video Art and Music Video. These distinct, yet interrelated, cultural practices have shared a mutual artistic history and evolved symbiotically, creating a rich tradition of audio-visual synthetic responses to socio- political movements and issues, adapting over time to the new technological and aesthetic modes of the era. Until recently, this relationship has received relatively little attention in Art Historical academia, with discourses by prominent theorists such as Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis opening up the debate around the place of Music Videos within institutional settings. This thesis offers a selective, analytical study of the evolution of Video and Music Video - Art: from analog, to broadcast and now, in the contemporary period, digital and museological contexts. As a recent field of academic study, this thesis aims to offer conclusions as to the current, and future, relationship and artistic status of Music Videos in the contemporary cultural world, spanning artistic and musical spheres. This dissertation is by no means exhaustive, instead aiming to offer avenues for future study whilst highlighting the multifaceted nature of this contemporary art form. Focussing on close visual and contextual analyses I will demonstrate how, as a medium born out of counter-cultural artistic and socio-political processes, the Music Video - as - artwork is a cultural phenomenon that whilst seemingly contemporary, has a rich, irreverent and complex socio-artistic history.

office hours: wednesdays 3.30-5.30 email or make an appointment here course objectives what is a music video anyway? is it a product of MTV and the 1980s? is it a short art film? is it a commercial that utilizes a popular song to sell you a product? is it a YouTube video? or is it when you record yourself lip synching to a song on TikTok? well, yes, music videos are all those things and much, much, more. in answering this question in depth throughout the semester, we will be considering the impact that the union between music and image has on the political framework of our culture. this class is less about interpreting the aesthetics of individual music videos, but instead more about how they are weaponized for various political causes. of course, most music videos don't necessarily aim to make a political statement, however, all music videos are a product of the culture that we live in. hence, this class takes a cultural studies approach to analyzing music videos to explore the various social and political messages that music videos are presenting to us. towards this aim, we will not only be learning how to read music video aesthetics and exploring their long prehistory dating back to the silent film era (pre-1927), but we will also examine videos in relation to concepts like feminism, satanic worship and paranoia, Black respectability politics, sexual expression, queerness, fashion, revolutionary politics, war, capitalism, and commercialism. deadline summary february 17: music video analysis due. march 24: first installment of reading journals due. may 19: tiktok assignment due. may 19: final installment of reading journals due. music video analysis: 10% of grade reading journals: 70% of grade tiktok assignment: 20% of grade "Donald Trump Says 'China.'" by Iggy Jackson Cohen. 2016. Trump's pastor warns about God's strike. 2020.

Post-digital Culture, 2017

How to deal with digitalization? Several aesthetic developments have emerged over the past few years in the laboratory called music video. Videos show tendencies to avoid the look of the digital by going analog and retro, or, just the opposite, they are stressing the fact of digital artificiality, exposing and over-affirming it by being hyper-digital. Hyper-digital music videos have not only shown and praised the potential and power of the digital, but they have shown how the digital infects our lives, our conditions of living, our identity, making the digital and its effects on our lives the main subject itself. Quote: Lund, Holger (2017): „What’s Left? The Critique of Digital Life in Hyper-digital Music Videos.“ In: Kulle, Daniel/Lund, Cornelia/Schmidt, Oliver/Ziegenhagen, David (Hrsg.): Post-digital Culture, http://www.post-digital-culture.org/hlund2

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

IASPM@Journal, 2018

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 1997