Publisher's Synopsis
The aesthetics of the seventeenth century baroque period used spectacle to evoke delight and astonishment; contemporary entertainment media, according to Angela Ndalianis, are imbued with a neobaroque aesthetic that similarly emphasises the spectacular and creates a sensory experience for the audience. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment she situates today's film, computer games, comic books and theme-park attractions within an aesthetic-historical context and uses the baroque as a model that helps us better understand contemporary entertainment media. The neo-baroque aesthetics that Ndalianis analyses are not, she argues, a case of art history repeating or imitating itself; these forms have emerged as a result of recent technological and economic transformations. The neo-baroque forms combine sight and sound and text in ways that parallel such seventeenth-century baroque forms as magic lanterns, automata, painting, sculpture and theatre but use new technology to express the concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.;Moving smoothly from century to century, comparing ceiling paintings to the computer game Doom, a Spiderman theme park adventure to the baroque version of multimedia known as the Bel Composto, and a Medici wedding to Terminator 2:3D, the book demonstrates the logic of media histories. Ndalianis focuses on the complex interrelationships among entertainment media and presents a rigorous cross-genre, cross-historical analysis of media aesthetics.
