Meaning and semiotics

Member lesson

Stereotype and cliche in visual work

Lesson 8 of 9 in Meaning and semiotics.

Why Hollywood Won't Stop Making Some Foreign Countries Look Awful | Mashable · Mashable
Lesson

A cliche is a sign that has lost its difference. It was accurate once, which is exactly how it got popular, and the popularity is what killed it: when every brand in a category reaches for the same image, the image stops separating anything from anything and carries no information beyond the fact that you are in the category. A stereotype is the same mechanism pointed at people. It does more harm, because a person has to go on living inside the shorthand after the campaign has run.

the thingyou are sellingthe thingeveryone knowsone shared property, and only onewiden the overlap and the metaphor stops meaning anything
Two unrelated domains joined by one shared property, which is the whole metaphor.
A black and white long-tailed bird stands on a rock at the water's edge against a plain gold-brown sky, with a scatter of small birds in the far distance. The painting is set into a wide gold-flecked border of pink, orange and violet flowers, with lines of Persian script in the margins.
A bird painted for the Shah Jahan Album, set inside a wide border of flowers. The plain sky behind it makes the bird the figure and the rest the ground.Spotted Forktail, folio from the Shah Jahan Album. Painting attributed to Abu'l Hasan; calligraphy by Mir Ali Haravi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access/CC0 1.0
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A sign that has lost its difference. It was accurate once, and then everybody used it.”

    • Connotation
    • Denotation
    • Arbitrary
    • Cliche
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The same mechanism aimed at people, which does more damage, because somebody has to live inside the shorthand.”

    • Figure and ground
    • Closure
    • Proximity
    • Stereotype
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Packaging your own culture in the version an outsider expects, in order to sell it back to them.”

    • Figure and ground
    • Self-orientalisation
    • Closure
    • Proximity

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