Obsession with image

In contemporary society the obsession with image and style overrides function and substance. Stuart Ewen, in All Consuming Images: the Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, examines the preoccupation with image and style and its implications. The book, which Ewen started writing in 1983, was first published in 1988 with a new edition published in 1999. In the new Introduction to the 1999 edition, Ewen comments that it is remarkable that the book needed so few changes from its original text, considering that a style is generally short-lived and transient. He attributes the book's continued relevance to "the fact that it was written during a time when now-familiar elements of today's image-gripped culture were in the process of becoming apparent" (xvi).

Ewen has excellent credentials to author this kind of study. He is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York, and a Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in History and in Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A frequent lecturer, he has authored many other books on

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