Practices of Looking–Pages 145-151

        In this section of the book the focus is on realism and how it affected and still affects our past and present. History is an important part of any culture so it is only natural to follow the development of different ways of seeing, knowing the world, and different cultures views about value and meaning. The main question the book asked in this section was, "...what do the different approaches to realism that we find in art and visual culture tell us about the culture and politics of a given social context" (pg.146). I thought this was an interesting question to bring up because each culture is going to have a different reaction to the histories of other cultures' approaches to realism. Not only are the ideas and attitudes towards realism are going to be different for each person, but each persons own history are going to affect the way they view not only their own culture, but other cultures as well. I feel like that because there are so many different aspects of realism, there can never be a right and wrong answer, just individual ones. A term that this section of the book used that i had never heard of before was episteme. The book explains that it is "an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period of history" (pg. 149). So not only will each culture have different views about different aspects of realism, but each culture within each period of history will have even more of a variety of different views about realism as well. I really liked how much the book emphasized this because so many people are affected by different things, but can end up in the same place in their lives, but also different people can be affected by the same thing and end up in different places of their lives. You never know where life is going to take you next and I think that is a goof thing because then life wouldn't be as much fun.