Talk:Cultural icon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 7 May 2006. The result of the discussion was delete.
Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 21 April 2008. The result of the discussion was keep but cleanup.


Contents

[edit] 2007-02-1 Automated pywikipediabot message

This page has been transwikied to Wiktionary.
The article has content that is useful at Wiktionary. Therefore the article can be found at either here or here (logs 1 logs 2.)

Note: This means that the article has been copied to the Wiktionary Transwiki namespace for evaluation and formatting. It does not mean that the article is in the Wiktionary main namespace, or that it has been removed from Wikipedia's. Furthermore, the Wiktionarians might delete the article from Wiktionary if they do not find it to be appropriate for the Wiktionary.

Removing this tag will usually trigger CopyToWiktionaryBot to re-transwiki the entry. This article should have been removed from Category:Copy to Wiktionary and should not be re-added there.

--CopyToWiktionaryBot 04:42, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Says who? And does it even make sense?

We read:

A cultural icon is an object or person. . . .

and then

Hollywood, McDonald's, Las Vegas, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Disney, New York, Coca Cola, Levi's, etc. are cultural icons of the United States that have a major influence on the American culture and the world.

I hadn't realized that Mickey Mouse was either an object or a person. It's more like a conventionalized graphical image, sometimes rendered in three dimensions. I don't know what "McDonald's" means here -- the places or the burgers? (Surely not the company, which wouldn't be an object or person.) Is "Disney" the company? Can Disney and Mickey Mouse both be cultural icons? (Isn't there at least one category mistake here?)

And what "major influence" has Barbie had on the world?

Or again:

A cultural icon is also irreplaceable, incomparable and timeless. In many aspects, they [sic] represent a nation or a certain culture.

Isn't representation of a certain culture somewhat difficult to square with timeless? I associate McDonald's, Vegas, and Barbie with postwar US: far from timeless. And as for "incomparable", I easily compare McDonald's with KFC, Burger King, and the junk food outlets indigenous to the nation where I live, Vegas with Reno and Macau, Mickey Mouse with Donald Duck and Mickey Rat, New York with Chicago, Coke with Pepsi, Barbie with GI Joe, Levi with Lee, Hollywood with Bollywood, etc etc.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy has a political iconic status.

Is this a political cultural iconic status or a political non-cultural iconic status?

Etc etc. To me this looks like the first draft of an essay, no more. -- Hoary (talk) 15:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Your criticisms are apt. One of the pitfalls of cultural studies is that nearly every enthusiast of the field thinks they understand the subject without reading any of its key texts. This article was written by author(s) who don't know the subject they're writing about. However, the article could be improved greatly by drawing from Roland Barthes's Mythologies and subsequent work on the subject... Pinkville (talk) 20:01, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Mythologies is a most entertaining work (which makes it most unlike any other work by Barthes that I've looked at). But I don't remember it as much more than a collection of well-written little essays. -- Hoary (talk) 23:34, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Mythologies concludes with the long essay Myth Today, which provides the theoretical grounding for the short essays/reflections on various phenomena (plastic, Marilyn Monroe, etc.) earlier in the book. The book is virtually an introduction to semiotics through an analysis of an assortment of cultural icons or myths. Pinkville (talk) 16:07, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comment

An anonymous editor added the following comment: "(Obviously the original author of this article sees the term 'Cultural Icon' as exclusively a product of the USA. The rest of us have neither culture or icons?)". I moved it out of the article, since it belongs on the talk page (if anywhere). Anturiaethwr 18:34, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] To think that all those people voted "Keep" in the second AfD

Its title: "cultural icon". We read: Marilyn Monroe - one of the cult icons, who is one of the most recognizable icons of all times. So she's a cultural icon, a cult icon and one of the most recognizable icons of all times, plural.

Strange, I thought that the image of her would or wouldn't be an icon. But let's suppose for now that she, and not her image, is a cult(ural) icon. One of the five, fifty, five hundred most recognizable icons? Among whom? According to what research?

(And that's just one caption. The rest is just as dodgy.)

The first AfD got it right, I think. If I'm wrong, care to prove it? -- Hoary (talk) 16:01, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Ha, you think this is bad, look at Pop icon! Johnbod (talk) 18:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Ooh urgh. That article links to Cult icon and I was expecting unintended laughs there, but disappointingly it instead points to this very article. If humans can be icons, then I imagine that John Waters would be a cult icon, or anyway the gross woman gobbling eggs in Pink Flamingoes would be, and thanks to the redirect WP's innocent young readers would be led to believe that they're cultural icons. ¶ Meanwhile, how about the earnestness of "Gay icon"? Lotsa links, but most are discrete: it appears that if somebody verifiably states in a newspaper column that a given person is a gay icon, then that person thereby verifiably becomes a gay icon. This is all jolly good fun in the knockabout world of selling newspapers, but if this encyclopedic methodology is sociological (as Pinkville didn't quite claim) then I'm Napoleon. -- Hoary (talk) 09:48, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] and again

Can somebody who, unlike me, is capable of taking "cultural studies" seriously please look at this article and attempt to get it to make sense?

I'd thought that an icon was a visual representation of something. See Betty Grable: after markup-stripping but with my emphasis: Her iconic bathing suit photo became the number-one pin-up girl of the World War II era. It was later included in Life 100 Photos that Changed the World.

However, this article starts: A cultural icon is an object or person that....

Is it that Grable's photo was iconic but, thanks to its being a mere photo and not her, disqualified from being culturally iconic; while Grable herself remains in the running for being culturally iconic?

But for now, this article claims that a cultural icon is an object or person. It immediately proceeds to give seven examples: three are (dead) people, one is a fictional person, one a game, one a place, one a liquid. Whatever "cultural icon" may mean, the article gives not an iota of evidence for its assertion that these are cultural icons. Their selection, and the removal by User:Icarus of old of James Dean, look pretty arbitrary.

I quote a comment by Pinkville (after some markup-fiddling, and with my emphases): "cultural icons" are not the things/people themselves, but rather the images of them in popular culture. That is, in scholarly terms it isn't Marilyn Monroe herself that is the cultural icon, but the collection of ideas about her: beautiful, sexy, tragic, dumbish but inspired blonde, etc. that together form a persona called "Marilyn Monroe".

So it's not the objects or persons (or fictional persons or games or places or liquids); it's the images or ideas thereof. Well, which -- images or ideas? Or (in set-theoretic terms) the union of the two? I'd hazily thought that images included, or perhaps were even prototypically exemplified by, visual images (in our times, primarily photographs). Perhaps Johnbod thought so too; anyway, he added a see-also for Replicas of Michelangelo's David, whereupon I tentatively added two more, for Guerrillero Heroico and Chandos portrait. But they too have been summarily swept away by Icarus of old, in his single, summaryless edit.

So are these associations or cognitions or what? Do paintings or photographs qualify? Or the magazine (etc) reproductions of paintings or photos? Or people's memories of (reproductions of) paintings or photos? If any paintings (or photographs) (or their reproductions, or their memories, or the memories of their reproductions) qualify, which would they be? Why Crocker and not Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, why Presley and not Dean or Bela Lugosi or Pam Grier?

Come on, cultstuds: Come up with just two little coherent, credible, persuasive paragraphs about "cultural icon". -- Hoary (talk) 00:18, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Ten fairish words on that topic might be my limit; however, I think the reasoning is probably sound that cultural icon at least initially is an image, perhaps those "ideas" associated with the image, often but by no means always, a person. That person, or that object could in extreme cases come to be seen as an object of veneration. c.f. Religious icon --
An icon (from Greek εἰκών, eikōn, "image") is an image, picture, or representation; it is a sign or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it, or by analogy, as in semiotics; by extension, icon is also used, particularly in modern culture, in the general sense of symbol — i.e. a name, face, picture, edifice or even a person readily recognized as having some well-known significance or embodying certain qualities one thing, and image or depiction, that represents something else of greater significance through literal or figurative meaning, usually associated with religious, cultural, political, and economic standing.
(bolding itals added). The addition of images to the article seems entirely reasonable for instance the Sydney Harbour Bridge would be a cultural icon, a well-recognised image, cheers, --NewbyG (talk) 00:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
I'm reaching the conclusion that while it's wrong to say that "cultural icon" means nothing, it's true to say that it doesn't have any one dominant meaning (let alone a single meaning). As such, a good entry for it is going to have to distinguish among usages that can be, and probably should be, separable (while conceding that in the hands of sloppy, lazy, obscure or obscurantist writers it may have amorphous swarms of meaning, or may merely be bullshit).
The result is unfortunate for what purports to be an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. Compare heat, an article that very properly explains the term as it's used in physics and gives short shrift to the term as it's used elsewhere. Well, the physicists have got their act together; the cultstuds haven't. (True, the physicists have had more time to do this, but I also strongly suspect that they are also very much more intent on clarity and very much less tolerant of sloppiness.)
There are terms that people are going to want to look up in an encyclopedia and that should be clearly disambiguated before exposition. Two that come to mind are Ebonics and expletive. Perhaps they'd be models for this article. -- Hoary (talk) 04:57, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
All fair comments. One difficulty with cultural studies is that its subject matter is phenomena we're all familiar with, have opinions on, and feel expert in, while physics is considered esoteric/arcane. Consequently, terms like "cultural icon" (even more problematically, "culture" itself), though they have specialised usages in cultural studies, are used with abandon by nearly everybody. "Cultural icon" is often used in colloquial discourse as a mere honorific, interchangeable with "idol", "star", etc. In a more technical context, one description might be that a cultural icon is a thing (person, object, phenomenon...) stripped of its contents, leaving a shell into which other contents are poured in; so, we're not talking about baseball per se (with such complicating details as the antitrust exemption, publically-subsidised corporate assets, individual players' records and off-field behaviour, etc.), but the ostensibly mutually shared idea of baseball: a wholesome, unifying symbol of particularly American positive competitive spirit having internally overcome its historical demons (segregation, game fixing)... the sort of mythology that Ken Burns pandered to so successfully. I can add something to the article itself... as soon as I've laid my hands on the necessary books to support my 20-year old memories of the theory... Pinkville (talk) 13:44, 30 May 2008 (UTC)