Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The late medieval Catholic worldview had a conceptual hierarchy of the universe ranging from the “Ultimate Good” down to the “Ultimate Evil,” which was synonymous with the spiritual world of God and angels down to the incorporeal world of humans, animals, plants, and matter. Parallel to this chain was a hierarchy of moral value for each point along the chain. This multimedia talk with slides, including hundreds of images, presents the twenty-first century “Brand Universe” hierarchy of global capitalist symbolism, using the same points along the chain as the medievals, but revealing the pattern of value to be a perfectly inverted mirror of the medieval worldview and hierarchy of values. The material is relevant to all consumer economies under global capitalism, and especially to all brands, icons, logos, and advertising campaigns that are going “textless,” as the image replaces the word in the quest for a universal “language of the image” that transcends linguistic and national and cultural borders. The paper is most relevant to Fortune 500 Companies and their attendant iconography.