Portraying the Arab Intellectual in Visual Media: A Sociological Analysis of the Plastic Artist’s Identity in Shaghaf TV Series

30.Dec.2022

​This research aims to explore the socio-visual possibilities of artistic identity through Arab media. It focuses on the “Shaghaf” series, a drama show that was podcasted during Ramadan month 2020. This paper critiques several visual elements, the first element is the image of the plastic artist, the second is the fourth dimension that consists of time, space, and movement and the third element is the representations of social reality and its psychosocial dilemmas. Furthermore, this paper negotiates dramatic intersections within the literature that discourses the Death of Art and the Death of Author by postmodern philosophies. The present critique deconstructed the aesthetic approaches integrated within the unit of analysis, which is the artists’ identity. This identity transforms through a symbolic duality between latent and manifest representations in the public versus private social spaces. The research discussed the critical need to manage the cultural content in the media as well as to focus on the positive role of the artist in society. The present paper resists stereotyping less privileged people of physical/social/psychological needs, and any exclusionary content in media that defines them as socially unfamiliar. Finally, this paper is significant because it focuses on the woman artist's identity as a social construction in the Arab media, as women artists are underrepresented in visual media in general. Furthermore, Art Sociology, as an approach in Fine Arts Studies, presented an advancement in the specialty and does not exclude the philosophies of Aesthetics and Art History but rather conceptualizes theories with qualitative and quantitative methodologies.​