CAT 2020 Slot 2 — VARC Question 12
Direction for Reading Comprehension: The pass ages given here are followed by some questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option whose answer best aligns with the passage
The claims advanced here may be condensed into two assertions: [first, that visual] culture is what images, acts of seeing, and attendant intellectual, emotional, and perceptual sensibilities do to build, maintain, or transform the worlds in which people live. [And second, that the] study of visual culture is the analysis and interpretation of images and the ways of seeing (or gazes) that configure the agents, practices, conceptualities, and institutions that put images to work. . . .
Accordingly, the study of visual culture should be characterized by several concerns. First, scholars of visual culture need to examine any and all imagery – high and low, art and non art.. . . They must not restrict themselves to objects of a particular beauty or aesthetic value. Indeed, any kind of imagery may be found to offer up evidence of the visual construction of reality. . . .
Second, the study of visual culture must scrutinize visual practice as much as images themselves, asking what images do when they are put to use. If scholars engaged in this enterprise inquire what makes an image beautiful or why this image or that constitutes a masterpiece or a work of genius, they should do so with the purpose of investigating an artist’s or a work’s contribution to the experience of beauty, taste, value, or genius. No amount of social analysis can account fully for the existence of Michelangelo or Leonardo. They were unique creators of images that changed the way their contemporaries thought and felt and have continued to shape the history of art, artists, museums, feeling, and aesthetic value. But study of the critical, artistic, and popular reception of works by such artists as Michelangelo and Leonardo can shed important light on the meaning of these artists and their works for many different people. And the history of meaning-making has a great deal to do with how scholars as well as lay audiences today understand these artists and their achievements.
Third, scholars studying visual culture might properly focus their interpretative work on lifeworlds by examining images, practices, visual technologies, taste, and artistic style as constitutive of social relations. The task is to understand how artifacts contribute to the construction of a world. . . . Important methodological implications follow: ethnography and reception studies become productive forms of gathering information, since these move beyond the image as a closed and fixed meaning-event. . . .
Fourth, scholars may learn a great deal when they scrutinize the constituents of vision, that is, the structures of perception as a physiological process as well as the epistemological frameworks informing a system of visual representation. Vision is a socially and a biologically constructed operation, depending on the design of the human body and how it engages the interpretive devices developed by a culture in order to see intelligibly. . . . Seeing . . . operates on the foundation of covenants with images that establish the conditions for meaningful visual experience.
Finally, the scholar of visual culture seeks to regard images as evidence for explanation, not as epiphenomena.
All of the following statements may be considered valid inferences from the passage, EXCEPT:
Answer & solution
studying visual culture requires institutional structures without which the structures of perception cannot be analysed.
- B
understanding the structures of perception is an important part of understanding how visual cultures work.
- C
artifacts are meaningful precisely because they help to construct the meanings of the world for us.
- D
visual culture is not just about how we see, but also about how our visual practices can impact and change the world.
Easy
This is an EXCEPT question: three options are valid inferences; one is not. Test each against the text. The trap is an option that adds a claim the passage never makes — here, that "institutional structures" are required to analyse perception.
Correct (this is the EXCEPT — the invalid inference). The fourth concern treats the "structures of perception" as a physiological process and an epistemological framework. The passage never says institutional structures are needed, without which perception cannot be analysed. This is an unsupported, far-fetched addition — hence the answer.
Valid inference. The fourth concern explicitly says scholars "may learn a great deal" by scrutinising the structures of perception — so understanding them is part of understanding how visual cultures work.
Valid inference. The third concern says the task is "to understand how artifacts contribute to the construction of a world," supporting the idea that artifacts are meaningful because they help build the meanings of the world.
Valid inference. The opening assertion says visual culture is what images and acts of seeing "do to build, maintain, or transform the worlds in which people live" — i.e. visual practices can impact and change the world, not just how we see.
Option A — it imports an unsupported claim about required "institutional structures"; perception is discussed only as a physiological/epistemological process, so this is the inference that does NOT hold.