VISUAL CULTURE
Luke White: Profile
I originally trained as an artist at Canterbury (BA) and Camberwell (MA), where my work was largely concerned with the urban environment. After college, I practised as an artist, and was involved with various artist-led initiatives, working in particular in the medium of temporary artistic ‘interventions’ into the built environment. I started teaching Visual Culture/Art History at Middlesex somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and ‘theory’ and teaching have slowly taken over my working life. I am currently pursuing my research, in the form of a PhD full time, funded by Middlesex University.
Current Research
PhD title: Damien Hirst and the Legacy of the Sublime in Contemporary Culture
My PhD examines the legacy of the development, during the eighteenth century, of a notion of and a sensibility for ‘the sublime’, not just in high art, but also in ‘low’ culture. I take the work of Damien Hirst, perched as it is on the boundaries between the two, as a central example through which to conduct this inquiry. I set out in particular to trace the relation between the rise of the ‘sublime’ and the development of commercialised culture, and the links between an imperative to the sublime and its incessant lapses into bathos.
