Politics and culture.

The unexpected comparison of a Supreme Court Justice with a popular culture
icon demonstrates how politics and popular culture become entwined in the
contemporary context; moreover, network culture provides a conduit for vernacular
discourse about politics, which circulates in the style of popular culture. Through analysis
of images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as created, shared, and circulated in network culture,
this project explores the alternative levels of discourse generated in network culture,
examines the ways the public represents politics, and explains the ability of political
subjects to affect meaning. The aim of this project is to document a conjunctural moment;
as such, analysis of the images in aggregate provides a foundation to raise questions
about how American political culture is manifested, attended to, and maintained through
network culture and the parlance of popular culture.

This dissertation reconstructs and investigates the origins of the Pérez Art
Museum Miami. In 2013, the museum re-opened in a new, county-funded building to
great acclaim and international attention, but the museum’s origins in the 1970s have
been largely forgotten. A result of the 1972 “Decade of Progress” bond vote by county
taxpayers that allocated funds to build a new art museum, the museum opened as the
Center for the Fine Arts in 1983 as a non-collecting institution dedicated to displaying
traveling exhibitions. The new institution represented the combined efforts of local
government, business, and art to construct not only a place in which to view art but also
as part of an overall plan to create a great metropolitan area.