The omnipresence of the icon

Read any newspaper or online magazine, watch any video or television ad, and it is likely you will encounter the term ‘iconic’ being applied to a specific person, building, object or even fictional character. Cultural icons can take many forms, and they appear to be omnipresent in the public domain. As Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen stress in Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (2012), ‘The concept of [the] icon has endured across vast stretches of time and space. It represented the sacred for medieval churchgoers a millennium ago and remains central to the technical discourse of computer users today.’ They continue, ‘The icon has proven to be a powerful and resilient cultural structure, and a container for sacred meanings, long after Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of god’.

Despite the central place iconic representations take in contemporary culture, consensus on what the term ‘icon’ means is abundantly lacking. Overflowing with meaning, the concept itself almost seems to become meaningless. As the art historian Martin Kemp already signalled in From Christ to Coke: How Image becomes Icon (2011), ‘the term iconic is now scattered around so liberally and applied to figures or things of passing and local celebrity that it has tended to become debased.’ Recently, Hariman and Lucaites even spoke of the ‘hyperinflation’ of the concept, stressing that icons suggest ‘a stable fixture, a familiar setting, an enduring connection to something beyond endless churn and change’. They add that the problem is a devaluation of the term itself, ‘leaving the public more adrift than before’.

This volume sets out to limit the inflation of the term by offering, in this introduction, a comprehensive overview of the existing conceptualizations of the icon and by demonstrating, in the chapters that follow, how the concept can be fruitfully applied in research from diverse cultural disciplines, such as literary studies, media studies, art history, and cultural history. The book has been arranged according to the main perspectives of the contributions: iconic persons (I. People), iconic places (II. Places) and iconic objects (III. Objects). The contributions focus on the visual aspects of icons as well as on the cultural historical embedding of iconic representations – two aspects which are strongly intertwined and cannot easily be separated, if they can be separated at all.