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After writing about Cultural Appropriation in Beauty and Fashion, now finally comes to Cultural Appropriation in Music. Cultural Appropriation often happened in the Music industry and there is a lot of examples in modern pop culture.  One of the very obvious example is Selena Gomez's "Come and Get It". In the music video, Selena Gomez hyper-sexualized the traditional dance of Indian and wearing Indian clothing with bindi. Also most importantly, she uses Indian traditional music as her background music. During interview, she called the music video "tribal". When the music video release, it shocked the South Asian Culture. On the MTV Music Awards 2013, Selena Gomez wears bindi on her forehead and do Bollywood-style choreography during her performance. The president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, Rajan Zed comment:   “The bindi on the forehead is an ancient tradition in Hinduism and has religious significance…[it] was not meant to be throw

On my last post, I wrote about Cultural Appropriation on Beauty. In this post, I will write about the cultural appropriation in Fashion Industry. The most popular serious case are the headdresses from Native American. As I mentioned on one of my previous post, One of the famous example is Victoria's Secret using Native American headdresses in one of their fashion show.  Victoria's Secret apologized after being accused for being cultural appropriation by using headdresses.  Bringing back to the Native American headdress. When we thought of headdress, the first image that pop out in our mind is a warbonnet with full eagle's feathers like Red Indian we saw on TV but in fact most of the Native American did not uses this kind of warbonnet. The first Native American tribes who uses this kind of head pieces was The Sioux, warbonnet is for the brave and powerful among the tribe and each feathers was added when someone in the tribe committed a brave act, the person

After writing about the definition and my own opinion on cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, I will spread beauty, fashion, and music into different posts to understand the differences as I felt that they are actually quite similar. In this post, I will write culture appropriation of beauty, and the history of the culture. Speaking of cultural appropriation of beauty, the first thing and the most popular cases are afro-hair which is cornrows and dreadlocks etc.  Illustration of Shannon Wright. In the history of African Civilisation, hairstyle playing a very important role in black people's life. Hairstyles represent a person's social status, tribes or even family background. People could tell a person's identity just by looking at their hair. For Example, warriors from Wolof tribe would braided their hair when they went to war and the woman who mourning would do a more subdued style or just not doing their hair. "What's more, many

Based on my understanding on question 2, first I want to write about the relationship between artists and their fans in our era. Sources from Google Before social media exists, artists were like "semi-god", we only see them in newspaper or listen to them in the radio. But after social media comes into our life, the relationship between artists and their fans changed. Sometime we see Taylor Swift comments on her fans post, or 2NE1 got their own fans club, so they can interact with their fans.  As the social media grown bigger and wider, artists can constantly keep their audiences up to date on things that matters, for example like when there is concert or autograph session even when they are not dropping any new album soon. But in the same time, artists also facing challenges like they always need to maintain the relationship with their fans, they have to take time to respond their fans that contact them.  Other than that, social media also give fans power to

In my last post, I wrote about my opinions and the definition of Cultural Appropriation, and I found a word "Cultural Appreciation". So I was studying what is Cultural Appreciation? In this post, I want to write about the differences between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation as  I found out that most of the people (including myself) usually did not aware that when we are trying to appreciate a culture, we never thought is it appropriate, and it might brings harm more than good.  This is the reason why we need to understand the differences Cultural Appropriation  and Cultural Appreciation .  A person wearing an outfit, put their palms together and eye closing intended fit into a stereotypical “East Asian” image. (Image from Everyday Feminism.) First, What is  Cultural Appreciation? Cultural Appreciation is similar with Cultural Exchange. It is about learning another culture with respectation and courtesy,  take time to learn, interact and  both sides w

Karlie Kloss during Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Image from The Closet Feminist. Katy Perry dressed as a geisha at American Music Awards in 2013. Image from ThoughtCo. Culture Appropriation is an act of using somethings that from other people's culture without showing respect and understanding. A ppropriation occur when a leading group of people utilizes the craftsmanship, culture or religious images, thoughts and expressions from long-marginalized groups to profit themselves.   This kind of issues usually happened in music, fashion, beauty industries. For example, wearing a Pocahontas (Native American) costume for Halloween, or Katy Perry dressed as a geisha at American Music Awards in 2013.  But this does not mean that we can not use other people's culture, Quote from TheStar.com " Cultures are fluid and we constantly appreciate and take from one another." Instead of just making money from other people's culture, we should understand an

Listed below are the 5 topic choices given for Media Cultures L5: 1. Critically review a local art/design exhibition in-depth. Discuss it in terms of its curatorial goals and exhibition design with related research. 2. Compare and contrast the relationship of celebrities with their fans in two different creative communities. Which one is relatively more healthy in their connections? 3. Exam ine the issue of cultural appropriation within a domain of beauty, fashion or music industry. Why are some communities cautious of, or against this practice? 4. What are some issues and best practices for design in multilingual communities? Write from the perspective of either a graphic designer or interactive designer. 5. Explore a variety of media is used within the context of branding or transmedia storytelling. Does variety dilute the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or story? Among these topics, I am really interested in topic (2) and (3) as I always pay close attention for