“MASS MEDIA-GASTRONOMIC” LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING AND PR COMMUNICATIONS (BASED ON THE IMAGE OF A UNICORN)

Abstract

In the space of media communications, a relatively new language, “mass media-gastronomic”, has been actively and successfully developing recently. This language is being mastered and effectively used by advertising and PR communications. Further merging of opportunities, tasks, languages of journalism, advertising, PR, development of already established ones, created of new intermediate territories (Mukařovský) with active inclusion and use of business and art fields is an aspect that now needs to be rethought, taking into account the active, rapid, much vector formation and development of the integrity of thematic dessert texts and their media texts, especially food photography. “Mass media-gastronomic” language manifests and represents the specifics of new platforms of peculiar, semantically and symbolically multilayered media texts; a new fusion of media texts, media discourses with texts of artistic culture (literature, painting, cinema), confectionery art; a new expansion of the intermediate territory, which has long been formed by the intentions of the mass media, ideology and literary culture, due to gastronomic culture; of a new language that has emerged and is rapidly improving for communication in the social and everyday environment, which is characterised by new models of leisure and its description, representation in the virtual space. The main purposes and objectives of the article are, firstly, to substantiate new platforms and languages that are created and developed on them for media texts, media discourses that have emerged under the influence of a rather unexpected growth of artistic culture, artistic opportunities supported by the digitalisation of confectionery art, its effective connection, even affinity with the world of media communications; secondly, to show the relationship, trends in the rapports of the connections between confectionery art, media texts, advertising, PR of goods, services, leading ideas, images of the ideology of modern social mythology; thirdly, to characterise the correlation between the traditional language of the world of advertising, PR and the “mass media-gastronomic” language; fourthly, to confirm the key theoretical theses by analysing and interpreting the image of the unicorn, which is actively used by modern confectioners, both world and Ukrainian. Research methods: the classical semiotics, the foundations of which were developed by Mukařovský, Todorov, Barth, Eco, Deleuze, Derrida, Lotman, and now their successor – Open Semiotics, which will not allow to “blur” the object of research and the boundaries between different areas of humanities and ideas; the concepts of the fusion of the fields of business, art, power, media communications by Bourdieu and Virilio, as well as the principles and approaches to the world of the imaginary, which were discussed by Caillois and Malraux in the second half of the twentieth century. The results and conclusions of the article. Desserts-texts and their media texts are a relatively new phenomenon that has already created and is developing a complex intermediate territory. “Mass mediagastronomic” language is a successful, in many ways even surprising discovery, which is still relatively new, fashionable, actively developing, acquiring its own features, qualities, and realising its possibilities. It is built by a system of signs that are both preserving memory, the functions of mythology, folklore, artistic culture and creativity, ideology, mass media, food, business, which are actively used and have not been levelled out and erased due to the novelty and popularity of the phenomenon. It is a language for telling simultaneously about a product, a service and, most importantly, the image of a happy world of joy, perfection, refined taste, pleasure that stands behind them and can be literally, to the point of bodily sensations, reproduced, created in the everyday life of an ordinary person. The usual artistic culture, its images, plots, language, and functions are not additional to the “mass media-gastronomic” language, they are used more often by advertising, on an ad hoc basis PR texts, and communications to achieve their main goal: to present and sell a product or service; to create, consolidate, and develop the image of a company, person, idea, etc. For the “mass media-gastronomic” language, artistic culture is a full-fledged and significant substantive component, without which the successful and effective functioning of new surprise platforms and intermediate territories is impossible.