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Overview
These are the questions addressed in the Art in the Age of Mass Media, as John Walker examines the fascinating relationship between art and mass media, and the myriad interactions between high and low culture in a postmodern, culturally pluralistic world.
Using a range of historic and contemporary works of art, Walker explores the variety of ways in which artists have responded to the arrival of new, mass media. He ranges from the socialist paintings of Courbet to the anti-Nazi photomontages of Heartfield, from community murals and Keith Haring's use of graffiti to the kitsch self-promotion associated with Jeff Koons. The new edition describes what happened during the 1990s, including Toscani's adverts for Benetton, the simulations of Leeds 13, art and cinema, Damien Hirst, and the cyberart currently being produced for the internet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783718924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
John A. Walker (1937-2014) was Reader in Art and Design History at Middlesex University. He is the author of Art and Celebrity (Pluto, 2002), Art in the Age of Mass Media (Pluto, 2001), and Cultural Offensive: America's Impact on British Art Since 1945 (Pluto, 1998).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CORE TERMS/CONCEPTS
Traditionally, culture has been categorized in a variety of ways. For instance, it has been divided into three ranks: high, middle and low. Cultural production has also been discussed in terms of particular media or artforms – painting, photography, graphic design, etc. – and in terms of broader groupings such as the fine arts, the crafts, industrial design, the mass or electronic media. Such categories influence the way we think about, interpret and value visual artefacts, but they also have consequences in the world outside the mind. They have material consequences in terms of the policies and practices of educational and arts institutions, galleries and museums. To cite just one example: in 1979 an application to the British Arts Council for a grant to repair trade union banners was rejected on the grounds that the banners were craft not art, even though many such banners feature painted images. In Britain trade union banners are collected and preserved by the Museum of Labour History in Manchester, not by the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Gallery in London.
All visual artefacts, no matter what their medium, can be ranked according to a good-to-bad scale of aesthetic value, but in terms of the hierarchical schema high/middle/low it has been customary to assign the fine arts to the top and the mass media to the bottom. It is surely no coincidence that this hierarchical schema echoes the division of European society into three classes: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or middle class, and the proletariat or working class. (A more complex model introduces the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat or underclass.) Appreciation of the fine arts is primarily associated with the upper classes and appreciation of the mass media with the lower classes. Of course, a person's opportunity to enjoy a variety of types and levels of culture increases dramatically with the possession of wealth and leisure; consequently some rich people appreciate both high and low culture. The intelligentsia – a social group privileged in terms of cultural capital if not monetary capital – also has the opportunity to enjoy a broad spectrum of culture.
The Fine Arts
In the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, what we call 'the visual arts' were regarded as useful crafts on a par with shoemaking and cooking. The situation began to change from the Renaissance onwards as artists succeeded in raising the low social status of the visual arts by emphasizing their intellectual, theoretical and learned character, and by playing down their manual aspects. By the eighteenth century, according to cultural historians, the modern system of the arts (a grouping of five arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music) had become established. The use of the term 'fine' implied beauty, skill, superiority, elegance, perfection and an absence of practical or utilitarian purpose. The fine arts gained their specific character by contrast with mechanical, applied or useful arts and crafts. In some instances qualitative distinctions are made even within a single type of activity; for instance the distinction that has been drawn between architecture and mere building (a Gothic cathedral counts as architecture, whereas a bicycle shed counts as building).
Although historically the concept of fine art became associated with particular artforms – namely painting, sculpture and architecture – there is nothing intrinsic to the practices, materials and media of these arts which makes them 'fine'. This point is confirmed by the fact that many contemporary fine artists employ the new technologies of lithography, photography, film, video, holography, photocopying and computers. It is not the materials and technologies themselves which produce the distinctions between fine art, craft and mass culture, but rather the way in which those materials and technologies are habitually used – the different formal conventions employed and the social institutions within which artefacts are produced, distributed and consumed. Even the concept of art itself (the concept which enables us to distinguish works of art from non-art objects) can be regarded as a social institution. A satisfactory history of European art, therefore, ought to include a history of the concept 'art as well as a history of artists, works and patrons.
As already indicated, the distinction between the fine and the applied arts is based partly on the contrast between useless and useful. However, the idea that the fine arts are useless, that is exclusively concerned with the provision of aesthetic pleasure, is a dubious one. Architecture clearly serves practical as well as aesthetic functions. In fact, this is also true of the other arts: painting, for instance, serves ideological-symbolic ends and decorative functions. Our contemporary conception of works of art as purely aesthetic owes much to the existence of public museums and art galleries. (Many major museums date from the nineteenth century.) Isolated on the walls of these institutions, works of art derived from churches, country houses and public buildings are detached from their original physical settings and from the religious/secular contexts which helped to determine their meaning.
Curators usually arrange their collections in chronological sequences and in national schools. This kind of arrangement pleases art historians but, unfortunately, it fosters the impression that art's evolution is autonomous, growing primarily out of previous art rather than out of any external social demand. Once the museum existed, artists began to make works of art with that display context in mind. The result was that the size of works of art increased and many of them began to be about art or formal issues rather than about the world outside.
For centuries the visual arts were funded by, and served the interests of, the ruling classes of Europe and North America. When, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the upper middle class (that is, industrialists, businessmen, merchants, financial speculators) replaced royalty and the aristocracy as the dominant force in society, it inherited the culture promoted by the aristocracy. Even now, the fine arts are appreciated, supported and collected by a mainly middle-class public. Today, however, the fine arts exist in a culture dominated by the mass media. The fine arts continue, but in a sense they are a residue of a pre-industrial social formation. To some they appear marginal and anachronistic. Arguably, their fate resembles that of the horse in the age of motor cars, trains and aircraft.
Pre-industrial values are evident in an art such as painting where skilled handwork results in a small output of unique products which are, as a result, expensive. Paintings and sculptures are usually luxury goods which only the wealthiest individuals or companies can afford to buy or commission. If, as some argue, all distinctions between art and mass culture have been dismantled, how do we explain the fact that a reproduction of one of Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' can be purchased for a few pounds while the original painting costs tens of millions?
A specific set of practices, training schemes, organizations and institutions - what is commonly referred to as 'the artworld' – ensures the particular identity and continuity of the fine arts. The part played by academies and art colleges in supplying the artworld with fresh talent is clearly crucial. A few artists succeed without any art education but the vast majority of contemporary artists have benefited from a period at artschool. In these schools, individual production is the norm and it is highly valued. (This contrasts with the mass media where people tend to work in teams.) Modern artschools have fostered personal expression and experimentalism. The emphasis on creativity and self-fulfilment means that most art students are not encouraged to please patrons or to communicate with the public. Work is generated out of inner necessity – viewers and buyers come later. Only a small proportion of artschool graduates are taken up by dealers and are then able to make a full-time living as professional artists.
Many fine artists struggle to exist on various small sources of income. They therefore occupy a socially marginal position. This position does have a positive aspect: the artist has a greater degree of independence and intellectual freedom than, say, the graphic designer working in an advertising agency who has to serve the needs of clients. (Again the situation is somewhat different for architects.) This means that the more politically aware artists are free to make works of art that are critical of the society around them. Of course, this advantage is counterbalanced by a chronic lack of the resources which would enable artists to disseminate their critical images widely. But, as we shall see later, some artists have succeeded in forming links with existing organizations and community groups in order to disseminate their ideas.
A few professional artists manage to become very famous, successful and rich. The names Picasso, Dali, Warhol and Hockney immediately spring to mind. Once they have reached a position of eminence, such artists can wield a considerable degree of power and influence. They can make statements either through their work or via the media, or by contributing money and their names to particular campaigns and causes.
The Mass Media and Mass Culture
The expression 'mass media' denotes certain modern systems of communication and distribution which 'mediate' between relatively small, specialized groups of cultural producers and very large numbers of cultural consumers. A list of the mass media generally includes photography, the cinema, radio, television, video, advertising, newspapers, magazines, comics, paperbacks and recorded music in the form of discs and tapes. (It is obvious that some of these categories are not exact equivalents and also that some of them overlap – films are shown on TV and released on videotape; adverts make use of photography and appear in a variety of media.) Some historians regard the invention of printing as the beginning of the age of mass media, but a situation in which billions of individuals are exposed daily to a spectrum of powerful mass media is surely a uniquely twentieth-century experience.
A characteristic common to the mass media is the use of machines such as cameras, projectors, printing presses, computers and satellites to record, edit, replicate and disseminate images and information. What the mass media make possible are cultural products which are cheap, plentiful, widely available and capable of rapid distribution. Machines and their outputs enable communication to take place, but they also stand between the audience and the artists or performers,- thus direct contact typical of much folk and popular culture is absent from mass culture. (Direct contact persists in the live arts such as theatre, ballet, rock and pop music performances.) On the positive side, technology and mechanical reproduction have brought about a tremendous democratization of culture. On the negative side, billions of people have become consumers of culture – much of it trivial and sadistic – produced by others.
Another characteristic common to several of the mass media is that they use more than one medium, that is, they are mixed- or multi-media. Feature films, for example, employ moving coloured pictures, natural noises and the sounds of human language and music,- they also combine the skills of storytellers with those of costume and set designers, and with the skills of actors who may well have trained in the theatre. The combination of media appealing to different senses makes for a rich, perceptual experience. It also facilitates communication and understanding because the meaning of an image can be repeated or reinforced by the words or music that accompany it. There is thus a sharp contrast between the mixed-media aesthetic of the mass media and the media-purity aesthetic typical of modernist painting and sculpture.
Since the mass media are vehicles or channels capable of transmitting pre-existing information, they can transmit examples of culture from any level - high, medium or low, via television, a Beethoven symphony, a documentary film or a game show. However, the mass media are designed to reach the largest possible audiences – 'success is often measured in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Consequently their cultural content is predominantly low-to-medium in character. The idea 'mass audience often has negative associations because it is assumed that an item which appeals to millions must represent the lowest common denominator of taste. However, reality is more complex: in 1990 a taste for opera singing was extended to millions who had never been to an opera house when an operatic aria was used by television as the theme music for the World Cup soccer games held in Italy.
No one should underestimate the power of the mass media to relay art images. For instance, in 1988, a rock concert was held in London to honour the seventieth birthday of Nelson Mandela,- works of art by the side of the stage created by African, American and British artists were seen by an estimated audience of 500 million in 63 countries. Film and video pieces by artists produced for the same event ran into censorship problems because of their radical content. This illustrates another negative characteristic of the mass media: a tendency towards blandness and conformity.
A curious feature of the mass media is that the large audiences reached are not gathered together in one place in a single crowd but dispersed in many locations. A TV programme is watched by millions of families and individuals but their experience is not a collective one. In other words, the mass media atomize and demobilize their audiences. In spite of letter columns in newspapers, phone-in programmes on radio, studio audiences, market research and rating charts, feedback is very difficult for mass audiences. Their ability to influence or to have a democratic say in the form and content of the mass media is extremely limited. (Purchasing power is probably their greatest weapon.) The mass media function vertically; that is to say messages tend to be transmitted in one direction only, from top to bottom (and from urban centres to rural peripheries, from the developed countries to the developing ones). Power in the mass media is concentrated and centralized; the aim of the community arts and media movements of the 1970s was precisely to demystify and decentralize the means by which visual culture is produced.
Marshall McLuhan, the mass media pundit of the 1960s, once argued that the consequence of the invention of a new medium is to displace older ones in the direction of art. A new medium often causes older ones to decline or to change their character. Furthermore, the older media usually become the content of the newest. Television, for instance, contributed to a decline in cinema attendances, caused film companies to make different types of films, and fed off the past of the cinema by showing hundreds of old movies.
High culture (including the fine arts) is normally thought of as the antithesis of mass culture, as a form of culture appealing to an educated, privileged élite or minority, hence the alternative term 'minority culture'. But, in fact, minority cultures – in the sense of small or specialist audiences – are catered for by the mass media: radio channels are differentiated according to levels of culture; so-called 'quality' newspapers reach much smaller audiences than tabloid newspapers; magazines about specialist subjects are designed to appeal to particular interest groups within society. In other words, niche marketing does take place within the mass media. (As media and channels proliferate, the mass audiences of the past are fragmenting.) However, even a 'small' mass media audience is normally many times larger than the total number of people who will visit an exhibition of contemporary art in a private gallery.
Since the advent of industrialization, social scientists have increasingly preferred the concept of 'the masses' to 'the people', hence 'mass culture/ media/society'. Some left-wing theorists have argued that mass culture is a myth, a mystification devised by bourgeois sociologists. In their view it is misleading for two reasons: first, it implies the masses themselves are the source of the culture (this was one reason why the Frankfurt School philosophers devised the term 'culture industry'); and second, the mass media audience is never a monolithic, homogeneous mass – it is always stratified and variegated. Even marketing and advertising agencies recognize that the public can be sub-divided according to such factors as income, employment, psychology, tastes and lifestyle. In spite of these qualifications, the term 'mass' cannot be abandoned altogether because of the sheer size of the audiences the cultural industries continue to reach.
In most countries of the world, but especially in those which are advanced, industrial, consumer societies, the mass media dominate human consciousness. Only the most isolated or reclusive individuals can escape their influence. They are major forces in the development and reproduction of culture. Many intellectuals, especially those employed in education, are critical of the mass media for several reasons: the media, it is argued, reproduce dominant ideologies and are thus a conservative or counter-revolutionary force; they encourage passivity, apathy and a sense of powerlessness; power is concentrated in the hands of a few people who are motivated by self-interest, private profit and/or social control; the culture associated with the mass media tends to be of low quality, bland, escapist, stereotyped, standardized, conformist and trivial. In short, mass culture is seen as an 'opium of the people, a means by which the labouring classes are manipulated and diverted during their leisure hours in preparation for their daily toil in offices and factories, or as a compensation for the misery of unemployment. The education system is viewed as one of the principal sites of defence against the blandishments of the mass media because it is one of the few places where the media are critically examined.
These charges will not be considered at length here. There is much truth in them but at the same time they are too sweeping and simplistic. For example, not all mass media products are of low artistic quality; to some degree the injustices, problems and contradictions of the world are discussed by the media; some TV documentaries are even sharply critical of the present organization of society. Furthermore, whatever promises, lies and fantasies the mass media transmit, there is always the lived experience of reality to act as a corrective. This is especially true in poor countries which receive, via the media, images of affluence emanating from Europe and North America. In the view of the Chilean sociologist Armand Mattelart, the belief that the bourgeois media are omnipotent is a serious error:
The messages of mass culture can be neutralized by the dominated classes who can produce their own antidotes by creating the sometimes contradictory seeds of a new culture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Art in the Age of Mass Media"
by .
Copyright © 2001 John A. Walker.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
1. Core Terms/Concepts
2. Art Uses Mass Culture
3. The Mass Media Use Art
4. Mechanical Reproduction and the Fine Arts
5. High Culture: Affirmative or Negative?
6. Cultural Pluralism and Post-Modernism
7. Alternatives
8. Art and Mass Media in the 1980s
9. Artists and New Media Technologies
10. War, The Media and Art in the 1990s
11. Conclusion
Notes and References
Bibliography
Index