Popular Culture

Popular Culture vs High Art

Art- ‘The creation of works of beauty or other special significance’

Culture- ‘The ideas, customs, and art of a particular society’

Popular- ‘Designed to appeal to a mass audience’          

-       Collins English Dictionary 2001

Andy Warhol- Turquioise Marilyn 1964

-       questioning the skill needed for a fine art piece

-       paintings mimicking painting-by-numbers – trying to hide his lack of traditional skills behind his mass-production technique

Popular culture often contrasts with a more exclusive, even elitist ‘high culture’, that is, the culture of the ruling social groups. The earliest use of ‘popular’ in English was during the fifteenth century in law and politics, meaning ‘low’, ‘base’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘of the common people’ until the late eighteenth century by which time it began to mean ‘widespread’ and gain in positive connotation.

Pop Culture- fashion, music, sport and film

-       influenced art from the 1960’s onwards- pop art

Matthew Arnold- Culture and Anarchy, 1869- defines culture as ‘the disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection’

Having culture meant to ‘know the best that has been said and thought in the world’.

Arnold saw high culture as a force for moral and political good- still a view which is uncontested today.

High Culture consists of the appreciation of what ‘High Art’. Western concept of High Culture concentrates on the Greek/Roman traditions (brought back again in the Renaisssance period).

Campbell’s soup tin- turned into art by Andy Warhol- Campbell’s Soup Can, 1964.

-       layout like a row of tins you would perhaps find in the supermarket

Is the distinction between popular culture and high art becoming blurred?

-       Banksy’s Tomato Soup- was just an ironic statement about high art but now is a piece selling for £117,600

-       Is his work now high art?

Martin Creed Work No 227- The lights going on and off 2000

- uses shock tactics to ‘challenge the idea of art’. Art gone too far? Idea of authorship being challenged also- lighting technician made this piece, not the artist. This art is based on the viewer’s perception of it only.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, CFC76311561.1, 2002

-       idea that western culture has stolen other country’s prized possessions in return for McDonald’s food.

-       Layout in the gallery like the pieces were some of the ‘treasures’ found in exotic places- but in reality were mocking the gallery space.

Frankfurt School: Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer

Reinterpreted Marx for the 20^th century- era of ‘late captialism’

Defined ‘the Culture industry’

-       homogeneity

-       predictability

‘All mass culture is identical’:

Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. ... The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. ... The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle. ... film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part ... all mass culture is identical.

- Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,1944

Herbert Marcuse on ‘Popular Culture’:

The irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. ... it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life - much better than before - and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.

-       Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1968

‘Art is a vehicle that can make an ad more distinctive, more memorable, and at its best, carry a message in such a way that it will be more effective in influencing its audience.  But that’s only at its best, and it only happens when its creator … knows that the artistic and commercial elements have to live together in an almost symbiotic relationship.  If one starts to dominate at the expense of the other, the relationship becomes more parasitic than symbiotic’.

Steel, Truth Lies and Advertising, 1998, p. 12

‘Today advertising is the product.  What people are buying, whether it’s drink, jeans, medicines or electronic gadgets, is the perception of the product they have absorbed from advertising’.

Eric Clark, The Want Makers.  The World of Advertising: How They Make You Buy, 1988

‘Has the distinction between art and non-art become irrelevant in an age when art and science, commerce and fashion are all whipped together in the global culture blender we call the Internet.

‘The answer is no, though the reason has little to do with the traditional rationales for defining art, be they to distinguish high and low culture or to validate creative programs in academic settings.  Art may be temporarily out of place, but society needs to make a place for it.  Because society needs art to survive’.

- Blais, J. and Ippolito, J. (2006), At the Edge of Art, London, Thames and Hudson,

p. 8

Ken Musgrave- ‘I have had the very good luck to have been in the right time and place to have made an original contribution to the young field of computer art. My artworks all issue directly from computer programs. Thus they represent examples of "algorithmic art" in (what I would say is) its purest form. Thus I am an Algorist. I believe that the peculiar process by which these works come into being represents a revolutionary event in the history of the creative process for the visual arts’.

- http://www.kenmusgrave.com/gallery_intro.html

‘So why aren’t most games art?  One possibility is that interactivity precludes art; that art is a form of communication from the artist to viewer, and if the viewer starts to interfere, the message is lost’

- Adams, E.W., ‘Will computer games ever be a legitimate art form?’, in Clarke, A. and Mitchell, G. (eds) (2007), Videogames and Art, Bristol, Intellect Books, p. 257

Julius Wiedermann 2003- Digital Beauties

-       almost summing up cultural stereotype of who is producing digital art

‘Another objective of art is to reach the audience in some way.  Videogames accomplish this by allowing the player control. However, games could and should go much further … A hindrance in the argument of videogames as art is the lack of an efficient way to display them in an exhibit or gallery.

These shows would also be mocked and judged maliciously by those in the traditional art world … playing the videogame will become the exhibit’

- Martin, B, ‘Should Videogames be viewed as art?’, in Clarke, A. and Mitchell, G. (eds) (2007), Videogames and Art, Bristol, Intellect Books, p. 206