Has art killed culture?
Andy Warhol, Mickey Mouse
After the second world war artists were steeped in history and introspection. Art has never been more serious in its view of life than it was in the era of Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. But even as modern painting reached such heights and depths, western society was going through an epochal transformation. The power of the capitalist economies in the postwar era was unprecedented in world history. An entirely new lifestyle, that of “consumerism”, was born.
Consumerism instantly inspired artists. Pop art in America and Britain took the surfaces of objects, the instant appearances of the new bright world, as its subject matter. Everywhere, emotional depth in art was censored. Abstract Expressionism had to die. Art could teach people to look at the world in a new way: to embrace the cool. Pop art taught everyone to enjoy money and the mass media and 1980s post-modernism taught the same lesson again.
How art killed our culture by Jonathan Jones.
Ooh, strong words. Discuss. I asked Leo Abaya of the UP College of Fine Arts to react to the piece: read his opinion in Comments.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 9th, 2009 at 23:50
Leo Abaya replies:
Well, he obviously is condemning the “establishment” visual artists more than the literary artists.
My view is that artists define art-culture as much as it defines them. And for that, with consumerism (and the commodification of everything, including the medium of communication—think McLuhan) looming over the society in the last 40 or so years, the artists would inevitably react to it, both in a celebratory and in a critical way.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that art being made now is all about celebrating the shallowness of modern mass culture. Maybe the “Hirsts” and the “Koonses” of art in Britain and the States celebrate it. And the institutions lap it up because these expressions patronizingly support the establishment and legitimize what they stand for, which is capitalism. The establishment has the power to do so, therefore they can say, “Hey, were not really elitist—we also appreciate low art-cheap art-mass culture based art”—reminiscent of Marie Antoinette having a peasant village built on the grounds of Versailles where the courtiers could vicariously experience peasant life. This is something that would be unthinkable and redundant to the disenfranchised sector.
There is still a lot of serious stuff going on. Not only with artists but also with the theorists. But because a lot of these expressions are critical of the establishment and its tropes, it is inevitable that they lie in the fringes and are not really as visible.
A reason why these critical artists also avoid the traditional forms like painting, large scale sculptures and projects, and topics/intentions like truths and the spiritual, is because these are identified with the modern (and elitist), and these artists are equally aware that the “medium is the message”. For these reasons a lot of critical works use the familiar graffiti, performance, pulp fiction, video and other time-based media. Aestheticizing mass culture would have meant committing exactly the “crimes” that they are critical of. Artist now use the real and the actual (the objects and modalities of consumerist society) because these are the truths at the moment. We live in an age where political pronouncements are exposed as spin, where assassinations are not solitary psychopathic acts but complex top level conspiracies and heroic images are actually staged. The heroes of our times are flawed individuals, and artistic talent can even be made to appear where there is none, making it very hard to even think of transcendence and timelessness and depth and all the time-honored virtues in art.
These aberrations shout at the contemporary artist in the face. And responding to mass culture through either persuasion means art still does what is expected of it—reflecting “even fraudâ€.
I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that people say culture is better than nature. With all the very visible global efforts being made towards the preservation of the planet and its natural resources, what is in fact being said is that all of these worldly things, culture included, mean nothing if the centers of our civilizations are inundated because the polar ice caps have already melted.
The art produced in a period in history explains and is explained by that period. It is true today, more than ever.
And as far as I am concerned, after man became aware of the concepts of surplus, limited resources, insatiable needs and the power that can be wielded from controlling them, thereby using them in various degrees of disguise to supplant belief, we’ve been progressively screwing ourselves since, with art leading or not leading the way.
So why blame art? How about posing the question to the signatories of the checque he received for sitting as a jury member in the Turner Prize?
I mean—
Cheers!