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Art In The
world Of Media.
Kate Grove
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Introduction
The Birth Of The Monster Called Media
How We Define And Recognise The Arts And Media
How Arts And Media Operate
How Arts And Media Combine
Conclusion
Bibliography
Is Fine Art dead? Has media taken over, leading us toward a future of commercialised mass advertising? I do not believe so, not yet anyway. There has been dramatic interplay between the two however. I wanted to try and define and categorise fine art and media to discover how and to what purpose media has changed and influenced fine art, and vice versa. Media as we know it in its full extreme is a reasonably new phenomenon , but a very powerful one. Artist Michael Sandles 1988 sculpture entitled �A mighty blow for freedom/Fuck the media� certainly denotes strong feelings but does not explain his reasoning for such an extremist rejection to media. I wanted to discover why media has created such a deep felt opinion.
The Birth Of The Monster Called Media.
Through-out the last century, society has
gradually developed a man made world. Until about fifty years ago, nature and its organic
images were the keys to feeling in art. Natures endless cycles through decay and
regeneration , its ruthless responses to weather and light change through each season .
This natural order had intense input in all aspects of life for humans and therefore art.
This beautiful purity of Pre-modern art was challenged by the booming cities, industry and
the mass media of the late twentieth century. The gradual take over of the industrial age
can be seen in such pictures as Vincent Van Gogh�s �The Huth Factories At
Clichy�, 1887. The vibrant cornfields are
subtly interrupted by the smoky chimneys of industry, a strange mixture; signalling a
change of times.
Up until the mid nineteenth century our European culture was dominated by architecture,
painting and sculpture, the three principle visual arts. These flourished under
considerable patronage by the most wealthy individuals, groups and institutions within the
society such as monarchies, councils and the church. In the last twenty years especially,
capitalist self success, electronics and the emergence of an urban, consumer society have
created a world dominated by force-fed stimuli. Media, not art, now dominates our culture.
Sadly this seems to have resulted in quality or meaning having less significance than
excess. This overloading has subsequently affected our art. As media took over it was
feared that fine art could not survive in this brand new world. Manufacturing produced new
and exciting shape organisations, colours, smells and sounds. Mass colour printing and
photography challenged the art of painting, and arguably forced a decline in its power and
status. Consequently, the social function of painting has dramatically changed. Although
architecture was far less effected by these changes than sculpture and painting it is true
to say that art had never had such competition from its surroundings before.
During the 1970�s and 80�s art historians were employed by the British colleges
of art to broaden areas of expertise to include mass media. Courses and additional
lectures on the history of industrial design, advertising, photography, film, video and
computer graphics (and more) were all part of this. This was part of producing future
media professionals to work in our media world. Fine art students became the minority, and
had to re-evaluate there �employment� statistics. The most interesting part of
this was the interaction that art and media began to play. People began to wonder just
what the relationship between art and media was. �Artists� began to use the tool
of the media students, and sometimes vice versa. Obviously as time progresses the human
eye is provided with an ever increasing collection of art history, but today our minds are
so full of eclectic images that a pure appreciation of a work in its own right is totally
impossible. Twenty four hours a day our minds are bombarded with images through TV,
newspapers, the net and scarily extensive advertising. Society is now so crammed with
informative and persuasive advertising, companies are finding it hard to condense their
messages into texts short and stark enough to be taken notice of by the overfed public.
Therefore, I feel that image is taking over text because of its immediate and easy
recognition. I feel that the influence of media on twenty century life is so strong that
art could not be produced without some form of reflection of mass media. Many of
history�s greatest artists already openly display great reference to media.
America�s Jeff Koons and more recognisably Andy Warhol display
a form of self -presentation and self promotion that indicates similar behavioural
patterns to huge mass culture stars such as Michael Jackson or Madonna.
How We Define And Recognise The Arts And Media.
We have learnt to categorise culture in
definite terms we refer to. These categories influence the way we appreciate and value
visual experiences. Whatever form of aesthetics we consider there will always be good and
bad examples, but in our culture there has been a definite recognition of the fine arts
being classed higher than media arts. In conjunction, it is mostly assumed that
appreciation of the fine arts is linked to the upper-classes and appreciation of mass art
or media with the lower-classes. Of course I feel that this is a sweeping generalisation.
Perhaps the difference in wealth creates different lifestyles and ultimately this would
mean that the upper-classes may be able to appreciate a fuller range of the arts as they
can afford to travel, privately educate or provide greater leisure time. There are also
the intelligentsia to consider however, a group privileged in terms of cultural capital
and not necessarily wealth that could also appreciate the full spectrum of the art.
During the Middle ages art was held in the same regard as useful crafts such as shoe and
dress making . As the Renaissance occurred artists such as Michelangelo began to raise the social status of the visual arts by
emphasising their intellectual and theoretical learned character. By the eighteenth
century the �Fine Arts� had been established as painting, sculpture,
architecture, poetry and music, and as their name suggests they had been given a certain
superiority to mechanical or useful arts and crafts. Even during these times however, it
was established that fine art was not evaluated by the materials used to produce visuals,
it was the method, place of production, distribution, acceptance and function that
qualified fine art as a distinction to craft (or today as mass culture).
Today�s artists employ all the new technologies of lithography, photography, film,
video, holography and computers to use in their fine art. Some people believe this makes
the boundaries between the two even harder to recognise. Surely this determines that it is
not the materials and technologies themselves that define the differences between Fine art
mass media or craft, it is the way they are employed. If the arts and media are the same
thing because they employ the same tools or resulting image, than how can a postcard or
reproduction of Van
Gogh�s �Sunflowers� cost fifty pence while the original still costs millions ?
However, the definition of the fine arts as useless and crafts or media as
�useful� is a dubious one. Can fine art be produced and consumed purely for
aesthetic beauty? Is it not true that most works of art have some underlying depth,
meaning or purpose?
Certainly throughout history, reading and writing were skills available only to those
privileged in terms of wealth, and therefore art could be used to teach and persuade the
illiterate masses. In my view this was the use of fine art as media. I think the
Industrial Revolution certainly encouraged the use of media more than any other factor,
but that media has a much longer history than that. Years ago, the church was such a major
patronage of the fine arts because the pictures of Biblical stories they commissioned
encouraged people to attend church. They depicted what would happen to those who did not
join the fellowship, they depicted the joys of heaven and showed spiritual characters
humans - in a form that helped us to empathise, feel close and believe in them. Giotto�s Byzantine frescoes are examples of this. Gustave Courbet�s �The Stonebreakers�
1849, is a later example of fine art that was produced to sway the public mind. Thought of
as the first of his political work, it shows two working class persons engadged in the
lowest form of toil. The old man and young boy represent the endless cycle of this
backbreaking way of life. It seems that this was Courbet's first attempt
at socialist advertising. In this way the fine arts were used to manipulate the views of
the public, similar to advertising and very like media.
Contemporary views that fine art has little function other than aesthetic beauty are
surely encouraged by the method we use to consume fine art. The works of art derived from
churches or public buildings are removed and displayed on stark white walls of galleries
and museums, isolated from their original settings and contexts, which had previously
determined their meanings.
I feel that it is the overwhelming power
that mass media holds over the collective public that really separates it from the fine
arts. Unless you live on a deserted island, it would be almost impossible for you to live
your life in our contemporary world with out experiencing some form of mass media.
Although media seems to have brought around a certain democratisation of culture, it has
simultaneously force fed the public with a lot of unimportant drivel we seem powerless to
stop. The most curious issue of mass media is that it thrives reaching huge audiences at
one time, but dispersed in separate locations. Through television watched in your own home
or newspapers read individually, the experience is hardly ever collective. I feel this may
be part of the reason we seem so powerless to create feedback, apart from our purchasing
power.
This is why I value fine art so much more than media. A work of art gives all power to the
viewer. It wants to provoke individual thoughts and opinions, therefore encouraging
interaction, debate and individual opinion making. It will not adapt to the viewers
opinions to produce an ideal response and stereotype the communities ideas, forcing
everyone to feel powerless. It has a certain value and worth simply by being unique.
Having written these thoughts however, I do not feel that a work of art looses all
it�s worth by being used in the media. When Pavarotti�s opera singing was used
in the 1991 world cup presentation, at first I was disgusted by this �misuse� of
this classic form of music. but eventually I was pleased that the media had opened up this
form of art to a much wider audience than it would of had without the media�s use.
This advert using Leonardo
Da Vinci�s world famous �Mona Lisa� gently mocks the piece, but does no serious harm as the
piece is so well known in it�s original state.
Others believe that however much media tries to persuade and control the public mind,
reality will always show the truth and overrule. Chilean sociologist Armand Mattelart
certainly had faith that mass audiences are not that easily seduced. He commented.
�The messages of mass culture can be neutralised by the dominated classes who can
produce their own antidotes by creating sometimes contradictory seeds of a new
culture�
Media is still a threatening tool to attack our minds however, consciously or
subconsciously shaping our views in a controlled fashion. This is the underlying issue
separating art and media I feel . Media is produced for reasons to promote, persuade and
make money. Art is much more innocent and pure. It is more a progression of the human mind
rather than wealth !
Only a few artists have managed to have success within their own lifetimes to such a
degree that they can use the power of media within their art. Such names as Warhol, Hockney , Dali and Picasso all managed to reach such a position of e minence that they could
make statements to the public either through their art, the media or contributing their
names to certain campaigns or causes.
During the last few years mass media has
become so extensive, it is now pretty impossible for art to be produced uninfluenced by
media. The English art critic Peter Fuller once commented that, �Artists would do
well to ignore the mass media entirely and get on replenishing their own art in nature, in
natural form and in their imaginative response to the traditions which they are working
with.�
Surely in our contemporary built up urban environments a totally pure perception of nature
is impossible. The media has fed us with a false perception of nature and the world around
us that we are helpless to ignore. Even during the beginning of real mass media in
Britain, during the 1940�s and 50�s, the artist Richard Hamilton commented that,
�To be a fine artist is to suffer the divided personality of a schizophrenic`
At work artists drew nudes, nature, truth, while at home he looked at pulp novels, cinema
scope and American car styling. Sharply different worlds.
Richard Hamilton took these two different worlds and combined them. He was an
artist belonging to a group of intellectuals who called themselves �The Independent Group�, around the 1950�s. They collected to discuss various
topical issues including popular culture. It was during these discussions that Laurence
Alloway first coined the term �Pop Art�. The
group prized popular culture as a new form of art in a way. Because media was now produced
by specialists rather than �by the people for the people�, they perceived it as
a specialist profession. The group believed that in this new democratic society and frame
of mind arts and media stood distinguished with equal importance. Richard Hamilton was a major head in the group and was one of the first British
artists to produce Pop
art. He defined mass media as;
Popular (designed for mass audiences)
Transient (short term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (Aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big business
All factors he loved about media, perhaps because they defined the opposite to what society called fine art. In one of his earliest pieces �$he�, oil-paint merged in to relief and collage of media imagery. It was the result of an analysis of domestic appliances he took for the �I.G� on persuasive image. It is a collection of seductive streamline appliances ( taken directly from advertising) merging with a perfect machine like example of the typical American housewife. Photograph becomes diagram and seeps into painting. Female curves and attractiveness are shown within the appliances also. Rather than mocking women or America the piece seems to be a statement of society in the 1950�s. What people wanted, how we were persuaded and the reality of it all. By placing the media images Hamilton used into the place of fine art a fresh approach was created. People could look at the images without purchasing in mind. They were simply images. Although the public were outraged, and regarded the pieces as highly as they regarded mass media �rubbish�, I think Hamilton slightly opened the public eye to what extent media was operating. Like media the art works were idealist, vibrant and easy to recognise. The public did not see the artistic element in media Hamilton tried to expose. They wanted a clear divide between the two. Although Hamilton went on to delve into media as far as to design a Beatle�s album cover, he was always considered a fine artist. Today his work is prized highly and thought of only as fine art. Above all, Pop art painting and sculptures show that the media have become an ominous and unavoidable reality which has radically changed our conscious and our perceptions, our sense of values and our relationship to the world and ourselves.
Personally I think, as I take a sip of tea
from my Damien Hirst �Pharmaceutical piece� mug, that it is obvious that there
will always in the future be a close link and influence between the arts and media. I
think media will continue to dominate our society and will find many new ways and
technologies of communicating. But as media finds new tools, simultaneously does art. At
the moment traditional views of traditional fine art will still separate and devalue mass
media, but as the techno-age begins and the techno-generation grow up, mass media will
have been familiar to them throughout their lives and so views may change I feel. As
techno-artists are also produced, I think an ever greater bond between art and media shall
occur.
Since the Da-Da movement during the early twentieth century( an example being Hannah Hoch�s 1919 �Cut with the Kitchen Knife�) artists have known the culture and society can be defined by our rubbish.
Media tells us a lot about ourselves. It also helps the art world to survive by
advertising and communicating for it. The relationship between arts and media is very
complex as I have only briefly covered it, but overall I think what I have discovered is
that personal opinion on importance, value and function is what makes the issue so hard to
conclude.
Robert Hugh�s, art critic once said;
�Pop art was big and brash. It had learned from other media. But there
was no chance it could survive outside the museum. Equally though there is no way the
museum arts can rival the commercial extravaganzas of the real world� in any showdown
between painting and the big media, painting cannot win�.
Although I mainly agree that painting (or fine art) �cannot win�, I think it
will survive in it�s own right as a separate issue (perhaps even excel) and media
will grow instinctively, as that is in it�s character. Their interplay shall
continue, but basically I will enjoy art as art and media as media.
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By Kate Grove
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R Saudek
�Visual Arts In The Age Of Mass Communication�
E. Jussim
�Visual Communication and The Graphic Arts�
T. Perkins
�The History Of Western Art�