Pop!

One of my former students e-mailed me last week asking for guidance on a project she is working on, the subject of which is Pop art, specifically political images in Pop art. She gave me a list of Pop artists who have incorporated political images into their works. There were the usual suspects, of course: Warhol, Rauschenberg, Fairey. But there were also some artists who would only be recognizable to scholars and New York/L.A. art gallery mavens.

I’ll start by sharing an excerpt from my e-mail reply to her: “All man-made objects are works of art,” I reminded her, since this is the subject of my first lecture each semester. “Everything that a culture produces is the art of that culture. However, we live in a culture where ‘art’ is generally considered to be what you see in ‘art’ galleries. This ‘art’ is generally thought to be concerned with personal expression, and the more inscrutable, the more esoteric, the more ‘high-minded,’ the better.

“But most people don't go to art galleries. Most people watch T.V., surf the Internet, and go to movie theaters. And while much of the stuff that they experience in these places is not particularly ‘high-minded,’ it has a huge impact on what they believe and how they behave. If you want to understand what is happening in a particular culture, look at the culture. Frankly, I've never heard of John Stango or Perry Milou. But I've heard of Bill O'Reilly, and I would say that he is probably the most popular Pop artist in America today, he and Barack Obama.

“Look at facebook (everybody else is). Andy Warhol famously said, ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ The funny thing is, Andy Warhol got it. He understood the impact of the media. That was his whole thing. And the ‘art’ world got it too, but they promptly forgot it. And they forgot it largely because they were and are invested in their own deals. Warhol said that art is what you see on the way to the museum, but the museum doesn't want you to know this.”

The art history textbook of the future will wrap up the history of painting sometime in the 1950s and continue from there with the history of television, film and related mass media. This is why Warhol is such a pivotal figure. He wasn’t just commenting on the impact of mass media, he was assimilating its methods. He was a commercial artist. He created his work in a Factory. He made films, produced the Velvet Underground and started a celebrity magazine. He understood the power of marketing. Of course, his supreme creation was himself, the image of the artist as celebrity. The music industry, to take but one example, from the Beatles to Lady Gaga, doesn’t look the way it does without Andy Warhol.

The most important images, the most influential images from our culture are not made by “artists,” they are made by filmmakers, television producers, ad agencies, and so many others, up to and including random people uploading memes to the Internet (like this one). The history of Western image-making since the Renaissance has been the introduction of one technological advancement after another: linear perspective, the printing press, the development of oil paints, newspapers, photography. Even photography had a difficult time making it into the traditional narrative. Then television arrived in the 1950s and Pop! that was the end of painting as the dominant “art” form. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the standard art history textbook.

“Museums and galleries,” writes David Summers in Real Spaces, “are only a tiny part of the social space of the modern world, and the art of museums and galleries will take us only so far in understanding the conditional transformations of Western modernity. To keep to the theme of images, the world in which we live as modern people differs from [every previous culture] in being utterly and continuously saturated with images, printed and electronic.” Beginning with television, the electronic media take their place in the history of Western culture, and it is there that we must look for our Pop “art.”

The common definition of "art"

The purpose of this blog is to present over a succession of related posts an argument for a reconsideration of the way we use the word “art.” The word may seem innocuous enough, but I believe there is a general misunderstanding as to what actually constitutes “art,” and I believe that this misunderstanding leads to larger, much more dangerous misunderstandings and conflicts.

I’m serious.

The common definition of “art” today refers to unique man-made objects that represent personal expression. “Art” objects are contrasted with mass-produced objects, the general belief being that the more technological an object is the less it is “art.” Indeed, the modern notion of the “fine arts” developed concurrently with and as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.  Before this cataclysm in human history, even the most technologically advanced object usually revealed some evidence of the hand or hands that made it. More precise machines all but eliminated this evidence, and the rise of the modern notion of “art” can be seen as a product of the Romanticist nostalgia for the past.

Lost in this new attitude toward human making is the fact that, as David Summers writes in Real Spaces, “technology is always the more or less immediate background for everything we call art,” whether we’re talking about the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa or the iPad. A Renaissance altarpiece was not classified as “art” the way the term is used today. It was a functional component of a complex social space, and it was produced by a bustling workshop utilizing the very latest technology. One of its equivalents today would be a PowerPoint presentation at a community planning meeting, which is not something that we are inclined to call “art.”

Another current use of the word “art” is quite simply to mean “good.” This is the intended meaning when one says of another’s work, “You’ve really created a work of art.” This is the intended meaning when a movie theater is referred to as an “art house.” The most immediate problem with this formulation, of course, is that what is good is subjective, and deeming something as not “art” amounts to little more than saying that you don’t like it.

But there are more consequential problems with this formulation. The Romantic definition of “art” has led to the now pervasive view in the West that anything can be “art.” And this is true, but it also leads to the assertion that if an artifact doesn’t serve its purpose well, the fault lies with the beholder. If the artist’s intentions are inscrutable, well, that’s how artists are in today’s culture. One can do anything and call it “art.”

Which is fine, as long as you’re not drowning puppies. But there are at least two disturbing consequences of this refined definition of “art.” The first is that we end up sanctioning the purveyance of outright lies in the name of “art” (like, for instance, this). The second and even more serious consequence is that we end up minimizing the significance of the most dominant visual media in our culture: film, television, and the World Wide Web. If “art” is synonymous with “good,” “important” or “high-minded,” then we have a tendency to dismiss all the stuff we consider “bad,” “trivial” or “low-brow” as inconsequential, even as it continues to have a massive impact on the way people behave.

What is art?

Between leading online discussion groups with my college students and posting long-ass comments on friends' Facebook pages concerning the nature of "art," I decided it was time to revive this blog. Though it was created over a year ago ostensibly for people to upload pictures of red crape myrtles (the rarest hue), I always envisioned it as a place for me to present broader ideas. Perhaps the broadest idea of all in my world of ideas is my belief that the popular conception of "art" is problematic, for reasons which I shall explain through definition and example. 

Initial Post

Crape myrtles blossom white and all hues of red from pink to purple, but deep red (sometimes called watermelon red) is the rarest. I'd like for people all over the world to be able to submit photos of the deepest red crape myrtles they've seen.