Artists, Institutions, and Society
In response to JamesWright's essay on celebrity, "Actors, the industry, and society": It's not much different from what happened with the arts more generally.
Artists - those who made paintings, sculptures, buildings, and other art works - were considered artisans, craftspeople. The arts were patronized by civic and religious institutions, so the art served religious and civic purposes, and was therefore intrinsically public and communal. It wasn't till the rise of capitalism, which allowed private individuals - merchants - to be able to commission artworks, that artists became celebrities of sorts.
That led to the idea of the artist as an inspired, and, eventually, "mad," genius, a solitary figure suffering for his or her art which serves to express his or her private vision.
Due to the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality, which excluded emotional experience/response, art also began to be analyzed in more intellectual terms. That's why, for example, the mid-20th century painting movement Abstract Expressionalism was so confusing to people - it was about an emotional encounter with the work of art, not about making "sense" out of it symbolically, which was how people were used to reading paintings.
Rationalism also meant that artworks were meant to be contemplated rather than lived with. Museums are a good thing in that they allow the public to see works of art in person that they might otherwise have no access to, but until recently, they've tended to both assume and reinforce this atomistic, rationalistic approach to viewing art. The Detroit Institute of Arts (www.dia.org) and the Oakland Museum of California are two museums I know that have been re-thinking the museum itself; I know there are more that have been doing that, too. The DIA, for example, has started putting works of art in the context of their period - e.g., the walls are painted the colors that people's salons might be painted and there is period furniture too. What's cutting-edge about that presentation is two-fold (at least): it displays furniture, a practical art or craft, alongside "fine" art; and it shows the "fine" art as it might have been originally displayed in someone's home (albeit a wealthy merchant).
My academic advisor, Alex García-Rivera, tells about his experience talking with museum curators (my field and his is Theological Aesthetics - and museum curators are seeking him out): people are increasingly doing things like leaving offerings of fruit in front of Buddhist statues in art museums - even though in the museum, the Buddha or other statue is displayed down low for visitors to look at, rather than up high, where the Buddha would be placed in a temple, looking down at the temple-goer. The museum model has been that we go to look at art; but through most of human history, art was meant to be lived with. Religious art met our gaze, looked at us, invited us into a deeper realm. In a museum, we look at it analytically instead. We see a Byzantine icon in a museum as an object, not as the window into heaven it was made to be.
Another part of the renewal of art as something to live with rather than look at is the re-valuation of the crafts. The Arts and Crafts movement was famously about just that: problematizing the sharp distinction between what was considered "fine" art, and what was derided as merely craft or "folk" art. That's a false, modernistic, "Enlightenment" binary that we are well justified to reject.
I can't end this without plugging hitRECord yet again. I love this site because it's one very democratic (of the people!) way to break down all those false binaries that have resulted from the commodification of art. Art, like creation itself, has the character of gift, not commodity (as my advisor AGR says constantly), and we impoverish our shared humanity when we treat art, creation, and our fellow human beings according to the rules of commerce.
So... we've been told that art is a commodity, a privilege of the rich. We've been told artists are mad geniuses, the madder the better, in fact. We've been told to be possessive of our creativity and ideas, lest someone else profit from them. We've been told that creative works are objects to look at, analyze, buy and sell, but not to encounter in the spirit of gift exchange. That's what we've been told. Fuck that. Hit RECord!
Artists - those who made paintings, sculptures, buildings, and other art works - were considered artisans, craftspeople. The arts were patronized by civic and religious institutions, so the art served religious and civic purposes, and was therefore intrinsically public and communal. It wasn't till the rise of capitalism, which allowed private individuals - merchants - to be able to commission artworks, that artists became celebrities of sorts.
That led to the idea of the artist as an inspired, and, eventually, "mad," genius, a solitary figure suffering for his or her art which serves to express his or her private vision.
Due to the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality, which excluded emotional experience/response, art also began to be analyzed in more intellectual terms. That's why, for example, the mid-20th century painting movement Abstract Expressionalism was so confusing to people - it was about an emotional encounter with the work of art, not about making "sense" out of it symbolically, which was how people were used to reading paintings.
Rationalism also meant that artworks were meant to be contemplated rather than lived with. Museums are a good thing in that they allow the public to see works of art in person that they might otherwise have no access to, but until recently, they've tended to both assume and reinforce this atomistic, rationalistic approach to viewing art. The Detroit Institute of Arts (www.dia.org) and the Oakland Museum of California are two museums I know that have been re-thinking the museum itself; I know there are more that have been doing that, too. The DIA, for example, has started putting works of art in the context of their period - e.g., the walls are painted the colors that people's salons might be painted and there is period furniture too. What's cutting-edge about that presentation is two-fold (at least): it displays furniture, a practical art or craft, alongside "fine" art; and it shows the "fine" art as it might have been originally displayed in someone's home (albeit a wealthy merchant).
My academic advisor, Alex García-Rivera, tells about his experience talking with museum curators (my field and his is Theological Aesthetics - and museum curators are seeking him out): people are increasingly doing things like leaving offerings of fruit in front of Buddhist statues in art museums - even though in the museum, the Buddha or other statue is displayed down low for visitors to look at, rather than up high, where the Buddha would be placed in a temple, looking down at the temple-goer. The museum model has been that we go to look at art; but through most of human history, art was meant to be lived with. Religious art met our gaze, looked at us, invited us into a deeper realm. In a museum, we look at it analytically instead. We see a Byzantine icon in a museum as an object, not as the window into heaven it was made to be.
Another part of the renewal of art as something to live with rather than look at is the re-valuation of the crafts. The Arts and Crafts movement was famously about just that: problematizing the sharp distinction between what was considered "fine" art, and what was derided as merely craft or "folk" art. That's a false, modernistic, "Enlightenment" binary that we are well justified to reject.
I can't end this without plugging hitRECord yet again. I love this site because it's one very democratic (of the people!) way to break down all those false binaries that have resulted from the commodification of art. Art, like creation itself, has the character of gift, not commodity (as my advisor AGR says constantly), and we impoverish our shared humanity when we treat art, creation, and our fellow human beings according to the rules of commerce.
So... we've been told that art is a commodity, a privilege of the rich. We've been told artists are mad geniuses, the madder the better, in fact. We've been told to be possessive of our creativity and ideas, lest someone else profit from them. We've been told that creative works are objects to look at, analyze, buy and sell, but not to encounter in the spirit of gift exchange. That's what we've been told. Fuck that. Hit RECord!
