Art, Culture, and Society

A series of discussions inspired by art theory, practice, and 4 credits in undergrad. Enjoy! -Rebecca

[salmonandsociety]

Art, Culture, and Society discussion #7

The social responsibility of the individual is a complicated thing. I suppose it changes depending on the severity of the environment. In my opinion, the individual is meant to help out the groups as a whole as much as possible, I believe we exist in this world with the purpose of benefiting other people, to take care each other. Only and individual, a person with a  sense of self can understand that others are individuals as well. With this understanding comes compassion and easier lived lives. Individuals exist to empathize, to make life easier for other individuals. To let voices be heard and to keep peace without sacrificing their sense of self. However, if other individuals are being threatened, it is up to the individual to stand up. to not only keep others peaceful but to keep them protected. Individuals must be constantly observing and checking in with those around them, to make sure that others are living proper lives,

The role of the artist is somewhat similar. Like the individual, they exist for the benefit of others as a whole. However, they are a bit more self-serving. Artists have not only the strong sense of self of the individual, but a passion, a story or opinion or vision they must share with others. However, whatever it is that is compelling them to make their work should not just benefit the artist as an individual. Whatever message the artist is using their skill and audience to spread must be worthwhile. It must help out the groups of individuals they encounter. Whether it be to tell a story, to evoke emotions, to beautify and to soothe, or to cause revolution, other must be able to relate or benefit. Individuals exist for other individuals. Artists exists for other individuals just as much as they exist for the driving force that makes them create their art. They have a responsibility in twofold. 

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Art, Culture, and Society discussion #6

My culture is a huge part of who I am and the way I go about making my art. My family dynamic has been hugely influential in the artist I’ve become, no matter how indirect it may seem. I grew up in New York in a small and close family that fit almost perfectly into the “New York Jewish” stereotype. Everyone in my family was very emotional and forthcoming about our feelings. We are loud and opinionated and always need to feel like the smartest one in the room. We are always talking over each other and depending on our senses of humor. Though my family is a very supportive one, you need to fight to be heard. I was raised with very high expectations and treated almost like an equal by my parents for most of my life, forcing me to grow up very quickly. My dad and sister were musical theater majors and my mom is an english teacher, so storytelling was very prominent in my household. Though my family was caring and meant well, they were not particularly empathetic people. I happen to be very empathetic and perceptive to other’s emotions, and have always been this way. Because this trait set me apart from the rest of my family, I worked to hone it as I grew older. I became the peace keeper in my family. I learned to communicate, I learned how people thought and felt, even without depending on how verbose my family could be. I began to read people’s emotions in my mind like they were stories. All of this has effected the art work I make in a very big way.

Much of my work is a balance between passive and very unsettling/aggressive. This is likely because my background as a more compliant person being raised in a loud, fiery household. The arts were always respected and encouraged in my home, and my wish to become an artist was greeting with complete support and very little surprise, as I had been raised on art, dance, and voice lessons from a young age. Through all this support and my background as the token empathetic person, I learned the visual cues required to help people understand an art piece. Also, my family’s love of storytelling paired with how open we are with our emotions made me very comfortable making narrative-heavy, autobiographically, emotional work. 

The environment I was raised in and my identity through that have strongly influenced my art making, however, the things that set me apart allowed me to sift through the influence of my family and form my own perspective as an artist. 

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Art, Culture, and Society discussion #5

The art world is one that is as firmly rooted in tradition as it is in innovation. Since art is so difficult to define to so many and the role of art is even more complex, it very much relies on its history to answer these sorts of questions. I suppose since almost everything is relative, the only way to give anything a sense of purpose or a way in which to judge it is that of tradition. Everything we have now is built on what came before. Tradition is beyond important, it is necessary. It gives people stories to tell, and makes those stories relevant. It creates bonds between generations and between cultures. It gives people perspective and teaches them humility. 

However, tradition also exists to fuel dissatisfaction. The more older standards for living/creation are discussed and quantified, the more they seem to be dated, or irrelevant. The more tradition is labelled as tradition, meant to be respected just because it came before, the more compelled people wiil be to bring about change. The more status quo something seems, the more people will want to turn it on it’s head. 

Because of this, tradition and innovation fuel each other and exist to destroy each other in equal measures. Something cannot be created without the building blocks of what came before to work from. A mold cannot be broken if there is no mold. And something that is different and new cannot be either of those things without sameness and oldness. 

And, of course, in art and in life, trends towards the more innovative and the more traditional are cyclical. People begin to get sick of tradition and create new and exciting things to enact change. However, at a certain point, the change becomes too much and things revert back to the tradition. Or, even stranger, the change is so well received that it goes unchanged long enough to become the tradition.

Because of this, the concept of a truly original idea is impossible. Something being purely self referential cannot exist. Everything, every idea, every piece of art, depends heavily on the environment it was created in. And, of course, that environment is one based on tradition and innovative change. Nothing can exist outside of this cycle. 

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Arts, Culture, and Society discussion #4

Our contemporary culture is very much one of rapid change. With the introduction of new technology and platforms, the counter culture have become mainstream. It is very much a culture of duality. People post their entire lives online, their life is often defined by the perception of their public image, yet people still strive for intimacy and privacy. People are opinionated and discuss their opinions publicly and freely, but are against a rising culture of confrontation. The opinions people post online are fairly homogenous, often out of fear of being harassed or judged. Statements made on social media platforms are often spur of the moment while still being benign and safe. In other words, people put great consideration into the things they say-- but with condensed platforms like twitter and snapchat—put little thought into how they say it.

           It is a culture of trends, of silly little videos becoming “viral”-- of invention and reinvention of such trends. A vine becomes popular, all other vines or posts made in the same vein of the vine become popular as well. And yet, just as quickly as these trends come, they disappear, become irrelevant. Cultural trends function in a way that is almost impossible to capitalize on—at least monetarily. Things fade in and out of popularity quickly, there leaves no time for production and distribution. Instead, the currency is based in attention. People produce content they like, it blows up, and others gain attention and esteem for copying those popular things. The biggest sign of success on such a large, public scale, is not in terms of money, but instead in terms of attention.

           It is a culture that values attention and values the voice of the unknown. With it, cultural reform is being talked about publicly in a way that it almost never has before. You have a opinion; you’re likely to share it online. You share an morally wrong opinion online, thousands of people may see it, and now your prejudice is a conversation topic for thousands of strangers. People can’t quite hide their hate the way they used to. And in a culture based in attention, where your online presence is who you are, you’re forced to reform or be- rightfully- shamed. The system of checks has totally shifted, and now grants more strength to marginalized peoples.

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Art, Culture, and Society discussion #3

          Personally, I believe that accessibility is entirely necessary for artwork to be successful or relevant. Quite a lot of artwork reflects on our society, our reality, and uses the experience of the “common man” for reference. In my opinion, the minute an artist references mass culture or mass experience in their artwork but refuses to make their work at least visually accessible to the public, their work becomes exploitative. Once a piece is exploitative, any emotional reaction it is trying to invoke in its viewers goes stale.

           At first, print media was an excellent way to massively increase the accessibility of art. Throughout history, even back to the invention and introduction of printing press, cataloged printing was used to get information out to people. In terms of art, distribution of weekly art magazines, articles in the arts and leisure section of daily newspapers, and press kits helped get the word out about current shows and happenings in the art world internationally. In terms of famous, historic artworks, books and archives were distributed to individuals at bookstores and the general public in libraries. I, personally, have only seen some of the world’s most famous painting by viewing them in books so I know how impactful print distribution can be for art.

           However, print might not be the absolute most accessible option anymore. Holding subscriptions for many different circulations can become pricy and certain pieces of art can only be found in specified books, which can be quite a lot to purchase just for the occasional, casual viewing. More and more, people are becoming interested in researching and referencing their art online, either through blogs or just surfing google images or online pages of print newspapers. There is real benefit in this—with this method there are a million different ways to cheaply and consistently be kept up with the goings on of the art world. Truly anybody can access different archives of work or editorial pieces.

           This convenience, however, comes at a real price to the artists. Often, the grandeur of a piece of art gets totally lost online. People become lazy about maintaining the dignity and impact of an art piece, dwarfing large and expansive installations but looking at them on a small mobile screen. The casualness of online media often results in people skimming over important artist statements or sometimes even artist names. On social media platforms that usually rely on concise content, sometimes images of art will go hugely viral without the artist even having their name attached to their work. IT becomes almost impossible for a artist to gain recognition and notoriety when their work is circulating without any credit to them attached.  So while the work becomes more accessible, it also lacks some respect for the artist’s integrity.

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Art, Culture, and Society discussion #2

Personally, I am very much in favor of the “traditional environments” in which art is often displayed. In this case, traditional meaning mid- sized rooms with gray concrete floors and white plaster walls and ceiling with neutral, white lighting. Whether or not this environment is the best or most valid outlet to explore art is an interesting discussion to have. Personally, I love that it becomes an automatic reference point, that any time someone makes the room look different—such as slanting the walls in Charles Ray’s “Yes” piece—this change in the neutral become a part of piecing together the meaning of the art work.

Just like how no art piece can ever be fully self-referential, the second a work of art demands a change in the neutral, traditional space it is installed in, it completely changes the work and immediately references the fact that it is changed. When someone walks into a gallery space with bright orange walls, their first thought may not even bee about the orange walls, but about how the white walls were covered up. A piece in which, say, the floors are covered with ceramic sunflower seeds, becomes a spectacle in itself because gallery spaces traditionally don’t have piles of ceramic on the floors.

Though art doesn’t need to show in a traditional space, it works wonders as a reference point, and many pieces wouldn’t be successful without it as a widely- known neutral to build off of. That being said, people do often depend on a gallery space to define a piece as “Art”. Commonly, the difference between performance art and experimental theater is the space in which it takes place. In my opinion, it is experimental theater that depends more on a traditional space rather than performance art. For instance, the second it is no longer shown on stage on in the round, as soon as it doesn’t have a divide between audience and actor, it becomes performance art. So in this case, performance art doesn’t need a traditional gallery space to be art, it needs the established neutral of the stage to not be considered theater.

Street art is where things become difficult to define. Though I don’t ever want my pieces to be displayed on the street, that is likely because they are so craft- based, they almost rely on the white cube to be seen and “capital A Art”. For a piece to work in a nontraditional environment, the place it is installed needs to mesh either formally or conceptually with the work. By existing as a work of art, it is simultaneously referencing and rejecting the traditional gallery space. Since it is rejecting the neutral, it needs to fit successfully in the alternative. If a piece feels strange or out of place (assuming this is unintentional) it will cause confusion. If there is not stylistic or conceptual reason for the piece to be in its nontraditional environment, the piece itself will get clouded by the decision to not show it where it is expected to be shown. The whole “point” of the piece will be that it isn’t where it is supposed to be and though that is a valid decision to make, it isn’t the most interesting one.

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Art, Culture, and Society discussion #1

In this post, I will be discussing what “public art” is and what it should be- the unspoken rules of public art and it’s role in the environment it is placed in. The give and take between a piece of public art and it’s environment is instrumental, more so than in any other platform of art, which is what makes it so interesting to discuss. However, before any dissection of public art, it is important to pick apart the concept of “public”.

Recognizing the concept of public and private is far from an innate human skill. Many children are prone to over-sharing or snooping, or even just speaking too loudly in what is meant to be a private, quite space. However, with little time, we begin to learn the difference between the two. Being able to behave differently in either a public or private space is often a sign of empathy or tact. However, it is far more difficult to detect than it would seem.

Even on the streets of Manhattan, what would normally be considered a public space, there are unspoken rules about privacy.  For instance, you can talk on the phone, but you cannot yell. If someone is behaving in a way you find jarring, you are meant to act as though you can’t see it, as though their behavior creates a bubble of privacy around them. You can take pictures, but you can’t take “selfies”, as the shame paired with perceived actions of vanity makes it a private act inappropriate for a public space.

In fact, it is usually shame that marks the division between “public” and “private”. Things that are easily digestible by the masses, even if just for a moment, can be practiced freely. However, the second something becomes too personal, or makes people uncomfortable, it does not belong in public. This sentiment towards everyday interactions is also common in most public art.

Very often, public art- art displayed in areas accessible by all people at almost all times- is thematically benign. In fact, it is so common for public art to be easily digestible by all people that the second a public piece is slightly shocking or provocative- that becomes what defines it. Let’s say, in this instance, a museum, gallery, or home is considered a private space for art and a street or park or atrium of a building (common areas for public art) is public. In a private space, a piece can be made about a delicate topic- be it too inciting or even too personal- without the piece being all about how daring it is. In that environment, the piece has the freedom to be about whatever issues it’s about without being clouded by any buzz. In contrast, the second a piece in a public space is problematic in any way; it becomes the “problematic piece” and looses almost all other meaning or impact.

Take, for instance, Paul McCarthy’s recent public installation, “Tree”, in Paris. Though he has created provocative public pieces before, the reaction to this one was the strongest, likely because in was created in a hub of a city at a time when art of questionable taste gets huge amounts of viral attention. The piece, viewed as sexually taboo sparked such strongly negative reactions that McCarthy was assaulted and the art piece destroyed. Paul McCarthy has created a slew of much more “upsetting” art before but because it was in a private gallery or museum setting, the expectations for taste were completely different. In the end, the shame and restraint attached to everyday behavior in public spaces ultimately leads to the taming and censorship of public art.