The Work of Art in the Age of Communicability
If I were a good writer and if I had somehow managed to study philosophy, I would probably write an essay entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Communicability.
Of course, the link is to Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), where the author addressed important issues about the effects of reproducibility of the work of Art.
It's been a while I'm thinking of this, and a few days ago I shot these pictures in the tunnel that connects to South Kensington station.
Message patchwork, South Kensington tube station, London (11.2013)
Posters accompany people throughout the tunnel, and generally they are displayed on raws. Here, the communication game begins. Posters for Art exhibitions, films, TV series, records releases, Christmas events and so forth melt into a patchwork of meanings that I'm not sure the overall effect on people of it might be.
Though I might not question what I see, since we are sort of used to this visual collage, I believe things change pretty much when posing the attention on meanings. And questions arise.
How meanings around Impressionism or Klee (and in general the overall ones about Art) that I've acquired through exhibitions, readings and education are being affected when placed side by side the electric guitars of The Killers, or the intimate shot of Don Draper + new wife? And how Art messages affect mainstream culture when melting into these kind of meaning's patchworks?
These are naive questions (and I'm sure there are a lot of answers out there), but I'm not following bias thinking. I don't cry out loud for any presumed corruption of 'high Art' by a lower (by contrast) mainstream culture. I'm just curious about how communicability change the work of Art (and therefore Art itself).
The work of Art is in fact open, according to Eco (The Open Work, It., Opera Aperta, 1962), that is to say, its peculiar configuration is subject to continuous (potentially) interpretation. Day by day, month by month and years over years, the meanings of a work of Art keep changing.
The work of Art , as a communication device that offers different 'states of the world' through aesthetics, is supposed to 'differ', somehow. But to what? Can you still call Art anything that is injected in the stream of communication? And then, who can claim to be an Artist? Is the one that joins the stream, or is the one that escapes from it?
A lot of questions, no answers.
(I also failed to follow the post 'This Archive #2')