Social conservatives, right-wingers, and opponents of government spending are fond of attacking the arts. Modern visual art is considered immoral, sometimes blasphemous, a waste of time and public money. But at the same time, from the left there's been a far quieter Marxist critique of the arts, suggesting that art fulfuls a disreputable role, necessary for the maintenance of an unequal and unfair capitalist society.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is the first important figure. He wondered how class and social divisions persist in an allegedly mobile society, and he realised that what matters in society isn't just your bank balance, it's who you know and what you know. He introduced the idea of social capital - the network of connections you have - and cultural capital - how much you know about the arts and other topics that are shared by the ruling classes. Social capital quantifies how in many industries today, particularly the media, it's a question of who you know, with the children of existing well-paid staff getting the placements and internships; if 500 people apply for a job, it takes something more than talent to get your CV to the top of the pile, to even get an interview. Cultural capital connects with older ideas like the "two cultures" and connoisseurship in the arts: that the upper classes are supposed to know about certain things, discuss certain topics, and attend certain cultural events (formerly Glyndebourne, now maybe Glastonbury), and not to know about other things (with the British upper classes, science, manufacturing, maybe even business).
Roger L Taylor, author of Art, an Enemy of the People, has described how art exists to promote a feeling of superiority in those in the know, and a corresponding condescension towards people not in the know. He focused on how jazz went from popular music in New Orleans brothels to the province of chin-stroking obsessives (generally white and highly educated). It's just as true among hipster music fans. The teaching of art history may fulfil the same function as fee-paying schools or elite universities: it makes the children of the wealthy feel superior to the tastes of the masses and thus better able to govern, control, hire and fire them.
Taylor followed on from the work of John Berger and others in the early 1970s, who began to study art as part of a wider pattern of visual culture. They showed the resemblance between art and advertising images, both historically (oil painting became popular because it was so good at painting people's lustrous possessions) and recently, where commercial art constantly refers to high art to gain prestige and to sell us stuff. More recently, advertisers have moved away from the traditional high arts to use alternative music, punk, and other subcultural media which is used less for its popularity than for the aura of sophistication and exclusivity it presents (hence despite the popularity of One Direction you're more likely to hear some winsome alt-folk in an advert than to get mainstream pop).
Larry Shiner's The Invention of Art is a more recent contribution, focusing particularly on the question of how some arts became high-status (classical music, which until the late 18th century was used by the rich as background noise) and others low-status (tapestry, weaving, things women did). The fact is inescapable that the development of the modern concept of art coincided with the development of modern capitalism and the end of a social system based on privilege of birth. A new system of privilege was required. This is well-attested in studies of art connoisseurship from the 18th century, the first time that paintings were sold openly by art-dealers to wealthy collectors rather than being primarily commissioned for religious and political institutions; to promote their products, dealers encouraged people to differentiate good and bad art and promoted the idea of taste, the judgement you need to buy paintings, which is so central to 18th century art-buying.
However, most critics and historians have failed to understand the full radicalism of this position. Feminist art historians have noted that the entire system of art history exists to support patriarchy and class-based power. Yet, most refuse to accept that art is simply a creation of capitalism: they believe that somehow you can destroy the entire evil system of our thinking about art, and then be left with the pure essence of art which can be directly appreciated. It's been common in the past 40 years for artists and art historians to challenge the artworld, the system of teaching and studying and selling art, and the history of the twentieth century avant-garde is largely a series of calls for all the old art to be destroyed and replaced with new art. Yet far fewer artists or art historians are willing to accept that art may be a force for evil rather than good.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Everybody writes propaganda songs
Imagine some of the most daring and experimental artists of the era making propaganda for an authoritarian, militaristic regime. This is exactly what some of the brightest stars of German art did during World War One: John Heartfield went on to fiercely oppose Hitler; his brother Wieland Herzefelde published numerous books on Marxism and avant-garde art; and George Grosz produced some of the most outstanding paintings of the era, showing greedy corrupt businessmen and prostitutes who represented the corrupting forces of capitalism.
But in December 1917 Heartfield joined the German Foreign Office as a director of propaganda films, soon after followed by Grosz and Herzefelde. Perhaps they reckoned that making films for the government would be less trouble than dying in the trenches. Heartfield has already, in 1916 anglicised his name in protest against the war. And the German propaganda machine had shown itself open to the widest reaches of art, sending Expressionist paintings to Zurich for exhibitions held by the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire; the Italian government, on the side of Britain and France, competed by sending Giorgio de Chirico.
Preceding Goebbels' view that the most important thing for propaganda was to be entertaining, the Imperial German authorities felt that the best propaganda was the best art. Hence, the projects that the Heartfield/Herzefeld brothers and Grosz worked on were strange choices for propaganda: they made animations of the dark, violent Struwwelpeter stories, and considered adaptations of Poe's Masque of the Red Death and even Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey. Sadly, none of their work appears to have survived.
After the war, Grosz and his friends went on to a very different kind of propaganda. Along with Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Grosz produced some of the most brutal artistic critiques of the war and its lasting effects on German society. Heartfield fought in another kind of war, producing anti-nazi propaganda until he was forced to flee Germany. Grosz left for the USA in 1933; Heartfield and Herzfelde went via Czechoslovakia to the UK, and Herzfelde went on to the USA.
They are not the only artists to answer the call to make propaganda in times of war. Britain has excelled at it, with artists from William Orpen to Henry Moore working as official war artists. Writers such as George Orwell produced propaganda broadcasts. The best of British film-making turned their eyes and hands to the war effort in World War Two. Leftist experimental documentarist Humphrey Jennings made two extraordinary films: the verite drama I Was A Fireman, and the brilliantly avant-garde Silent Village in which a mining community from Wales re-enacts the nazi's destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice following the assassination of Heydrich. Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti made Went The Day Well?, a satire about Germans taking over an English town aided by the nazi-sympathising upper classes.
Powell and Pressburger, then the leading talents in Britain, made some of their best work: A Matter of Life and Death, completed after the war, and the Hitchcockian thriller A Canterbury Tale, in which a British and an American soldier team up with an English girl to track down a sexual pervert targeting the wives of soldiers; it's a generally light-hearted picture, aside from one brilliant scene in which the main characters come across streets of bombed out houses, revealing the true devastation caused even in the most ancient corner of the English countryside.
The Spanish Civil War had perhaps changed the opinions of many; one war which was mediated through propaganda. But writers and artists will tend to defend their homeland. E M Forster may have said he'd rather betray his country than his friends; Orwell famously did the opposite.
Main source: Andrés Mario Zervigón, 'A "Political Struwwelpeter"? John Heartfield's Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation'. New German Critique, Summer 2009, Issue 107, pages 5-51.
For more on propaganda in Zurich, see Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art.
But in December 1917 Heartfield joined the German Foreign Office as a director of propaganda films, soon after followed by Grosz and Herzefelde. Perhaps they reckoned that making films for the government would be less trouble than dying in the trenches. Heartfield has already, in 1916 anglicised his name in protest against the war. And the German propaganda machine had shown itself open to the widest reaches of art, sending Expressionist paintings to Zurich for exhibitions held by the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire; the Italian government, on the side of Britain and France, competed by sending Giorgio de Chirico.
Preceding Goebbels' view that the most important thing for propaganda was to be entertaining, the Imperial German authorities felt that the best propaganda was the best art. Hence, the projects that the Heartfield/Herzefeld brothers and Grosz worked on were strange choices for propaganda: they made animations of the dark, violent Struwwelpeter stories, and considered adaptations of Poe's Masque of the Red Death and even Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey. Sadly, none of their work appears to have survived.
After the war, Grosz and his friends went on to a very different kind of propaganda. Along with Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Grosz produced some of the most brutal artistic critiques of the war and its lasting effects on German society. Heartfield fought in another kind of war, producing anti-nazi propaganda until he was forced to flee Germany. Grosz left for the USA in 1933; Heartfield and Herzfelde went via Czechoslovakia to the UK, and Herzfelde went on to the USA.
They are not the only artists to answer the call to make propaganda in times of war. Britain has excelled at it, with artists from William Orpen to Henry Moore working as official war artists. Writers such as George Orwell produced propaganda broadcasts. The best of British film-making turned their eyes and hands to the war effort in World War Two. Leftist experimental documentarist Humphrey Jennings made two extraordinary films: the verite drama I Was A Fireman, and the brilliantly avant-garde Silent Village in which a mining community from Wales re-enacts the nazi's destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice following the assassination of Heydrich. Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti made Went The Day Well?, a satire about Germans taking over an English town aided by the nazi-sympathising upper classes.
Powell and Pressburger, then the leading talents in Britain, made some of their best work: A Matter of Life and Death, completed after the war, and the Hitchcockian thriller A Canterbury Tale, in which a British and an American soldier team up with an English girl to track down a sexual pervert targeting the wives of soldiers; it's a generally light-hearted picture, aside from one brilliant scene in which the main characters come across streets of bombed out houses, revealing the true devastation caused even in the most ancient corner of the English countryside.
The Spanish Civil War had perhaps changed the opinions of many; one war which was mediated through propaganda. But writers and artists will tend to defend their homeland. E M Forster may have said he'd rather betray his country than his friends; Orwell famously did the opposite.
Main source: Andrés Mario Zervigón, 'A "Political Struwwelpeter"? John Heartfield's Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation'. New German Critique, Summer 2009, Issue 107, pages 5-51.
For more on propaganda in Zurich, see Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Zombie Steve Jobs wants your blood
Apple are well-known for their strict censorship, particularly when it comes to the iPhone, and Italian developers Molleindustria (motto: "Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment") are the latest to face their wrath. Produced in association with the Gwangju Design Bienniale and Abandon Normal Devices, Phone Story is an "educational" and satirical game which mocks consumer obsession with mobile phones and comments on the the conditions faced by workers in the consumer electronics supply chain. In the game's various levels, players have to mine Coltan, the valuable mineral whose control has fuelled the Congolese Civil War, prevent far-eastern factory workers from jumping off high buildings, and fling out the latest gadgets to rabid consumers.
Apple banned the game on the grounds that it depicts cruelty to children and features "excessively objectionable or crude content". The game is available from the Android Market. Molleindustria promise that their revenues will be donated to charities that help protect the poor and vulnerable caught up in the mobile phone supply chain.
(Source: The Guardian)
Apple banned the game on the grounds that it depicts cruelty to children and features "excessively objectionable or crude content". The game is available from the Android Market. Molleindustria promise that their revenues will be donated to charities that help protect the poor and vulnerable caught up in the mobile phone supply chain.
(Source: The Guardian)
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