Art that reflects culture is a comfort blanket in place of religion. A human being living in a society is a reflection of that societies culture because they are created by it. When art is created that reflects culture it is merely the artist creating a mirror and is fundamentally a narcissistic endeavour. The relationship between an observer who enjoys this piece of art and the art itself is merely the observer looking in to a mirror and is also narcissistic. It is more a comfort blanket, because the observer is reassured by the piece of art that they are indeed a creation of the culture and therefore part of the social collective and therefore safe. In this respect these artists and this art promotes the status quoas they idolise their mirror image, their culture, and the cycle continues.
Person creates culture-culture creates person-person creates artistic reflection of culture-reflection creates person-and so on.
Art that offers a unique perception on a culture, from outside a culture, changes the aspect of said culture when it is exposed to said art. There breaking the cycle, evolving the culture and the people that the culture creates subsequently. This leads to diversification between the generations leading to a more varied pool of perspectives and therefore a better chance of being capable of dealing with ones environments.
I’m not talking about explicitely counter-culture art. Just art that isn’t exclusively culture worship.
I’m not just talking about what is generally considered art. I mean entertainment mediums too, (as to classify them as not art is pretence. I don’t want to get side-tracked into that discussion, I’m merely clarifying my use of the word ‘‘art’’, and now that I have, it is not relative to discuss that).
The general idea is to compare the pool of cultural perspectives to the gene pool. As I’m sure is obvious, anyway.
So, from where I’m sitting the only art worth talking about is either entirely confined within culture (my personal favorite to partake in) or an explicit rejection of that confinement (which I only really like if I’m sufficiently familiar with the ‘in’ culture art).
The neither/nor, in my experience, pretty much universally falls short. The only example I can even think of where it even kind of succeeds is outsider art where retards poop on a canvas and call it a day.
Not exclusively. This is only true when…well…when it’s true. My example of art that directly mirrors culture in a cyclical nature.
I have a question to ask you in light of this statement.
After the second world war, american or ‘‘western’’ culture flooded into japan, in terms of entertainment, design, ideology. Over the time since this influx, the japanese, instead of making their art using ideas in the forms of entertainment and design in a mix of their own pre-war culture and, more significantly, western culture recreated in their own unique way. The same thing has also occured in the opposite way, but in the same direction. The explosion of impressionism in the west during the 19th century was a reaction to the influx of japanese culture into europe. What I’m asking you is this:
Do you not think that the japanese interpretation and metamorphoses of western culture is more valuable to the west and vice-versa as a way of seeing how they are percieved by people outside of their culture while still maintaining a familiar structure to their own entertainment media and design?
I only ask you because this has happened already and I want to know your opinion of this.
The same thing is happening China, which I’m sure you’d be more interested in. The Japan citation might give you something to look forward to in Chinese culture.
And I think that you are paying too much attention to the mentioning of counter-culture art in the thread which wasn’t really relevent when Churro brought it up.
Hmm. I do not see the creation of art as a narcissistic endeavor. That it reflects culture appears to be a given, but it also reflects what is essentially human in all of us. Thus, if it is to be viewed as a mirror, it also becomes a mirror within the eye of the observer; and upon observation, the artwork becomes the observed, a mirror within a mirror, so to speak. And if T.S. Eliot was right in “Burnt Norton,” the thing that is observed takes on the aspect of something that is looked at, and it essentially becomes a quantum relationship and transformation on both sides, always and forever connected and whole. As Eliot wrote:
Regarding the idea of art replacing religion, Joseph Campbell spoke to that very notion in The Power of Myth. When a myth no longer works or serves a society, when it loses its essential energy that bores directly through the mind straight to awe and a sense of the sacred, then art must serve that role. The early Nietzsche made a god out of art and aesthetics, thinking it to be a justification for life, an essential cosmodicy, until he changed his mind later on. Nowadays, in our anti-intellectual, reductionist postmodern wasteland, art serves little function at all. The great scholar and thinker Ihab Hassan, in his great essay The Plague of Mendacity (worth reading in full ihabhassan.com/plague_of_mendacity.htm), puts it like this:
If art is now strictly in the silences, the tool of the totalitarian state forcing us to face the abyss, where both great artists and the art itself are reduced strictly to a function as it relates to the state, then we are deeply in trouble both socially, psychically, and religiously. As Hemingway’s old man put it in “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” all is nada and the great prayer of our existence is “Our Father who art in nada.” This of course was post-war disillusionment and cynicism speaking, from the aspect of the Wasteland experience so tellingly voiced by T.S. Eliot. Joseph Campbell makes a connection between the co-option of religion by power groups and the oppressive state, which take over and recombine the timeless symbols to make them serve “the aims of subjugation through indoctrination, and the Waste Land.” This Waste Land is any world in which "force and not love; indoctrination, not education; authority, not experience prevail in the ordering of lives . . . . "
It rather makes me long for those Renaissance days before the Age of Reason, when art and mysticism were united in the most felicitous combination of symbolic aestheticism. However, I would not simply wish for a superimposition of Renaissance art and thinking on today’s world. Instead, I would encourage a mystical art that represents the essential life of a people living in a global society without the encumbrances of ignorance, superstition, and false notions of history; an art that shows us at our best, for what we are and what we can become in the greatest religious sense, as humans with divine potential.
It was really more during the Meiji period that western influences (including western art and entertainment) started to flood Japan. However, after WWII the central cultural narrative (as codified in the Imperial edict on Education) was effectively removed.
But most of the art of that period (particularly Mishima) focused on precisely that cultural dilemma. Far from being apart from culture, it was precisely the sort of thing I am talking about.
This is interesting for me to read, given that I mostly only enjoy abstract art that essentailly looks like nothing.
But I think there is a bit of sinister spin in this thread. Do keep in mind that there are people like me who love to paint, even though they are terrible at it, and paint without any real goal beyond the act of painting. For me, the worst part of painting is when I am finished, because now the painting is dead. Yes, I can enjoy it in my house or give it to someone who thinks it’s good (pshh, suckers) but I am always said when a painting comes to a finish. The same goes for sculpture, even more so. I think sculpture has a theraputic quality to it, the hands working the clay and what not.
I know that this isn’t what you guys are talking about exactly, but something to consider I suppose.
Nobody,
I love art, too. To question that which you love, is not to abandon it.
The impact of abstract art on culture is often, but not exclusively, in the area of design.
I’d be interested to find out what is the nature of this sinister spin that you cite.
I think that you are right, it isn’t exactly what we are talking about, but worth consideration on it’s own merit. The impact art has, art that is initially, exclusively done as a process contained within a piece of art’s creation. The example you used of the influence as it has as a therapeutic venture. Interesting.
Just the narcissism point of view. It’s not something I had ever really considered before, but I am sure it’s out there. I guess I just got defensive to see my beloved talked of in ill manner. And it was incorrect for me to say ‘spin’. It’s not like you were trying to promote a certain angle to make all art look bad, that’s just the certain part that you wre discussing.
So many things about it are positive for me. It’s a great social or private activity for starters. But getting into the nitty gritty of it, sculpture especially is a calming thing to do, for me anyway. There is just something about having ambient music and constantly working the clay with your hands. It feels… natural, for lack of a better way to put it. Like you’re reconnecting with a lost part of yourself or something. And then there are structural challenges with the clay itself that you have to overcome to make the piece you are trying to make, so there is thought involved. It’s very distracting from normal life. And the creative process itself always draws me, watching things take shape and evolve, trying to make them better, so on.
Painting is similar, but a bit different. It’s more emotional for me, something about the colors and how they collide and interact and compete and blend… I just love it. Even when things aren’t going how I want them to, that struggle is even enjoyable for me.
Due to the complexity and size of our global society, we rarely get to see any real evidence that our existance impacts on the world in any way. Physically changing something with your own hands, in a way that is unique to your own emotional an intellectual self. I can see how that could be a great therapy for the human condition.
Think AC. My shop has gas heat in the winter and AC in the summer. No excuses for me. When the muse decides to visit, I have a place to be - assuming I still have enough space left to work.
Nice, a simple case - the OP is dead wrong.
Art is not a reflection, but a imaginary projection, into which individuals see parts of themselves reflected, combined with elements they did not know. In this way art changes society, it changes how people perceive themselves and their role.
And then there is postmodernism. Trash put on a pedestal because people no longer want to look at things better than them.
As much as I don’t like modern art on an aesthetic level, I don’t think you can simply dismiss it as crap put on a pedestal either. It reflects our modern, individualist sentiment. The art is no longer about the artist (pre-20th century interpretation of art) nor is it about the recognized cultural symbols (all pre-modern art, “modernity” here as relating to the Enlightenment as opposed to artistic movements) instead it is about the feelings of the individual viewing them, theoretically devoid of any shared touchstones. Naturally, some elements of the shared culture do seep in and in hindsight they are apparent which does allow for an eventual opening up of modern art movements to the sort of analyses that would have traditionally been reserved for older works.
I’ve always seen the broad field of art as a magnifying lense. Each creation is the artist’s attempt to present a sensitizing element to the viewer regardless the content or “style” or the current popular movement as defined by art historians and critics.
I’m amused at the “crap on a pedestal” comment. Isn’t that sort of “art” a comment on the state of culture? Could it be that is what the artist’s are saying? Is anti-art not artfully presenting the mirror?
Look at all the cutsie advertising that makes tongue in cheek social commentary while pimping a product. Sure, it’s just a hustle, but isn’t there a bit more that couldn’t be called art?
What about all forms of abstraction whose only goal is to elicit an emotional response from the viewer/listener? Granted, it isn’t a comfortable rennaisance allegorical painting of christian virtue, but are you sure it isn’t art?
Would someone like to provide a succinct iron-clad definition of what is art?
Whilst attempting to build ‘art’ into an exclusive categorical term may not be the discussion you want, questions such as ‘what do we mean by art?’ ‘what do we mean by culture?’ ‘How can we understand art as a reflective tool?’, in my mind, have to be the first questions asked in discussions such as these.
I take, for the purposes of art discussion, the word ‘reflection’ to be about allowing one to ‘reflect’ on their situation, the act of the mind not the mirror. Surely it is not contradictory to understand reflection, in this context, as a creative activity?
On replacing religion: I can only comment on the society in which I live, but I feel that science has replaced religion. By this I do not mean that science has succumbed to dogmatic practices, is essentially faith based or any other of many attacks directed at… I don;t know, it, them, whatever. Merely that in ‘our’ current culture, driven by a moronic media, we are shown scientists as authority figures with the ‘Word of God’ who offer us salvation and doom and all this ultimately distances science as praxis from society.
Art, on the other hand, is a little too culturally immanent for it to become likewise distant. Art can play with the metaphors of religion, but this is a different problem. Entertainment may be a new opiate for the masses, but this does not make it a new religion, not for me anyway.
Phoebus, in response to your response to my response to a response to my OP, and also addressed to all other ILPers (including my future self), I say this:
A question is a request for information that is given in the form of an answer. One never gets an answer when one answers a question with a question. While one performs this act honestly, one performs a futile act, and not only has no interest in understanding, but thwarts other’s attempts to gain it. To digress is only valuable to the acquisition of information and/or understanding if one stops at some point on any subject for any length of time. To constantly digress is futile, and avails one nothing but wasted time. To answer a question with another question is to constantly digress. Amen.
You may be right, but if you start in the middle leaving unanswered questions that color the original question, then the unanswered questions thwart the discussion. Asking about art and the interplay with culture does require a tiny bit of definition. Otherwise ANY answer is both right and wrong depending on perspective. I’m sure you know what you mean, but I’m not sure anyone else does. The OP is a reasonable statement about everything, but everything statements usually generate questions. Or not.
Yeah, I know. I’m just tired, and tired of the common-ground-assumption bidding war that proceeds from every thread, wherein there are implicit assumptions.
We all get that way, but this is the fucking internet and not a pleasnt pub with beer and a few friends. A few pints makes conversation possible and all the apriori assumptions disappear - until the fight starts…
