As we enter a new age of austerity, the cultural landscape
is shifting beneath us and fault lines have finally begun to shake the
precariously decadent pillars of our creative monotheism. Please forgive this self-indulgent opening
paragraph but it seems an appropriate way to begin a sobering reflection on the
twilight of an era of obscene greed, vanity and cultural self-indulgence.
This is a crucial time in our cultural history and it has
been instigated by two major developments.
The global economic recession is one powerful influence, but it is the
maturity of online networks and social media that looks set to have the
greatest and most defining impact. The
consequences of a new global digital culture may be felt in almost every aspect
of our modern lives and there is every reason to believe that the effect on the
arts might just be revolutionary.
During comfortable economic times, it’s pretty plain to see
we have allowed practically all our popular forms of art become increasingly
devoid of purpose and exclusive to participate in. The last 30 years, in particular, have seen
the popular arts to become the very embodiment of aspirational affluence and
excess. It would be even be easy to
forget it wasn’t always this way.
To understand the particular vulnerabilities of the arts to
this most recent technological shift, we have to first glance back at how our
notions of the purpose and form of the ‘popular arts’ evolved.
The Classical Arts had always been reliant on the patronage
of the rich and powerful. The 15th
Century banking dynasty of the de Medici family, for instance, financed much of
the art and architecture that came to define the Renaissance period. Countless revered artists, including
Donatello, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, emerged from these deep mercantile
pockets, but the alchemical teat of
classical patronage – which extended to suckle poets, painters and composers
alike – did not conjure these art forms into being. The crafts, mediums and concepts of images,
words and music have existed since our most primitive times. Whilst influential, these classical
achievements do not fully represent the truly popular expression of the art
forms of their time: these are simply the loudest and most grandiose of our
cultural artefacts, intended to celebrate the power of church, state and
commerce.
Far from being exclusive and refined, the arts are mined
from much deeper and universal veins of existing creativity and human
experience. ‘Popular Culture’ in many
ways could be read as a shorthand (or a rebrand) for a universally accessible
cultural experience – and for over five centuries our primary popular art forms
have thrived independently of patronage, thank you very much. Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, Vincent Van
Gogh, Jan Vermeer, William Blake and Oscar Wilde, amongst countless other visionaries, died penniless and ruined, yet all played a key role in
establishing the billion dollar pop culture industries that thrive to this day.
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Artists who died penniless: Charlie Parker, Oscar Wilde, Vincent Van
Gogh,
Jan Vermeer, William Blake and Robert Johnson. |
Music is often recognised as the most popular of the popular
art forms. Perhaps because of its
universality and ability to transcend barriers of language. Perhaps it is simply the most accessible art
form to participate in. Either way,
where popular music leads, contemporary pop culture seems to follow. It is therefore at the birth of the modern
recording industry in the pioneering early modernity of the United States, we
can first see the strange shift in the commercialisation of culture that would
soon engulf the wider arts.
Here again we find that advances in technology were the
catalyst. In this case it was Edison’s
phonograph, a recordable medium that enabled affordable reproduction of music
to wider audiences. Coupled with
developments in radio broadcasting, a vast palette of sounds - from delta blues
to jazz to rousing rural hymnals to Appalachian folk - could be easily be
stripped from their natural habitat and repackaged for mass consumption.
At a local level, it is a common culture – in fashion, in
ritual and art - that provides a shared identity and holds a community
together. Common culture was the
framework for our first social networks.
But up to this point, they had been limited in relevance to their
locality. The result of giving any of
these isolated elements national or international exposure was presumably a
gamble, but here, at a time when a horde of middle-class post-war teenagers
were searching for their own mass identity, the results were explosive.
If the fledgling 50’s music industry was taken by surprise
by the sudden and seemingly unforeseen popularity of Bill Haley’s Rock Around
The Clock, it didn’t take them long to recognise the incredible financial
potential of the mass teenage thirst for backbeat rebellion. By the time Elvis
was face down in the Graceland bathroom, Rock and Roll had gone global and the
first multi-million dollar cultural industry had been born. By 2005, just four music groups controlled about
70% of the worldwide music market. Many of our beloved Independents are simply
undercover tentacles of this beastly Lovecraftian “Big Four”, an unholy
alliance of Sony Music Entertainment, the EMI Group, Warner Music Group and The
Universal Music Group.
Culture Goes Pop!
It was at during this time that ‘pop culture’ as we know it
first emerged – and the musician was the first artist to find the purpose of
their craft readjusted. It was to make
money. Whether a spokeperson, a healer,
a historian or hedonist, it appeared the craft had become entirely reliant on
the mechanisms of commerce, not only to be recorded and heard, but also to be
formally anointed as a professional ‘artist’.
Without the backing of publicists and promoters or a label with the
financial clout to press recordings and enforce repeated radio play, then the
art alone became literally and figuratively stripped of value.
That value lay in the ability to assimilate, replicate and
disseminate that art and, over subsequent generations, painter and poet alike
were required to submit to the dark arts of marketing.
Marketing demands that the quality of art is defined by its
fiscal return, it’s value therefore determined by mass popularity. This model quickly extended to place all the
popular arts in the most overwhelming position that all experimentation and
evolution is cruelly stifled. The
creative became a wholly commercial concern.
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| Some Art, yesterday...or is it just soup? |
Art was no longer something you could do, it was reformed,
reshaped in the corporate image. Ever
avaricious, the forces of industry recognised the power of art as an incredible
winning investment. Why gamble on
unstable dreamers, when the product could be manufactured just like any other
soup can? With the ability to reward those profitable successes with promises
of sex, money and fame, it was easy to line up the next willing stooge to help
perpetuate the myth that culture was little more than an elaborate exercise in
product placement.
And so increasingly elaborate machinery was installed in
order for artists to access the recognition and riches they craved. You could no longer just be a simple painter
outside of the system and still be considered a legitimate artist. You instead had to navigate the ever more
narrowing channels of university tutelage and sales pitch, auction house and
seminars, private view and dinner party.
Conditioning and expense was installed to ensure increasing
exclusivity. After all, in order to
maximise audience and profit it is also necessary to control and limit the
means of production.
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| It's Andy Warhol! |
|
Ever the brazen brattish cousin of the popular arts, the
fine art world occasionally attempted to cast its critical gaze on the very
cultural industries that dominated the galleries, the studios, the critics and
the investors who supported them.
The 1960’s Pop Art of Andy Warhol recognised and addressed
this alliance directly. His paintings
defiantly used imagery from advertisements, newspaper headlines and other
mass-produced images from American popular culture, famously including
everything from Campbell's soup tins to Coca Cola bottles. Later he applied the same treatment to
portraits of celebrities and other prominent public figures, including Elvis
Presley, Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
His narrative reconciled high and low culture and his
assertion that ‘everyone could have their fifteen minutes of fame’ suggested an
intention to undermine the distinction between the two. This attempt to reappropriate the language of
the commerce was initially successful, yet as Warhol attempted to prise open
the doors of the art factory to all he only served to elevate the role of the
artist to even higher and unassailable heights of fame. In his attempt to embrace mass audience
participation, Warhol’s screen prints, screen tests or even his motley crew of
acolytes were no longer the art object, instead the art became the artist his
or herself. He got reappropriated right
back and inadvertently created the role of Superstar Artist.
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Explosive spectacle and money, as juxtaposed by
photographers Geoffrey H. Short and Nikolai Ishchuk
from Big Bangs, Big Bucks, the excellent & thought
provoking 2011 exhibition from Diemar/Noble Photography |
The Superstar phenomenon is a tribute to the effectiveness
of the scorched earth cultural policy of building impenetrably high financial
barriers. An neat comparison can be seen
in the movie industry, where the brief wellspring of new wave, independent and
experimental cinema and the radicals of the 70’s New Hollywood who rushed to
claim the medium from the aging studio systems, were quickly absorbed and
neutered by the megabucks blockbuster.
These were movies so big and expensive that they simply couldn’t fail,
with budgets so enormous that they would bankrupt a small country. Despite the howls of outraged critics, excess
was successful every time, because we are all drawn to spectacle, no matter how
artless. There is, of course, a place
for awe and spectacle in our lives, but once spectacle comes to define a medium
and dominate every platform, the little guy with the big idea can’t even
contemplate competition. Art becomes an
abstract of itself: a gigantic, soft rock, slow motion, exploding, computer
generated, Jerry Bruckheimer parody of itself – and we love it.
For cinema and Warhol alike, this reached its peak in
the materialist eyesore of the 1980’s.
Here you will find celebrity artists, such as Jeff Koons, who were
barely even involved in the production of their own work at all. Koon’s reproductions of banal objects - such as
balloon animals rendered in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces - were
exquisitely expensive productions, created by master craftspeople and designed
to be spectacle. The role of the
Superstar artist was to be a director, a brand and to be an utterly glamorous
and rich object of aspiration.
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This is what a £14 million cystal skull looks like.
For The Love of God, Damien! |
It’s no surprise that the fine arts have became so
increasingly self-absorbed and self-referential under the academic conditioning
of Postmodernism; drifting so far from relevance to the wider world that the
media was in danger of becoming as impenetrable as the arcane confidence trick
of the ancient alchemist or the modern day gas engineer.
This Postmodern tide reached it’s most mercantile extreme in
2007, with Damien Hirst’s For The Love of God: a £14 million platinum cast of a
human skull, encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds. In an article defending Hirst in The
Guardian, Germaine Greer clearly establishes the role of Hirsts art:
"Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't
paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings - the best spot paintings by
Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists
in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of
the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously
threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even. The whole stupendous
gallimaufrey is a Vanitas, a reminder of futility and entropy.”
The outsider with wild and unique vision, but even a modest budget for materials, could never hope to compete for audiences on the level of this kind of spectacle. The artist without patronage or the support of a major sponsor or gallerist, the band without the backing of a major label or the writer without the clout of an international publishing house was almost invisible. If a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, only John Cage would be allowed to record the resulting zen koan. Anyone else would just be plainly nuts.
It was the industry that defined the relevance of art, a curious state of affairs considering the long-standing role of the underground and the outsider in defining cultural identity. Warhol’s assertion that we would all have our “15 minutes of fame” was remarkably prescient: by the 1980’s we all wanted our 15 minutes, our MTV and our bowl of M&M’s with absolutely all the brown ones removed.
Pop Goes Culture!
This bubble is now dangerously and joyously close to
bursting. Art is only relevant and
engaging when it reflects our life.
First and foremost, this is simply because the money isn’t there anymore
to sustain the Superstar lifestyle.
Nowhere is the effect of the economic collapse on the art world
illustrated more clearly than in the recent cancellation of a planned
exhibition by conceptual artist Chris Burden at the Gagosian Gallery in Los
Angeles. Burden’s installation involved
the use of 100kg of gold bricks that the gallery purchased from the Stanford
Financial Group, unfortunately now at the centre of a massive fraud
investigation. Now, announces the Gagosian, "the gallery's gold has been
frozen while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigates
Stanford."
But even if we aren’t all going to become Superstars
anymore, if this great cultural gold rush seems to be over, people are still
making art. In fact, they are making
lots of it, despite the absence of red carpets, canapés and gushing
praise. In an article discussing
the post digitalisation future of the publishing industry, writer Neil Gaiman
again reflects on the music industry as an analog to this cultural transition:
“There are fewer rock stars travelling the world in their private jets, but
there's a lot more good music.”
Actually there have always been artists making powerful,
engaging and thought provoking work outside of the professional workshop, but
it’s almost as if we never noticed before.
The reason we notice it now, as I stated all those words ago, is because
of austerity and technology.
Austerity suddenly makes the gratuitous spectacle a little
less attractive and urges us to rub our eyes and look away for a moment. During this serendipitous interruption, it’s
a shock to find just how close technology has brought us together. Suddenly we are part of an unimaginably vast
common audience and – with the spectacle temporarily muted – we can actually
hear each other. In online social media, technology has finally given all of us
the ability to communicate, to meet, debate, connect and share freely in a way
that had previously been restricted to the monied corporate gatekeepers of the
arts.
It’s ironic that the arts have been freed from their
imprisonment by the progress of technology that had initially been complicit in
their incarceration. During the late
60’s and early 70’s, mass reproduction of media had become affordable to the
individual and this inspired a brief but enduring period of Do It Yourself
culture. Brash and aggressive punk music
thrived on antisocial outsider status, defined by the rejection of mainstream
popular culture and spreading to a substantial and politicised audience through
a network of home taping and photocopied fanzines. This defiance was short lived – without the
oxygen of truly global marketing and denied a truly global platform, punk
culture was quickly assimilated and one by one it’s surviving exponents lined
up to sell out to major labels and world tours.
But now, technology has given us not only the tools of production and
reproduction, but also, crucially, a networking, marketing and collaborative
platform on a scale undreamed of just a few decades ago.
This levelling of the playing field is embodied in the
concept of Network Neutrality, a principle that advocates no restrictions by
Internet service providers or governments on audiences access to networks that
participate in the Internet.
Lloyd Kaufman, the President of Troma Films, is a forceful
champion of the Independent Arts. While
Kaufman’s own particular arts may be an acquired taste - the equivalent of
loading a cannon with high concept Corman high scripts, steroids and boob jobs
and firing it point blank at a day-glo wall to see what sticks – he is a
passionate and eloquent advocate of Net Neutrality. At Save the Internet, a campaign site for Net Netrality, Kaufman summarises:
“Right now, dear reader, your website, my company, Troma’s website and Disney’s
website all have equal opportunities on the level playing field of the
Internet. If your site or content is interesting, you can attract a larger
public than Viacom, Rupert Murdoch or Justin Bieber. And, should the Internet
ever prove to be a source of great revenue, then you too will have your fair
share of the profit.”
Now, this is not a post-punk call to arms. Art doesn’t need to be a prettily
painted Molotov cocktail designed to smash the system. Rather, we now face a readjustment of
purpose. There will always be a
necessary place for prospective investment and spectacle in the art world – but
now we have a chance to participate alongside and reclaim a new sense of
cultural identity again. Nowhere are the
early glimmers of this cultural readjustment more evident than in the
egalitarian organisation of social media based creatives.
Global is the new local.
An artist’s commune or collective can now reach out to an international
audience. For the first time, every
suburban dreamer or isolated rural recluse has a chance to resurrect the
collaborative spirit of Warhol’s Factory or the Swinging London
Pheasantry from the comfort of their own laptop.
Quirky independent collaborations such as Theresa Bruno and
Krystle Shard’s Wallet Gallery, a neat social network based project to curate a
show of miniature collected artworks within the confines of a leather wallet,
act as catalysts to form an artist community around shared ideas, unrestricted
by geography or access to particular networks or circles.
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Learning to Love You More, Assignment #49
""
Noelien's Friend by Nina Yuen |
Online platforms also enable a scope of interactivity and
longevity that would have been economically unacceptable within the traditional
confines of the commercial gallery.
Learning to Love You More was a website project by Miranda July and
Harrell Fletcher. Over seven years, from 2002 to 2009, the artists posted
assignments for their global audience.
Those participants who accepted these assignments - such as “repair
something” or “interview someone who has experienced war” — submitted photos,
articles, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks.
This collection of projects inspired a book and was
presented at venues including The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum and the
Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Here, in an increasingly common inversion, it is the audience
that first engage, promote and establish the provenance of the artwork, with
the traditional platforms of the art industry following afterward, reduced to
the status of passive observers and collectors.
Alongside crowd sourcing and audience participation, the
online network can also generate cash investment in diverse proposals. Online pledge systems for funding creative
projects, such as Kickstarter, have great potential for realising more
ambitious ideas. Broad shared backing of
amounts as small as $5-$10 means that investors are often engaging in patronage
based on ownership of something they would like to be created rather than
direct financial return.
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Still from the Kickstarter promotional short for
Emily Berçir Zimmerman's So To Speak |
Consider So To Speak, an exhibition conceived and curated by
Emily Berçir Zimmerman. Her proposal was
selected to be exhibited at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York, but the costs
entailed in shipping the four key artworks by Fiona Banner, Hollis Frampton,
Melinda McDaniel and Klub Zwei to Brooklyn exceeded the exhibition's allotted
budget. Through Kickstarter, Zimmerman was able to raise the additional $2,500
necessary to programme the exhibition without compromise.
As was once the case long ago, the success or profile of a
creative work no longer relies on the marketing budget; instead its success
depends on its ability to inspire, engage or connect with an audience. Even
financial barriers can be overcome: fan funding is self-fulfilling marketing –
if your big idea is strong enough, interesting enough and attracts a enough
investors to fund it into being, then you’ve the reassurance that the audience
is there before you’ve put pen to paper, scene to lens or chord to record.
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| Antony Lane, icon of fan empowerment |
Just a decade ago, the average movie fan could only daydream
that they would one day be able to make their own feature and open a
relationship with the medium they love from afar. But now, if you’ve the passion to bring
together enough likeminded people who share your vision, it’s a possibility
that’s within the reach of all. Just ask
Antony Lane, whose entirely fan funded, old school zombie movie Invasion of the Not Quite Dead goes into production this year.
Direct backing even enables established artists to reconnect
with their audience. Once freed from
their contract with EMI, Radiohead's subsequent album In Rainbows was released
through the band's own website in October 2007 as a digital download for which
customers could make whatever payment that they deemed appropriate - even
opting not to pay at all. With no major
label backing or marketing, 1.2 million downloads were reportedly sold by the
day of release.
Appearing on The Colbert Report, Ed O'Brien explained:
"We sell less records, but we make more money." Colin Greenwood
explained the Internet release as a way of avoiding the "regulated
playlists" and "straightened formats" of radio and TV, ensuring
fans around the world could all experience the music at the same time and
preventing leaks in advance of a physical release.
Make Your Own Damn Culture
Art makes us feel part of the world, part of something
bigger. At its best, it evokes shared experience. We want to be part of something, to
collaborate, engage and be complicit, not simply gazing acquisitively through
shop windows. We want art to mean
something because we want ourselves to mean something. We now have the tools to share our dreams, visions and crazy leaps of inspiration wider and more eloquently than ever before. We have an ability to connect, engage and maybe even change our world in a way that no previous generation has experienced. We really don't have any excuses anymore. If we don't feel that our communities and cultures relate to us, speak with us or fulfill us, then we have the power - and the responsibility - to make our own cultural alternatives. After all, if we can’t own our own culture and if we can’t
participate in it, it’s not really our culture at all.
