High Art versus Pop Culture Now.
(An International Survey)
ARTPULSE has asked
professionals it has identified as
relevant in this ‘expanded field’ to
address either one or several
questions related to the dialectics of
High Art versus pop culture-or, on the
contrary, to express an overall
position on the topic in general. The
ARTPULSE questionnaire has
been sent out to approximately 130
professionals internationally, among
which art professionals (art
historians, art critics, artists,
curators and museum directors) and
professionals from the field of visual
studies, cultural studies, sociology,
anthropology, philosophy and
literature.
By Paco Barragán
In our current era of
‘cultural capitalism,’ as I like to
frame it, revising and reformulating
the complex and contradictory
relationship between High Art and pop
culture is not an unbearable exercise
of nostalgia or outdatedness, but a
serious attempt to comprehend the
ideological, sociological and
cognitive conventions of neoliberalism
and how it affects the contemporary
subject.
Besides the global
international scope of the ARTPULSE
questionnaire, we also pursued a mix
of established and emergent
practitioners. And at the risk of
sounding self-congratulatory, we
sincerely believe we have achieved
this goal-we received 62
questionnaires-and would like to
express our gratitude to the wide and
varied participants for their
commitment, knowledge and challenging
perspectives.
Following are the series of
questions we posed to help articulate
this paradigm:
1) Is there a way past the
Marxist and Frankfurt School’s
“undialectical” dialectics of High Art
as authentic art and pop culture as
mere commodification?
2) How can we reformulate
Greenberg’s definition of ‘kitsch’
that comprised practically all pop
culture?
3) Are museums to blame for
turning artworks into mass-consumed
icons reproduced on mugs, bags and
towels, or is this process inevitable
in advanced, free-market democratic
societies?
4) Can we develop strategies
to comprehend the complexities and
contradictions of pop culture in the
context of contemporary capitalism and
so provide a more critical perspective
of culture?
5) Does pop culture have any
positive effects on democracy and
social life?
6) Is art history still the
primary discipline engaging in a
critical and fruitful dialogue with
pop culture, or do we need to look extramuros?
BOUNDARIES, ROPES,
AND DIFFERENTIAL AUTONOMY
We will start by
highlighting some of the answers of
those participants who have expressed
an overall position on the topic. If
for visual theorist James
Elkins (USA, based in
Chicago) this debate “will seem like
an old question, one that was asked in
the early 1990s,” quoting as support
for his argumentation the Kirk
Vanerdoe and Adam Gopnik’s exhibition
at MoMA titled “High & Low: Modern
Art and Popular Culture,” (1991) and
expecting the return of this debate is
“an effect of the artworld’s habit of
reading and forgetting selectively.”
For Slovekian theoretician Jozef
Kovalčik (Slovakia, based
in Bratislava), who lectures at the
Academy of Fine Arts and Design
Bratislava (AFAD), the identity of pop
culture was traditionally “defined in
relation to high art as mere
kitsch-simple, formulaic and
commercial,” and since the 1960s “high
culture was open to popular culture
and democratization,” and “the concept
of high culture is not plausible
anymore” but ends up signaling the
fact that art institutions where high
culture is produced “are still not
democratic enough.”
For associate professor of
communication and culture at Indiana
University Jon Simons
(UK-Israel, based in Bloomington,
Ind.), “The boundary between cultural
producers and consumers is being
effaced,” and this “transformation of
relations between cultural production
and consumption matters far more than
the distinction between high and low
culture, or postmodernism’s
undermining of it.” In this same
spirit, a series of art practitioners
signal this mutual approach or
hybridization between “hi and lo.”
Dutch photographer and filmmaker
Erwin Olaf (The
Netherlands, based in Amsterdam) is of
the opinion that “Pop culture adapts
more easily to high art and wants to
use often the ‘looks’ of (high) art as
an inspiration or plain imitation to
sell more of a mass product,” while
high art insists on “communicating
first of all that it is art by
creating first sight non-aesthetic,
repetitive and super intellectual
works that prevent the mass consumer
to understand.” For visual artist Walter
Bortolossi (Switzerland,
based in Udine, Italy), high and pop
culture are part of the “same rope,”
in which the two ends of the rope
signal “different manifestations of
the rope, and not necessarily the most
fundamental” and in which each artist
is confronted with the “risk of
‘watering down’ the product in the
interest of appealing to a public and
shying away from any kind of
complexity.”
Performer and new media
artist Pamela Z
(USA, based in San Francisco) thinks
that operating along and occupying the
“soft borders of disciplines” has been
irresistible, and it is the very
nature of our “capitalist society’s
commercialism which encourages the
co-opting of any idea or thing that
can in any way be monetized,” but
“affording artists the freedom to
incorporate whatever elements they
feel moved to include in their work”;
on the other hand, painter and
educator Jason Hoelscher
(USA, based in Savannah) acknowledges
as well “today’s intensive
hybridizations of culture modes” and
proposes the term “differential
autonomy”: “not a linear,
hierarchically exclusive mode of
discourse like that posited by
Greenberg, but rather a heterarchical,
networked system of feedback
relations, in which a form’s
independent status is reciprocally
clarified and enhanced through the
ways it differs from surrounding
forms.” French visual artist based in
Paris Jeanne Susplugas
acknowledges the “leveling of culture”
in which “quantity became quality” and
provides two examples: While “the
Pharrell Williams curated show
at Galerie Perrotin Paris is like rush
hour in the metro, people [also] queue
up to see Bill Viola’s show at Grand
Palais,” concluding that “the problem
is that culture has become synonymous
with leisure.” Finally, for visual
artist Sašo Stanojkovik
(Macedonia, based in Skopje,
Macedonia, and London), it is
important to point out that “in some
contexts where the art market hasn’t
developed yet and the capitalist
structures and relations haven’t yet
involved art (e.g. Macedonia), a
completely different set of questions
are more urgent but are also related
to the relation between neo-liberal
capitalism and art and how populism
overwrites art.”
The director of Spanish
MUSAC Museum Manuel Olveira
(Spain, based in Leon, Spain)
considers “culture today, more than
ever, porous and interconnected” and,
although he’s aware of the “way in
which pop culture feeds back to
produce new habits of thought and
action, conduct and expression that
likely wouldn’t exist in its absence-a
culture of high art, as it were”–he
is nevertheless worried about the fact
“that this open field of culture tends
to reinforce more than it challenges
one’s existing preferences or ways of
doing or appreciating images, things
and cultural products.” For
anthropologist Carlos Granés
(Colombia, based in Madrid), “Pop is
acceptance,” and “Acceptance is, or
can be seen, as the reverse of high
culture.” Furthermore, “Pop culture is
an urban culture” that appeals to a
“contemporary sensibility because it
is transgressive, youthful and
rebellious, but in such a way that
nothing is really defied or altered.”
For his part, art critic Barry
Schwabsky (USA, based in
New York) wrote a couple of years ago
in his recently reprinted book Words
for Art: Criticism. History, Theory,
Practice, “The art world
is a specialized milieu based on
taste” and dependent “on the value of
authenticity and a disdain for the
aesthetics of mainstream mass culture”
and, in a funny sense, “The art world
doesn’t know whether it is a
subculture pretending to be a culture
or a culture pretending to be a
subculture.” Finally, Iranian visual
artist and filmmaker based in New York
Shoja Azadi points
out that with the contradictions of
cultural production “through the
complex web of exchange and the
theoretical (read: ideological) mumbo
jumbo of academic valuation and
curatorial appraisal, the end result
is none but that of alienation and
estrangement.”
MARXIST AND
FRANKFURT SCHOOL ‘UNDIALECTICAL’
DIALECTICS
Regarding the first question
of our survey-”Is there a way past the
Marxist and Frankfurt School’s
‘undialectical’ dialectics of high art
as authentic art and pop culture as
mere commodification?”-we can consider
the words of Shoja Azadi, who affirms
that “The discourse needs to address
the morphing and changes of both
academia and cultural production
within the new realities of financial
capitalism. Art and culture are now
treated and viewed as a financial
asset, while academia at large is
vested in power sharing with, as
opposed to challenging, institution.”
Art theorist and director of the
Visual Arts School (ENSBA) in Paris Nicolas
Bourriaud (France, based in
Paris) prefers “to oppose an art which
generates thought and sensations to an
art that produces nothing but the
repetition of its premises, that needs
a ‘cultural’ crutch to exist. And I am
not sure that ‘authenticity’ is not a
really dubious concept.” James
Lough (USA, based in
Savannah), a professor in the
Department of Writing at Savannah
College of Art and Design (SCAD)
thinks we can’t ignore “the anxious
dialectic between high and low, the
Great Divide that Huyssen critiqued.
We have to be able to look at all of
it, from sitcoms to Nam June Paik, and
evaluate the works’ artistic merits as
well as their ideologies-based on what
the works are trying to achieve
artistically and the messages they
convey, on purpose or not.” For
director of the Van Abbe Museum Charles
Esche (U.K., based in
Eindhoven, the Netherlands), this is a
debate that “already happened long
ago” and says you can’t see “the last
30 years without thinking this issue
is already resolved.” Furthermore, he
reminds us, “The market determines
art’s authenticity through trading it
in the galleries and auction houses.”
For Manuel González
de Ávila (Spain, based in
Salamanca), a lecturer in comparative
literature at the University of
Salamanca (USAL), “This dialectic is,
in its epistemological and
sociological sense, insuperable, and
will never disappear from our
discourses about art. Even the debates
that put it in question merely
countersign and authenticate as its
very condition of possibility as
debates,” stressing furthermore that
what makes a work of art high or low
“is not only a set of characteristics
or properties inherent to the one or
to the other, but also the type of
aesthetical, cognitive and emotional
operations its receiver carries on in
his reception.” That is, “We must
recognize that ‘high’ culture is
something embedded in social subjects,
in their mind and in their body, and
not only a property of the select
objects they manipulate, create,
transform or receive.” Professor in
screen studies at Melbourne University
Angela Ndalianis
(Australia, based in Melbourne)
considers that “High art also succumbs
to an economic logic. It may not be
concerned with ‘mere commodification,’
but it is focused on an elitism that I
find even more problematic,” because
above all, “popular culture has
mastered the capacity to engage in
undialectical resistance (often more
so than high art) that runs parallel
with the changed conditions of our
cultures, economies, models of
technological communication.”
Executive director of
Higashiyima Artists Placement Service
Endo Mizuki (Japan,
based in Kyoto) thinks that it doesn’t
really matter whether it’s “high or
not, pop or low” as we see that “a
sort of autonomous logic appears in
specific cultural contexts, with
critical potentials to society” that
forms the “base of cultural reality,
which is not divided in a binary way
nor developing linearly.”
Peter Weibel (Germany,
based in Karlsruhe), the chairman and
CEO of the Center for Art and Media in
Karlsruhe (ZKM), says “that the
expectations and claims of high art
have been partially as illusionistic
as the promises of pop culture. The
starting point should be the question
of distribution. Mass culture is for
infinite distribution for the many.
High culture is for zero distribution:
the original for the happy few. High
art must accept a new logic of
distribution in the digital age.”
Distribution also appears to be a
strong argument for Domenico
Quaranta (Italy, based in
Brescia), the artistic director of the
Link Center for the Arts of the
Information Age, who signals that “In
the age of globalization, information
and accelerationism, this perspective
is completely outdated,” as the
“contemporary art world stopped being
a place for innovation in the 1970s”
and reminding us that “only a few
collectors are buying digital files,
in most cases stored on a physical
support (!) and accompanied by a
certificate of authenticity (!!).”
Chinese Colin
Chinnery, artistic director
of Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T) in
Beijing, feels that “There is no way
we can divorce commodification and
culture, at least not in visual art
and not in this era,” despite “pop
art’s valiant attempts to confront or
even destroy this dialectic,” largely
“because contemporary art no longer
deals with one but many
cultural/economic contexts, each going
through a different stage in the
transition to post industrial
consumerist societies.” For visual
artist Arturo Duclos
(Chile, based in Santiago), the
breakdown of the Berlin Wall and the
fall of the USSR brought with it the
disappearance of this dialectics and
the “construction of a new order,
which is beyond a dialectic between
high art and pop culture” in which
“the phantom of utopia still feeds art
and moves artists to search a better
life quality for the people instead of
questioning high or low culture.” For
his part, Australian based in Perth Darren
Ansted, coordinator of
painting at Curtin University in
Western Australia, Adorno’s
“pronouncements on art, both high and
low, are pessimistic,” and the
“conservative Marxist lens through
which he views art is unduly narrow,”
as “he situates art as part of the
superstructure, and not part of the
material basis of society, a view
which casts art as empty.” He ends by
saying that we can better “explore
theorists who have engaged different
ways of understanding art, like
Mikhail Bakhtin-for whom artists
co-author reality with the viewer.”
We finish a selection of the
first block of answers regarding the
“undialectical” dialectics with three
reflections on the commodification of
society. For visual artist Marc
Bijl (The Netherlands,
based in Berlin), we live “in an
overconsuming capitalist society where
everything is for sale, resale and to
buy,” and “if you want to live you
have to work and participate and
accept the very fact that
intellectualism, high art and high
culture is-by nature-a
‘commodification’ itself. It always
was in its own right. A product of its
well-educated people and society,” it
indicates that “the “undialectical”
can be made dialectical, Beuys can be
made Pop, kitsch can turn into
intellectualism and Warhol can sound
like a sociopolitical criticaster if
you only read the right auction house
catalogues.” Director of Museum of
Contemporary Canadian Art Davis
Liss (Canada, based in
Toronto) is aware that “Capitalism has
most certainly found a way around
dialectics and authenticity. So if one
wishes to make distinctions between
‘high art’ and ‘pop culture,’ for
better or for worse, commodification
is no longer a meaningful way to
measure such distinctions. Certainly
art and cultural industries have done
very well by capitalism, and I
wouldn’t make the assumption that
art’s status as a sought-after
commodity automatically renders it
inauthentic.”
Max Ryynänen
(Finland, based in Helsinki), an
aesthetician and a lecturer in theory
of visual culture at Aalto University,
finds that “Adorno’s ‘Culture
Industry’ is a fun and provocative
text to read, but I can’t see that
this division of culture would really
be relevant for all fields of
culture,” as “we’ve had avant-garde
popular culture-from the first rough
bebop recordings to today’s
experimental rock music-and we’ve
always had a soapy side in the arts as
well (some fairs, museums, etc). A lot
of that is more from the logic of
commodification.” We can conclude with
Robin van den Akker
(based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands),
a lecturer in continental philosophy
and cultural studies at Erasmus
University College Rotterdam, who
affirms that “If we were to speak of
dialectics we should therefore rather
say that the contradiction between
high art and pop culture had been
‘resolved’ (‘aufgehoben‘)
under postmodernism, resulting in both
a dissolving and a maintaining of the
distinction between high and low, pure
and corrupted, autonomous and fallen
(in the Heideggerian sense).”
GREENBERG, KITSCH,
AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
For Celeste
Olalquiaga (Venezuela,
based in New York and Caracas),
cultural historian and author of The
Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of
the Kitsch Experience,
“Greenberg’s definition of
kitsch (which, by the way, is not his,
but was taken from Hermann Broch) as a
bad copy of art has the advantage of
mainly being applicable to art itself.
Popular culture is an entirely
different ballgame. It is not
interested in being art, anymore than
kitsch cares about whether it is
original or fake. It just is, period.
This is one of the big pluses of
popular culture, kitsch or no kitsch:
It just doesn’t care to bow to
distinctions, it is not in the
business of establishing hierarchies
of better and worse, it just wants to
be liked.” But, Olalquiaga proceeds,
“Both art and popular culture can be
kitsch if by kitsch we understand a
saturation of codes, that formal
excess which modern rationality
abhors.” She concludes by stressing
that “Kitsch is anti-essentialist and
deeply democratic. It is not a
stored-up cultural capital that feeds
off its ancestry or intellectual
depth, but rather a free radical that
ignites both what is valued and what
is discarded. It is precisely this
equalizing talent that makes kitsch so
hard to accept.” Jennifer
Gilmore (USA, based in New
York), novelist and author of Something
Red and The Mothers,
reminds us that “Greenberg himself
came to reject his own notion of
kitsch,” and while “looking at kitsch
in the literary world, one of the
primary concerns of Greenberg’s piece,
it makes itself known in a variety of
ways. We see it through irony, for
example. It signals the reader with a
wink, always aware of itself as in
some of the novels by Philip Roth,
Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie.” We
can come to the conclusion that “Now,
kitsch is high art, even though what
that looks like is up for debate.
Literature has come to embrace the
kitsch of comic books, genre
literature, young adult fiction.”
Hajime Nariai
(Japan, based in Tokyo), curator of
Tokyo Station Gallery, understands
that “Kitsch can’t be separated from
avant-garde; for example, when
Pollock’s painting appeared on the
cover of Vogue, the artwork
had changed into kitsch.” In addition,
“The contrast between avant-garde and
kitsch, or authentic and fake, is not
a conflicting concept and can’t be
classified by Kantian affirmation.”
For visual artist Adel Abidin
(Iraq, based in Helsinki), what is
important is not “whether something is
kitsch or not, but much more: How did
the work affect our daily life and our
perception of art.” Says visual artist
Nicola Verlato
(Italy, based in Los Angeles),
“Greenberg launched the stigma of
kitsch on popular culture in order to
create, in America, the realm of high
art, of which, for a while, he was the
king, distancing as much as possible
the traditional arts field from the
formation of the values of mainstream
society. In doing so it made the arts
become themselves socially completely
irrelevant,” but today, “After the
all-including sedimentation of popular
culture of the last 50 years, we can’t
accept anymore the distance between
ourselves and the culture which formed
us, therefore we have to overcome the
concept of kitsch and finally remove
it from our box of interpretative
tools.” Echoing that opinion is Luis
Antonio Pérez Vidal (Peru,
based in Lima), lecturer in
communication studies at Atlantic
International University and author of
Pop Power: Diplomacia Pop para una
Sociedad Global (Pop Power: Pop
Diplomacy for a Global Society), who
affirms that “Kitsch can get very
subjective as it points out something
that doesn’t fit the standards of
opinion leaders or specialists,” and
“instead of reformulating the concept
of kitsch we should stop using it,”
because “Why should we discriminate a
form of expression just because it’s a
product of mass consumption? Shouldn’t
that be the artist’s goal-to make a
piece appealing to a massive
audience?”
This brings us to the
relevance of the geopolitical and
cultural context in which kitsch
manifests itself. In this sense,
visual artist and art historian Gregory
Buchakjian (Lebanon, based
in Beirut) translates this debate to
the new art market in the Gulf States
(UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar): “The role
played by these monarchies is the
total opposite of the dictatorships
mentioned by Greenberg. Till the
2000s, the Arabian Gulf was, with very
exceptions, a cultural desert, and its
imagery was exclusively associated
with bad-taste-gilded fussy interiors.
So that the question raised here is
what will happen when a kitsch
environment hosts major patrons of
‘high art?” Visual artist and
lecturing professor at Silliman
University Kristoffer Ardeña
(Philippines, based in Dumaguete,
Philippines, and Madrid) stresses that
“We should address the big factor
called cultural context,” because had
“Greenberg grown up and lived in
Southeast Asian (SEA), in this
heterogeneous cultural geographical
salad, he’d probably think of kitsch
in a different manner”; and so,
“perhaps the idea of high art plus pop
plus culture plus commodification are
all part of the same equation in
Southeast Asian contemporary art
system.”
The aforementioned Chilean Arturo
Duclos states that “Kitsch
is a totalitarian and colonial
definition coming from McCarthyism,
used as a domination concept of high
culture. Instead of kitsch we should
speak about a shift in our patterns
from the traditional West-East axis to
explain kitsch as pop culture alive in
the North-South axis.” From a formal
point of view, Mexican artist based in
London Alicia Paz recalls
“in the 1990s having a sense of
curiosity and relief as a painter in
relation to the more frequent
integration of kitsch in painting,” as
it “constituted a kind of ‘back door’
through which one could escape the
increasingly narrow postmodernist
trajectory that painting had become
associated with,” in which everything
“had already been done” and that
precisely “the problematic of kitsch
and social satire led the way in
opening up possibilities again.” For
Christian Caliandro (Italy,
based in Bari), art historian and
cultural theorist, “Greenberg’s
definition of kitsch was perfectly
inserted in his monolithic conception
of avant-garde and modernist art: in
that sense, it’s practically
impossible to use.” But “the term and
the concept of ‘kitsch’ can still be
useful, instead, to discover how it
has invaded the whole cultural
territory of contemporary art: Is
there a single artwork of the last 30
years that is not affected, in a way
or another, by a ‘kitsch attitude’
towards the world and the social
reality?” We can conclude this section
on kitsch with Manuel
González de Ávila, for whom
“The contemporary kitsch has to be
understood in terms of the
object-subject interaction which
supports many degrees and qualities,”
and where “the presence or absence in
the work of a strong, self-reflective
tone is a good criterion to
distinguish potentially interesting
kitsch (the ‘subjective’ kitsch) from
what is not but intends to look like
it (the ‘objective’ one).”
MUSEUMS, MUGS AND
MASS-CONSUMPTION
We will address this topic
by starting with some of the
participants from Down Under. For Elizabeth
Ann Macgregor (Scotland,
based in Sydney), director of the
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
(MCA) in Sydney, we can’t deny the
fact that “The democratization of art
through increasing access to more
people is a hallmark of much museum
practice today and is essential in
societies where public funding is ever
more contested. Art for the elite is
not a sustainable option. The adoption
of pop art strategies to popularize
art is therefore to some extent
inevitable and not necessarily
reductive. All museums face increasing
competition from the entertainment
business, and the key issue is how to
engage audiences in critical debate
within art without surrendering to the
lowest common denominator.” Also, Russell
Storer (Australia, based in
Brisbane, Australia), the head of
Asian and Pacific Art Queensland Art
Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in
Brisbane, signals the “rapidly
changing economic and political
climate in which museums are
increasingly expected to provide
entertainment, education, civic
promotion and tourism to justify and
retain their levels of government
funding. They compete with a growing
number of events and organizations for
a small pool of benefactors and
corporate support.” In Australia in
particular they “work with many
artists from Asia and the Pacific, as
well as Aboriginal Australian artists,
who come out of art histories where
the question of the modernist autonomy
of art was often framed differently,
or not at all, and the desire to
communicate broadly is embraced
perhaps with less anxiety.” Public
support is also an important issue for
Christiane Paul
(Germany, based in New York),
associate professor of the School of
Media Studies, The New School, and
adjunct curator of New Media Arts at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York, who believes the lack of it
obliges museums to “make a conscious
choice to ‘denature’ artworks by
mass-reproducing them on utilitarian
items.” In addition, Paul continues,
“Art as ‘decoration’ for consumer
goods is not an inevitable process of
the free market, but a choice made due
to economic pressures, lack of better
options, or lack of imagination and
inventiveness in creating better
options.”
For his part, Oliver
Kielmayer (Switzerland,
based in Zurich), director of the
Kunsthalle Winterthur, doesn’t “see
the problem here. Mugs, bags and
towels are commercial goods, and if
they have a Mona Lisa or Lady Diana on
it, doesn’t matter. Art is an
essential collective memory, so the
more often it appears the better!” Charles
Esche, the director of the
Van Abbe Museum, shares a similar
opinion when he states that “There are
very few museums that count in terms
of the market today, perhaps 10
worldwide. Those museums are largely
subject to the influence of their
funders, who are mostly collectors
with particular interests in the
museum programs. If merchandising
helps to give museum and independent
income stream, then it is helpful to
protect their diversity.” For Peter
Weibel, chairman and CEO of
ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, from the
moment the artist entered the free
market and offered their works at the
salons indépendants of the 19th
century “they realized that you
attract more clients when you provoke
some scandals in the media. Thus, the
salon indépendants became
“schools of scandals” (Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, 1777). This was the
entrance to mass consumptions. The
museums of today just continue in this
logic.” Tam Gryn
(Venezuela, based in New York), Head
of the Curatorial Department of the
Artist Pension Trust (APT), the
changing nature of a “world saturated
with information” will affect
“institutions who need to take
advantage of the fast pace of
information to educate people about
art. It was only in the 1960s that
museums became educational
institutions thanks to Pontus Hulten,
and now we are ready to take it to the
next level with museums and artist
participating actively in social
media.” For David Liss,
director of Museum of Contemporary
Canadian Art Toronto, “it’s
inevitable” because it “apparently is
no longer feasible to expect to be
supported by increasingly impoverished
governments.” This same idea is shared
by British artist collective Ben
Langlands and Nikki Bell
(U.K., based in London), who say,
“Given today’s drive to monetize
everything this tendency seems
inevitable. Museums are merely the
latest ‘followers’ in a promiscuous
drive to generate income from cultural
assets. In the course of turning
themselves into global entertainment
brands they reveal themselves prone to
the same opportunistic economic
temptations as nearly everyone else.”
Finally, visual artist Fabián
Marcaccio (Argentina, based
in New York) states that “We are no
longer in an advanced free-market
democracy, so we can leave alone the
mugs and bags. The actual pieces in
the wall of most museums look like
souvenirs, not useful living art! Look
at MoMA-it looks like Bloomingdales.”
Sociologist and arts writer
Nicola Mariani
(Italy, based in Madrid) sees museums
“from a sociological point of view no
longer ‘art temples’ as they were in
the past” but as “multifunctional
places with many different business
units: art exhibitions, bookshops and
merchandising, coffee shops,
restaurants, etc.,” as “the cultural
business is only part of the entire
business,” and many museums are called
“to sell ‘experience’ or ‘augmented
reality.’” For art critic and curator
Tokke Lykkeberg
(Denmark, based in Copenhagen),
“Museums may be said to do two things
at a time: They produce originals and
copies.” Therefore, “the production of
originals and copies go hand in hand.
A Mona Lisa mug does not debase the
tableau. It celebrates it.” Also, art
critics Francesca Bonazzoli
(Italy, based in Milan) and Michele
Robecchi (Italy, based in
London), authors of the recently
published Mona to Marge: How the
World’s Greatest Artworks Entered
Popular Culture, remind us that
“Although very tempting, the notion of
casting museums as the ultimate
villains is probably misplaced.
Museums and institutions can’t do
anything without the agreement of
artist or their estates.” Concerning
merchandising, they understand that
“the mere gesture of bringing home a
book tag or a mug reproducing the art
of a genius like El Greco could be
seen as a contribution to stimulate
the curiosity about the artist.” We
can conclude by discussing the
“commodification of the museum” with
visual artist Vargas-Suárez
Universal (USA, based in
New York), for whom it’s crystal clear
that “It’s not only the museum, but
artist’s estates, their heirs and the
public’s appetite for affordable art
consumables. It’s the perfect storm
for bastardizing art and its original
intentions.”
POP CULTURE,
DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM
In this section we will
include answers to question number
four–”Can we develop strategies to
comprehend the complexities and
contradictions of pop culture in the
context of contemporary capitalism and
so provide a more critical perspective
of culture?”-and question
five-”Does pop culture have any
positive effects on democracy and
social life?” This seems the most
complex part: What strategies can we
implement for culture to have a more
democratic effect on the citizen?”
For Nicolas Bourriaud,
“None of them are driven by culture,
unfortunately. But anything, from
great art to an inspired TV series
like The Wire, can slightly
modify or orientate the collective
gaze.” Independent curator and arts
writer Carla Acevedo-Yates
(Puerto Rico, based in New York)
considers that we have to look at
capitalism first. “Neoliberalism as a
way of life seeps into all forms of
cultural production (including what is
defined as ‘high’ art and pop
culture), i.e., how art/culture is
produced, circulated, disseminated and
consumed,” as “it is no longer a
question of economics or even content,
but one of finance and asset
diversification.” James
Hellings (U.K., based in
Birmingham, England), lecturer at the
Birmingham Institute of Art &
Design, expresses his worries about
our late-capitalist society by
acknowledging that “It is
reprehensible to live in a society
that produces and prescribes
high-quality education, experience and
products for some (the rich) and
low-quality education, experience and
products for others (the poor). Art,
play and culture, here isolated from
work and labor, made independent from
society,” he concludes,
“catastrophically fails its own
concept.” Iranian film-maker Sjoha
Azadi thinks the real
problem is that “The Illusionary
ideology was all so encompassing that
it ultimately dismantled the artist as
the independent creative producer. By
elevating a few celebrity ‘artists’
and creating schooled mass aesthetic
workers, it triumphed over the unruly
and subversive nature of art and
artists.” For Alistair Brown
(U.K., based in Durham, England),
researcher in the Department of
English Studies at Durham University,
talking about pop culture’s democratic
effects is difficult because “Like
popular art in general, from
television drama to the graffiti of
Banksy, we view the works not because
we freely rank them best among a
wealth of alternatives, but we have no
option but to look at them,
because they shout more loudly, buzz
through more channels, saturate our
media.”
Concerning the possible
strategies, for visual artist Jaime
Gili (Venezuela, based in
London) it’s about “being curious and
sensitive to the point where some
football elements may have the same
nuances as a medieval painting,” just
as any cultural creation is about
“intensity and depth.” For Lebanese Gregory
Buchakjian it’s about
acknowledging that “At a time
ideologies and politics don’t have
anything to offer but isolationism,
popular culture has the ability of
bringing together people around
something: a story, a dream, shared by
people from different races and ages.”
Luis Antonio Pérez Vidal
recalls how “in the 1970s Latin
America was the scene of multiple coup
d’états in the region. Where
civil organizations failed to restore
democracy, artists and musicians
succeeded by denouncing these de
facto governments. Art is
always on the first line of fire when
it comes to defending democracy, true
democracy.” And this brings us to
contemporary Taiwan, where visual
artist and curator Ada
Kai-Ting Yang (Taiwan,
based in Taipei) witnessed how “the
Sunflower Student Movement, a group of
average 25 year olds occupied the
Legislative Yuan (congressional
building) to protest the Service Trade
Agreement with China” and how “pop
culture arose together with propaganda
and social life” while students sang
“songs and made creative installations
and sculpture-like chairs.”
However, maybe we should not
talk about strategies but instead
“tactics to critically reflect the
nature of contemporary art,” according
to Timotheus Vermeulen
(The Netherlands, based in Nijmegen),
assistant professor of cultural theory
at Radbout University Nijmegen and
co-director of the Centre for New
Aesthetics. “Can we perceive the
artist as we see the Hollywood film
director, the television star or the
game developer, not as some autonomous
individual but as a discursive
subject?”
ART HISTORY GOES
EXTRAMUROS
The last question of our
survey was whether art history is
still the primary discipline engaging
in a critical and fruitful dialogue
with pop culture or whether we need to
look extramuros.
For some-Fabián
Marcaccio, Charles Esche, Kristoffer
Ardeña, Vargas-Suárez Universal-art
history is still important, but
looking extramuros in a
“transdisciplinary gesture” (Esche) is
always good, but remembering the roots
is necessary. For others–Angela
Ndalianis, Timotheus Vermeulen,
Carla Acevedo-Yates, Tokke
Lykkeberg, Arturo Duclos, Oliver
Kielmayer, Elvis Fuentes, Christiane
Paul, Nicola Verlato–art
history has never been the privileged
domain in which to engage critically
with pop culture. Angela Ndalianis
offers an interesting reflection when
she says, “Art history as a discipline
is destroying itself internationally
by stubbornly refusing to adapt
traditional approaches to new forms of
cultural practice.” That would need to
take into consideration “1) how the
traditions also impact on and can be
reconceived in relation to
contemporary practice, and 2) include
an analysis of new art forms and new
theoretical approaches that have
emerged since the 20th
century.” A third group-Endo
Mizuki, Nicola Mariani, Francesca
Bonazzoli, Michele Robecchi, Max
Ryynänen, Christian Caliandro,
Manuel González de Ávila, Domenico
Quaranta-suggest other
realms and disciplines beyond art
history, such as social sciences, new
media art, aesthetics, cultural
studies, semiotics and anthropology.
An image engages in multiple
interartistic and interdisciplinary
dialogues. We can easily agree with
Francesca Bonazzoli and Michele
Robecchi when they affirm that “Our zeitgeist
is pop, whether we like it or not.
Those who keep seeing pop as low art
and stubbornly resist it are failing
to see the same road they’re walking
on.”
I would like to underscore
the importance of this topic with some
finishing remarks. While for James
Lough it’s important if we
want to interpret the “million of
aesthetic adventures of the 21st
century” not to “abandon a certain
‘high modern’ critical elitism” that
can return “evaluating art based on
criteria of artistry, as well as on
political and ideological grounds”
(unlike his students who shy away from
critique), for Jason
Hoelscher it is up to us to
decide “whether the glass is half
empty or half full: does high/low
fusion prompt a cultural dissolution
into interchangeable, high-entropy
meaninglessness, or does it present an
expanded field of opportunity for
reciprocal influence, differential
interactivity and recombinant
creativity?”
We can confidently finish
with Barry Schwabsky’s
question, which in a very suitable way
summarizes our endeavor: “If this is
not the time to look with skepticism
at the direction our culture is
taking, what is?
