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In her book [link widoczny dla zalogowanych]Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Sally Price makes interesting points regarding the historical context within which the aesthetic experience of art is embedded. Particularly intriguing is the notion that “a visual perception can be altered when the object itself remains unchanged,” based on the context and visual surroundings of the object and the previous knowledge and experiences of the viewer. No matter how white the gallery walls or how reverential and hushed the whispers, the artwork is still inextricably sunk within a stew of culture.
But of course, there is culture and then there is “culture,” the first being subconscious and the second being that which is sought by those who want “culture.” It is the latter, conscious culture that leads to the existence of museums, arts organizations, and public funding of those who have been socially, and somewhat arbitrarily, crowned with the mantle of “artist.” Museums seek to extend awareness of and interest in this breed to society as a whole.
Art in Context
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Viewers and Meaning
Thus the viewer is actually a co-creator. Regarding the last part of Bennett’s statement, who is he to impose this proviso? What is an artwork? And what constitutes exposure? The comment implies a certain level of elitism: you can be in the club as long as you’re in the club.
SourcesBennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. New York: Routledge, 1995
Does the museum want to reach new people for the benefit of the people or of the museum? If the majority of patrons of art museums are financially secure professionals, does allocating tax dollars to the running of these museums not constitute a subsidy of the wealthy by the working poor? And if the working poor are not interested in visiting these museums, is it not a form of cultural elitism to try to convince them that they should, rather than leaving them in peace with their monster trucks and mud wrestling?
Tony Bennett swoops close to the Duchampian landscape when he writes that “it is the aesthete’s eye which constitutes the work of art as a work of art,” then swoops away just as quickly when he continues “this is possible only to the extent that the aesthete himself is the product of a long exposure to artworks.” Disregarding for the moment that Duchamp was an anti-aesthete, he did present some intriguing concepts regarding the existence of the artwork as a phenomenon which exists somewhere between the minds of the maker and the observer, rather than in the material itself.
Returning to the cultural stew, the idea that all art and artifacts exist within a historical context seems self-evident, given that artists are as unable as the rest of humanity to utterly transcend the historical conditions within which they live. Existing within history does not deprive a work of art of its transcendent potential. Quite the opposite in fact. Divorced from history and the rest of the world, what would there be for an artwork to transcend?
“Culture is realized only by denying itself as such”, says Pierre Bourdieu [Price 1991]. An interesting insight into the necessarily subconscious nature of any truly vital controlling social norm. That which we are conscious of [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], that which makes the evening news, may be “true” in a shallow sense but is never the significant underpinning which revs the engines of society. To dislodge that requires a peek under the hood where the unquestioned lies.