OUGD401 - Lecture Notes: High Culture and Low Culture

Objectives:

• Understand the term 'avant-garde'
• Question the way art/design education relies on the concept of avant-garde
• Understand the related concept of 'art for art's sake'
• Questions the notion of 'genius'
• Consider the political perspectives relating to avant-gardism
• Question the validity of the concept of 'avant-garde' today

Dictionaries link term - 'avant garde' with terms like innovation in the arts or pioneers
- Idea of doing art/design work that is progressive - innovating
But it also refers to the idea of there being a group of people being innovative

1. Being avant-garde in the work you do - challenging, innovating etc
2. Being part of a group - being a member of the avant-garde

Typeface that is avant-garde - gothic
Bridal
Florests
Hotel

Marcel Duchamp

• Urinal which he said was art
• Print of the Mona Lisa defaced with a moustache

'Fauves' Wild Beasts painting my Andre Duran

• Rebellion and experiments, challenge, being shocking

Printed textiles and surface pattern, interior design, fashion - all challenging conventional thinking

LCAD quotes prioritise certain concepts
1. Innovation (Creating new stuff)
2. Experimentation (Process involved in order to achieve new stuff)
3. Originality (To copy is bad, to be original is good)
4. Creating genius (To bring out a hidden creative depth held deep within the student)

In the 16th to 18th century the practice of art was done through an apprentice system. You were assigned to a master who was already a famous artists and you would copy that person's work night and day until you were so good you could replicate that style almost perfectly. Eventually when you got to this point you would paint a background on that person's paintings and they would finish it off. Then eventually you were allowed to go out on your own and become a painter. In the mid 18th century when romanticism comes in and celebrates the idea of the individual creative self and genius.

Painting of a poet portrays how he ended up killing himself because the cruel world didn't understand his work. The artist is called Chaterton. The concept and idea of lost of tortured artists over time is illustrating within this piece of art.

The notion of avant-gardism relies on the myth of being experimental, challenging and conventional.

Avant-garde from the French means the advancing guard. The van guard is the elite troupes which separate from the rest for them to follow. That brings with it a certain attitude and mind set.

Right wing current of avant-gardism about aesthetics. Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) Art for Art's sake. When this painting was shown in 1875 Ruskin did a small character of Whistler looking ridiculous. He accompanied this with an article explaining how Whistler was paid 20gs to throw a pot of gold paint at canvas.

End of the 19th/early 20th century
Two approaches to avant-garde art
1. Art that is socially committed (artists being the 'avant-garde' of society, pushing forward political objectives)
2. Art that seeks only to expand/progress what art is (in itself and for itself)/art for art's sake

Clive Bell

• Significant form - The relations and combinations of lines and colours, which when organised give the power to move someone aesthetically.
• He is an old critic
• His favourite painter is Cezanne Mount St Victoire (1900)

A major problem for the avant-garde is that it seems to necessitate 'ELITISM'
So for those members of the 'left wing' (interested in social change) there was a tendancy to have to rely on...

What is Kitsch?

• This term comes from art critics which they used to describe high culture and low culture
• It is something that aims to be high culture but fails in one way or another

Constable Haywain (1821) (Not Kitsch)

• Certain critics would say that this is Kitsch
• When reproduced as a print or on a plate it is Kitsch

Simplification of style - Repainted masterpieces for the modern eye - Leonardo DaVinci painting changed to letter rack
Commemoration - Mug with Diana on
This is true kitsch (animal themed paintings)

Jeff Koons Michael Jackson and Bubbles the Monkey (1988)
This is a sculpture which is lifesize

Thomas sells things on QVC channel and his work is bought all over the world

Carl Andre 'Equivalent VIII' was in the Tate Modern - bricks laid on the floor. It was mocked by the press

K Foundation award 1994

• Radical art terrorists
• They do a lot of things like getting a million pounds and burning it

Damien Hirst

• If you go back to the avant-garde as being creative and genius and then look at contemporary art now and there is no resemblance to that now.

If there is something avant-garde it is definitely Damien Hirst