On The Margins Of Art Worlds

Larry Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000307153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

During the late 1980s, the near-worship of artistic genius produced auction sales of works by Vmcent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso for tens of millions of dollars, over $15 million for a painting by Jasper Johns, and record prices for works by many other deceased and even living masters. At the same time, it was no longer controversial in academic and intellectual circles to maintain that art works are the products of what Howard Becker has termed collective activity carried out within loosely defined art worlds: Works of art, from this point of view, are not the products of individual makers, "artists" who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into existence. Artists are some sub-group of the world's participants who, by common agreement, possess a specialgift, therefore make a unique and indispensable contribution to the work, and thereby make it art. (1982: 35) The concept of the art world-with its central focus on the collective, social, and conventional nature of artistic production, distribution, and appreciation--confronts and potentially undermines the romantic ideology of art and artists still dominant in Western societies.

1
Art and Artists on the Margins

LARRY GROSS

ART IS A TERM THAT HAS BEEN USED in too many ways and been applied to too many phenomena to have a simple or consistent meaning. However, common patterns can be discerned. Works of art seem generally to be considered communicative acts, and therefore we can adapt the shorthand definition of a communicative event as involving a source who encodes a message that is decoded by a receiver; in the case of the arts each of these terms takes on special properties: an artist creates a work of art that is appreciated by an audience.

Not all messages are considered art, and not everyone who produces a message is considered an artist Art is the product of human creative skill, but because not all manufactured products are given this honorific title, other criteria must be involved in this designation. In its modern use the term is applied primarily to the products of a set of activities known collectively as the fine arts. Some of these were presided over by Muses postulated by the ancient Greeks: poetry, dance, tragedy; others (for example, painting, sculpture, and architecture) were joined to the concept of fine arts through a long process that culminated in the eighteenth century and was codified in Diderot's Encyclopedie and the newly emerging philosophy of aesthetics (Kristeller, 1990a). More recently the practitioners of new media—photography, film, video—have aspired to be included in this honored grouping.

The modern Western designation of the fine, or high, arts expresses a distinction drawn between these exalted domains of cultural production and others that might reasonably be included but are disqualified on various grounds. Most notably excluded are those performers and products whose appeal may be too broad—the popular, or low, arts—or too utilitarian, such as crafts. It has often been noted that these exclusions follow—and reinforce—lines of class and gender privilege. In other periods and cultures, as is well-known, such distinctions have not been made or have been derived from other social and ideological formations.

In some contexts and cultures artists are valued for their virtuosity in exercising conventional skills, with the greatest accolades for performances that approach the ideal realization of the conventional form; in others, aesthetic norms emphasize innovativeness and individuality, with an implicit expectation of radical innovation as the badge of genius. Each of these positions carries implications for the communicative role of the arts in society. These two definitional poles coexist in our time, although the balance is clearly tilted toward the latter. Art is generally assumed to result from the extraordinary technical abilities and personal qualities of its makers, unhampered by pragmatic considerations of utility. Although wide disparities among cultures and periods appear in their concepts of who can and should be defined as an artist and in the recruitment, training, and treatment of these individuals, in the modern West it is assumed that unique individual attributes—generally called talent—mark those eligible for the role of artist.

The Birth of the Romantic Artist

European societies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries underwent a series of radical transformations. These upheavals, which are partially identified by the labels of the Renaissance, originating in southern Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, originating in northern Europe, can be seen as resulting in part from the political and economic developments associated with the decline of feudalism and the stirrings of bourgeois capitalism and in part from the technological revolution embodied in the invention of printing.

Among the legacies of this period is the Western preoccupation with the individual as the focus of theological, moral, political, economic, and social concern. Protestantism emphasizes the inescapably individual relation of each person to the deity, and the political and social philosophies of modern Western societies locate in individual citizens fundamental rights and obligations that define their relationship with both the state and their fellow citizens.

In the realm of the arts these shifts are reflected in the increasing focus on the individuality of the artist and of artistic creation. The seeds planted in the Renaissance bore fruit in the eighteenth century and gave birth to the romantic concept of the artist.

For the first time, the term "creative" was applied not only to God but also to the human artist, and a whole new vocabulary was developed to characterize the artist and his activity although there were some partial or scattered precedents to be found in ancient and Renaissance thought. The artist was guided no longer by reason or by rules but by feeling and sentiment, intuition and imagination; he produced what was novel and original, and at the point of his highest achievement he was a genius. (Kristeller, 1990b: 250)

A great work of art thus came to be defined as the product of creative genius that transcends tradition and convention in the fulfillment of its inspiration. Achievement in art comes to be identified with innovation, as the artist's genius is manifested in the originality of style and execution. Following this conceptualization artists in Western cultures have been expected, in keeping with the spirit of romanticism, to prove their worth by expressing a personal and unique vision. The resulting pattern of constant innovation in the arts undermines their ability to embody the common experiences and meanings of the society, to serve the central communicative functions of socialization and integration—roles now assigned to the domain of the "popular" arts and the mass media. Artists came to see themselves as the avant-garde, the "frontier scouts" of culture, moving ahead of their contemporaries into uncharted territories where they undergo privation and sacrifices as they suffer under the ambivalent burdens of genius, only to be redeemed by the recognition of posterity. This peculiarly romantic model of the artist as quintessential outsider, set off from society by the special traits of talent and genius, both justifies and maintains the alienation of art from "real life" and the ambivalence that typically characterizes the relationship between artists and audiences.

The Reservation

The majority of the population in modern industrial societies does not view the arts as central, essential institutions in any personal, individual fashion. That is, for most of us the activities and products associated with the arts are generally outside the mainstream of our daily lives and important concerns.

As I have noted, the term art, or the fine arts, in the modern sense, came into currency in Europe only in the 18th century. Arguably, the term became conceivable as the common rubric for a diverse class of activities and products partially in response to their increasing irrelevance to the lives of most people. As these various objects and events moved to the periphery of Western culture, their common characteristics became more visible, their differences less noteworthy— hence their ability to shelter comfortably under a common umbrella. To use a metaphor, this process of cultural realignment resulted in the banishment of the arts to a reservation on the psychological periphery of Western culture.

By using the image of a reservation I do not mean to imply a dry wasteland at the geographic boundary of our world. I am speaking of a reservation in the sense that we tend to view the arts as institutions that exist at the fringe of society. These are cultural "spaces" that real people visit in their spare, fringe time but that only fringe, spare people inhabit in their: real time. The arts can be said to exist on a reservation, therefore, because their "territory" is foreign to the majority of the population, is visited briefly by a minority as a leisure-time tourist attraction, and is lived in by a tiny minority of special people. Only those with special qualifications (genetic or temperamental) are considered eligible for (or condemned to) full-time residency on this reservation.

It may help to clarify and convey the import of this metaphor if I extend it a bit further. There is another reservation that is adjacent to that on which the arts reside; the two even appear to overlap at points. This reservation contains another institution that has also moved to the periphery of modern Western culture: religion. Again, I use the image to reflect the fact that most people see religion as an activity-institution to be visited in their spare, leisure time and as the full-time occupation-residence of special, somewhat peculiar people. As with the arts, those called or chosen for full-time participation are singled out by special qualifications of soul or temperament. In both cases there is a common tendency to view such cultural specialists—artists and clerics—with a mixture of respect and contempt. They are granted a degree of respect because of their special abilities and their somewhat mysterious status as dwellers in a non-mundane realm. They may also, however, be objects of disdain for that very quality of being removed from real life.

Needless to say, this wasn't always so. Throughout most of Western history, and in most non-Western societies even today, it would be inaccurate to say that religion and the arts (the rubric itself would be inappropriate) occupy positions at the fringe of real life. Certainly, many of their practitioners may have been viewed as special in a variety of ways. However, the activities and products we lump together under these headings can generally be seen in the center of life and consciousness, often joined together. The common observation that art and religion seem to "go together" in many cultures of the past and the non-Western present can be traced to their joint roles as carriers and articulators of these cultures' basic beliefs about the nature of things and about the moral order.

At one time what we call religion was the institution that served to explain the way things were in this world and why, as well as how people were meant to behave. The means used to articulate and disseminate these explanations were often those of the arts. Religion and art were intertwined for good reason: They both dealt with matters of great importance—communal and cosmic order. As religion ceased to be the prime source of basic knowledge and value for most people, the arts ceased to be the vehicle of the symbolic functions that integrate and maintain social reality. They became a specialized province of largely meta-communicative creation and appreciation; in a fundamental sense they don't matter.¹

The qualifications for living on these reservations are similar, One needs to have special qualities, what in both cases is frequently called a vocation. One is called—motivated by a sense of inner necessity to give up the world of "normal" people and follow a different path. In the case of art the calling is defined by the mysterious spark of talent, even genius, that sets one outside (above?) the mainstream. Children are quick to absorb the contradictory messages they encounter about the arts: They are valued and scorned at the same time, treated with respect yet suspicion, fundamentally alien to the real business of life. Encounters with art take on a pass-fail overtone in which one's innate potential is being assessed. Not surprisingly, most give up, relinquishing any claim to membership in the communicative community of the arts.

First Encounters, Lasting Lessons

When asked general questions about the arts, most Americans voice the proper pieties as readily as they claim to believe in God and to attend church faithfully. In a 1992 survey conducted for the National Cultural Alliance and reported in the New York Times on March 1, 1993, 87 percent of the 1,059 adults questioned said the arts and humanities are life enriching, and 84 percent described them as a means of self-fulfillment. Yet in the same survey, 57 percent said the arts and humanities played only a minor role in their lives as a whole, and 41 percent said they had little to do with their daily lives. In similar surveys, overwhelming proportions have rated the arts as a very important part of life, yet as few as 5 percent said they visit museums or art galleries, and only 6 percent said making art is a leisure activity in which they can participate (Trend, 1992:1).

The pattern is familiar: The vast majority of adults regard the arts with feelings of inadequacy, incomprehension, and indifference. In brief, most members of our culture view the "arts reservation" as foreign territory to which they have no passport and little inclination to visit. Why should this be so?

One explanation of why adults seem so "deficient" in relation to the arts might be that the raw material is unsuited for transformation into a better product. If few adults are inclined or able to participate competently in artistic enterprises, this may simply reflect the fact that few children arrive with the potential to acquire competence in the arts. Possibly it is the nature of things that only a lucky few possess the essential ingredient—talent—that will permit them to scale the walls and play in the garden, and the best we can hope from society is that it not erect any further barriers that might stifle this talent in its rare appearances. Artistic competence and performance, by this view, are the province of the gifted, and the rest of us can only aspire to join the audience and benefit from their achievements.

There is, however, another possible explanation. Perhaps the capacity to acquire competence in the symbolic modes we associate with the arts is not rare but widespread, and it may wither for lack of nourishment. Is it possible that we are all born with sufficient potential to develop substantial competence in these modes but that we encounter them in a fashion that discourages most children through self-fulfilling assumptions of incapacity? On what basis could we support this argument?

First, there is the point made by ethnomusicologist John Blacking: "Because there are some societies whose members are as competent in music as all people are in language, music may be a species-specific trait of man" (1973: 34). Although it might be argued that such musical societies represent concentrations of inbred talent, it seems as likely, to quote Blacking again, that "the functions of musk in society may be the decisive factors promoting or inhibiting latent musical ability" (1973: 35).

In all societies adults are competent in the lexical and social-gestural modes; those few who are not are invariably defined as deficient—retarded, disturbed, or foreign—and treated accordingly (Gross, 1974). Although everyone will not be equally skillful or creative in his or her native tongue, by early childhood we have all acquired substantial competence in a highly complex symbol system. Why does this not occur in the case of other symbolic modes, at least in our culture?

There is a common pattern in the way children encounter music, say, in those societies Blacking was referring to and the way children encounter language in all societies. In both cases they are born into contexts where it is assumed that everyone will acquire music/speech, and they are surrounded by competent adult performers who treat their early performative efforts as potentially meaningful and respond to them as such.

In contrast, in our society children typically encounter the arts in contexts where most adults (1) are themselves incompetents, (2) assume that only a genetically chosen few will acquire competence and at least tacitly convey the message that the child is not necessarily expected to get anywhere, and (3) are incapable of responding to the child's beginning efforts in any discriminating fashion (as they would in the case of speech), thus dampening any sense that these modes are vehicles of shared meaning. Imagine the consequences if we assumed that only those possessing special talent would learn to speak.

Our commonsense genetic theory of artistic ability is further reinforced by the observation that artistic competence does seem to run in families—parents who actively engage in music seem more likely than others to have children who develop musical skills. But notice that such families are the most l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Art and Artists on the Margins
• 2 Negotiating the Critical Discourse: The Armory Show Revisited
• 3 Public Art and Cultural Authority
• 4 Artists Entering the Marketplace: Pricing New Art
• 5 "Woman Artist": Between Myth and Stereotype
• 6 From East to West: Polish Artists in the New York Art World
• 7 Directorial Intention and Persona in Film School
• 8 "A Photograph Is Not a Picture": Distinguishing Anarchy from Art in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 9 Between Art and Industry: Amateur Photography and Middlebrow Culture
• 10 Trading Places in the Art World: The Reputations of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans
• 11 Graffiti as Public and Private Art
• 12 Animation Art: The Fine Art of Selling Collectibles
• 13 Native American Art and Artists in Visual Arts Documentaries from 1973 to 1991
• About the Book and Editor
• About the Contributors