Problems? The Modernist canon has established a group of exemplary artworks, but Greenberg’s Modernist account privileges some art at the expense of others. Esp since the 1970s, it has been contested. e.g. Many feminist art historians have seen…
The word “Aestheticism” has Greek roots, coming from the Greek meaning to perceive (with the senses). Aestheticism would later come to refer to the world's appreciation of beauty, becoming the name of a 19th century concept prevalent in Victorian England, which placed utmost emphasis on beauty and pleasure in life. Aestheticism is also very prevalent in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, centered around the life of Dorian Gray. Youth and everlasting beauty is a form of aesthetics that is mocked by the character Dorian Gray. Without contemplating aestheticism, one cannot fully understand why people desired that beauty and aestheticism in the first place. Aestheticism is rooted in a personal desire to be beautiful and everlasting like…
Art appreciation is the understanding of the timeless qualities that characterise all great art, and personally i feel is a subjective matter; what I find aesthetically pleasing may not apply to everyone else. There are many reasons why we value art; because it informs us, because of its expressive quality, and because of its artistic quality. In this case, the latter is being discussed, that good art is good because of aesthetic enjoyment of form, the balance and structure and proportion. Its argued that content is not important, just the formal qualities make it good art, for example Jackson Pollock, his work is based on lines and colours and is valued very highly, therefore content is irellevant.…
The motivation behind this paper will be to explore Horkheimer and Adorno's evaluation of the enlightenment and Habermas' retort. Horkheimer and Adorno both prominent philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Marxist Critical Theory agree that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology”. Implying that the liner progression of the enlightenment has really uprooted its original aims. The notion is that by making man the sovereign of nature has really delivered inverse effects on social nature, which emerge in fascism and Stalinism. Habermas then challenges the focus of the enlightenment critiques of the time and the Norms that we have created that digress from the progression of the movement.…
In the 1950’s artists began to stray away from the politics of art and push popular or mass culture into the majority and dominating factor of their artistic works, and by…
Postmodernism is best understood by defining the modernist ethos it replaced - that of the avant-garde who were active from 1860s to the 1950s. The various artists in the modern period were driven by a radical and forward thinking approach, ideas of technological positivity, and grand narratives of Western domination and progress. The arrival of Neo-Dada and Pop art in post-war America marked the beginning of a reaction against this mindset that came to be known as postmodernism. The reaction took on multiple artistic forms for the next four decades, including Conceptual art, Minimalism, Video art, Performance art, and Installation art. These movements are diverse and disparate but connected by certain characteristics: ironical and playful…
Change is inevitable, man-made environments are changing all the time, people are getting higher, living in apartments and skyscrapers, human subconscious perspective is changing the world. Towards the end of the 19th century, newly creative forces were emerging, which looked forward and sought after innovation and originality in design. Seemingly endless reworkings of decorative design was overused and unambiguously discarded as fresh ideas along with new technologies and materials began to saturate into the beginning of the 20th century. The developed western world was seeing a new age and the birth of modernism . The term modernism and its meaning has formed much debate but it widely regarded as a shared aesthetic or ideological manifesto. As an interpretive concept, it may be applied to art, music or cultural and scientific expressions, not just design .…
Art is like a fractured mirror that reflects the society in which it was created. This reflection is a mosaic of images constructed by the artist's own perceptions which in turn are determined by the values and attitudes, especially the fears and insecurities in his or her own contemporary society. The responder also has to acknowledge his or her own door of perception, as this would affect their interpretation of the art. This is especially evident in texts like Brave New World which are designed specifically as probes into the aspects of society that the writer desires to explore. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World during the late 20s and early 30s; in the middle of the Great Depression and at the eve of the Second World War. World War One was still fresh in everyone's memories and so was the Bolshevik revolution of Russia, which threatened to spread throughout Europe and the world. On the other side of the Atlantic the "New World" was undergoing a revitalisation of industry with Henry Ford and other leading capitalists implementing the concept of mass production and attempting to create the ideal consumer society. There was also a form of cultural renaissance in the central European countries where the avaunt-garde was embraced rigorously in art and architecture. And in science, especially in the biological field, great breakthroughs, the likes of which the world hadn't witnessed since the days of Newton were being accomplished. In short it was a period of great social change and instability. Such instability eventually leads to fears and insecurities, most of which tend revolve around the future of society and the future of the individual.…
Adorno and Horkheimer believed that society used mainstream media to push out what they believed to be “beautiful”. The culture industry is a massive industry that utilizes advertisements, celebrities, and other well known figures to sell a product is what led many to associate “beauty” with a particular product or person. The companies in question push an idea to the general public that usually ends with the public trying to live up to the standards that were originally put out there. The reason that these ideations succeed is because people in general, place too many standards on their individual’s selves. I believe this is what causes some of the major problems we face…
The need for dramatic and extravagant forms of expression started to disappear, while more and more artists began completely abandoning techniques associated with the previous Age of Enlightenment. This inescapable yearning for change was the product of a century’s worth of growth through industrialization and urbanization in the western world. As more and more discoveries and innovative research was made, people started embracing new ideologies of philosophers such as Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx, and questioning the boundaries and self-imposed limitations that came with the previous era. As such, the demand of an art industry that also rejected previous boundaries grew. Visual artists and Western music composers alike embarked on a journey of simultaneously distancing and re-establishing themselves. This meant stepping away from the great amounts of detail found in realism- moving into the realm of surrealism and expressionism for some, and plunging into the Avant-Garde territory of obscurity for others. (Auner 2013) Arnold Schoenberg, along with his pupil who formed the Second Viennese School and surrealism, is often falsely regarded as an advocate against harmony. In fact, his mission behind the emancipation of dissonance has everything to do with harmony, and broadening previously set boundaries of what is right and wrong. John Cage, who studied with Schoenberg, however, was far less…
First of all we must look at what standardisation and pseudo-individualisation is within a media context. Adorno and Horkheimer first published the concepts in their book ‘Dialectic of enlightenment’, in which the central theme of their work was the culture industry. They point out that high art as it has been historically known is beginning to be commoditised and produced for the sole purpose of generating a profit for big business. This in turn is becoming what is now known as popular culture. It can be seen across all aspects of mass media and is generally used as a form of entertainment for the viewer. Adorno and Horkheimer noticed a trend in the music and film the mass were being exposed to, which was becoming increasingly similar and taking away from the individuality that can be seen in traditional high art. The culture industry is then concerned with producing standardised products, which come in the form of film,…
References: Anonymous (2010) Futurism: Futurist Manifesto, Suite Vollard Enrico Prampolini, General Books LLC, New York Anonymous Berghaus, G. (2009) Futurism and the Technological Imagination, Rodopi, Amsterdam Blum, C S. (1996) The Other Modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power, University of California Press, California Bru, S., and Martens, G. (2006) The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-garde, Rodolphi, Amsterdam Harrison, A. (2003) D.H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence, Rodopi, Harte, T. (2009) Fast Forward The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin Hays, M. (2000) Architecture Theory Since 1968, MIT Press, Cambridge Henning, M. (2006) Museums, Media, and Cultural Theory. McGraw-Hill International, London Smith, T E. (1997) Invisible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Strickland, C., and Boswell J (2007) The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post Modern. Andrews McMeel Publishing, Riverside, NJ…
It is true that manipulation theory sometimes finds a special place in its scheme for those rare cultural objects which can be said to have overt political and social content: thus, 60s protest songs, The Salt of the Earth, Clancey Segals novels or Sol Yuricks, chicano murals, and the San Francisco Mime Troop. This is not the place to raise the complicated problem of political art today, except to say that our business as culture critics requires us to raise it, and to rethink what are still essentially 30s categories in some new and more satisfactory contemporary way. (Jameson 139)I initially read this quote as a praise of political art as so worthy an object of study that its complexities could not be fully addressed within the scope of Jamesons work. In other words, Jameson was humbly admitting that political art is deserving of its own lengthy analysis. Why, though, is Jameson incapable of addressing political art (and implicitly counter culture) for more than a page in his nineteen page essay describing modern culture?As I reread the quote, I began to hear a dismissive tone in the words special place and rare. How rare is overt political and social content? How rare are 60s protest songs? While the historicity of the category 60s can be appreciated, and indeed Jamesons use of it appears to be grounded in skepticism towards the authenticity of political art emerging outside of collective life, it seems as if Jameson is using it to contain a threat to his argument. The threat, that is, that overt political art and action have been present and overt since before the 1960s, and continue to persist now. I feel that, to a significant extent, his position as academic shields him from and allows him to theorize away a counterculture that has been very much alive and struggling. Or, as Hakim Bey opens his TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, CHAOS NEVER DIED.The production or assumption of a limited period of the 60s tends to…
During the interwar period, the school of social and philosophical theory called, The Frankfurt School was present. It consisted of a group of neo-Marxist scholars that believed capitalism within society was not explainable. A well-known member of the Frankfurt School was Theodore Adorno who believed that a dominated culture industry used technology of mass production to have power over society because it served economic interests. The chapeter called The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception depicts Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer's perception on the culture industry. Within this chapter, Adorno and Horkheimer state that capitalistic society's culture industry has betrayed itself by allowing contributory logic to take over…
From the very birth of civilization man has been on his onward quest for knowing the hidden traits of nature .In fact he got at first awed by the very qualities of it and then he tried to reason out the secret behind such a happening. The same holds true for CLOUD.…