- the Greek 'techne' i.e. something that is made or created;
- to 'art' meaning sensory perception or sense perception;
- then through the next 'mimetic' stage which lasted virtually 1500 years concerning the rendering of images or statues to make them almost appear to be a reality, (with the most significant changes happening during the Renaissance);
- through the modernisation of art, greatly influenced by the works of the Enlightenment period of the 1750s;
- then the period where accessibility of art to the middle-class expanded, (together with those actually classed as middle-class as the clerks and mill owners, accountants merchants and traders wealth could afford them).
Then we found ourselves at the end of the 19th century testing the true nature of art, mixing it with philosophy, trying to find that essence of meaning, so it takes almost another hundred years of modernism and to a period around the 1950s.
I've taken perhaps a bit of a giant leap, because the first half of the 20th century, in a cultural sense, had actually undergone a massive turmoil. Since the advent of Cubism, and Modernism in society, as well as in art, we had also undergone two World Wars. My own personal belief, (for what it's worth, and here I am definitely going beyond the discussion that Steve Shipps has in chapter 4 of his book), is that these two World Wars caused something in the Western drive that went well beyond the rate of progress in technology that perhaps had been occurring in the last 200 years. And that rate of progress I am talking about affected everything on the planet, not just art and culture, but manufacturing and, then by now the 'juggernaut' of industrialisation of the West. Much of this manufacturing industrialisation was in fact in order to feed the war machine. This is something that artists traditionally don't like to talk about, because we're quite a passive and empathic lot, rarely aggressive or confrontational...
So here we are, having arrived at a time at the end of the Second World War, where it seems that society in the West (which arguably might really mean the northern hemisphere), began to split into political socialism, seeded at the turn-of-the-century following on from the ideas of Marx and Engels some 50 years earlier in 1850, through forward now, a hundred years to 1950 and the post-war Eastern Europe and Russian Communist Bloc.
And so, like a boxing ring announcement...
- "In the West corner... The United States of America, and in the Eastern corner, ... the United Soviet States of Russia".
The battle, - or "race" was on, but interestingly, in this game, all the rules of previous battles seem to have been just left to the history books. The game was still about status, and the comparison of 'who had the biggest "X", "Y" or "Z"s and a lot more, which arguably was all to do with egos, rather than the ideas of "right and wrong", (whatever that might mean too?). So whilst war was over, there was still a lot of military statuses and ego massaging, and a great deal of squaring up and posturing going on.
This was the period known as the Cold War.
Whilst shots were not being fired directly between east and west, (except in places of the globe with those dreadful "growing" pains, - such as Vietnam and Cambodia) the real race for the status prize was to get the first man on the moon.
The massively developing engine of industrialisation was therefore switched, in some degree, from instead of just making armaments for feeding the war machine, towards being pushed to feed a new mouth, - in the form of "the space race". The leaps in technology from the mid-1940s after World War II, for the next 30 to 40 years greatly outstripped any calculated or forecasted developments that had occurred over the previous 2000 years.
So coming back to the point, and that is, Steve Shipps discussion in the development of art, there was an awful lot going on in the first half of the 20th century, in almost every other avenue of human endeavour.
By the 1950s, whilst traditional and classical artists continued to develop their craft, they became more commercial, and so had to conform with an expectation of a highly expanding need to satisfy consumerism (and the after effects of new, hugely aspirant, middle class-dom). Illustration, therefore, and perhaps what we tend to call graphic artists, today, were fully engaged and committed to this mass-consumerism through advertising.
However there was a different type of artist, still trying to pursue, and reductive-ly define that extremely elusive attribute, that essence of art and what it means. These individuals were almost outside the class structure; - the deep thinking philosophers of art in that time. To accompany these, a new breed of highly intellectual critics, some of whom were not even practising artists at all, started writing about the legitimacy and validity of this highly intellectual exploration of art...
At a lower level (from world leaders), the same status and ego posturing was also flourishing (and of course still does to this day), in elite circles, in which, many of these critics, but also the artists they were discussing (either intentionally or not), readily found an audience willing to pay high prices for their new and very special unique interpretations.
A good example that Steve Shipps has used in his book is that of the work of Norman Rockwell, a highly respected and extremely successful commercial artist and illustrator, who produced many representational images of contemporary America for the Saturday Evening Post, a very popular weekly magazine of the 1950s and 60s. He was practically flogging his work on a 'day rate' basis, - like all other commercial illustrators and artists were probably doing. Shipps contrasts Rockwell's work with the type being produced by Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein and other abstract modernist painters at that time, who were also classified by the critics and the academics within "the fine art" category. Their work was selling for thousands and thousands of dollars. - Rockwell, however, was relegated very much to the "low art" and illustrator status: as his works, and that work of other commercial illustrators like him, was pretty much ubiquitous, being used in advertising as well as news media.
It appears then, that art by this time and split into two, therefore. On the one side we had 'fine art' as defined by the critics, the elite and the academics, and on the other, 'graphic design' and illustration for mass-produced consumerism.
For the public, - it was very difficult for them on the face of it, to have any need to try to understand "fine art" in the same sense (and it could be argued, the easy to understand), against the low art, or representational art of the commercial illustrator.
As a result of this division, it seems the gap between the two got even wider and wider.
The elite, the academic and critical "fine art" was still chasing the essence, having by this time found that essence as "an idea". (- It was Joseph Kosuth in the 1960s who famously created the concept as "Art As Idea, As Idea").
By this time, high art had gone beyond the visual image (particularly that created with a brush and pigment against canvas). By now it was gloriously engaged (with the critics mentioned earlier), in "language". Artists were searching linguistically for new ideas to be communicated, perhaps because they had run out of visual ways of articulation?
By the way, - during the late 1970s, on the back of the outcomes of the Space Race, I, (together with many others), were discovering the magic of highly miniaturised transistors, which at that time were being fabricated so to fit thousands of them onto a silicon chip. (- Bear with me on this one)..., I say thousands because then, we were dealing with a new dawn of an age of miniaturisation... By 1979, there were 'tens of thousands' of transistors on a chip made from silicon. - It wasn't long within the next couple of years for 'hundreds of thousands' of transistors to be reliably, and literally, grown onto a silicon chip. - What had been discrete components had by this time become able to be embedded into one single microprocessor. We saw calculators and electronic watches as the most personal piece of electronics during the late 70s. By the early 80s, we had the Apple Mac and the first IBM PC. The Apple Mac, in particular, was a massive breakthrough for commercial artists, particularly illustrators and printers.
So what could 'fine' artists do next? Art had been reduced to its essence, - pretty much anything could be art if there was some idea behind it, no matter how tenuously linked it was to an object. Even pre-made things had already become art, "just because someone said so", like Duchamp's famous Fountain, back in the 1920s. (But what was important is who said so). - Duchamp was already a very famous artist so he had immediate legitimacy and validity. - Equally, if a very famous art critic said that something was art, then it to instantly became legitimate Art with a capital A.
Conceptual ideas, the "Conceptualism" of the 1960s and 1970s, in a way, gave art a bit of a bad name, simply because many of those who were reporting on it (i.e. the news and popular press), were not reporting about the philosophical ideas clearly; but more to the point, neither with the critics, as many of them were talking complete rubbish too, hiding in a convenient pseudo-intellectual hinterland of avant-guard newspaper reportage (these individuals did a lot of damage to art by confusing the public, as they were neither journalists nor art critics, but some new social phenomenon of pseudo-flaneurs...
So this created an environment of elitism together with egocentric, esoteric and extraneous excrescences. (and lots of other big long words nobody really understands starting with an E)....
Enter post-modernism…
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