Review of Related Literature
Chapter 2
The essence of art is both commercially and culturally embedded: it rests on the assumption that it is a cultural representation of the artists’ society while purely an article of trade measured monetarily for some. This increasing dilemma is the center of the debate of this literature review. The emergence of a commodified cultural art is shown to be a phenomenon engraved even in museums.
Background of the Study
Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values, and standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. Culture is a set of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which people are born, it is the anvil upon which persons and destinies are forged. (Murphy, 1986)
It can be meaningfully claimed that virtually the entire society is part of the art audience, but in making that claim we should be aware of what we are saying. The widest audience is made up of onlookers–people outside the group generally meant by the term audience (Rosler, 1984).
The contours of fields of learning and disciplinary labels share surface similarities from one country to the next beyond the Western hemisphere. Yet the particulars of knowledge production and the circumstances of the use and absorption of societal knowledge remain nationally, regionally, sometimes even institutionally specific. We live in an age of ever greater human mobility, which is reflected in cultural scholarship through the increase of terms such as diaspora, transculturation and globalization, creolization and hybridization (Bendix and Welz, 1999). There is, however, also a need for a greater transparency, an awareness of the different contexts within which cultural scholars and practitioners work as well as recognition of the different ways in which they conceive of their work within society(Bendix and Welz, 1999).
Historical determinants of the artist’s present position in the art system include the loss of direct patronage with the decline of the European aristocracy and artists’ resulting entry into free-market status (Rosler, 1984). One ideological consequence of modernity was Romanticism and its outgrowths, which are a major source of current attitudes about the artist’s proper response to the public (Rosler, 1984). Unconcern with audience has become a necessary feature of art producers’ professed attitudes and a central element of the ruling ideology of Western art set out by its critical discourse. If producers attempt to change their relationship to people outside the given “art world,” they must become more precise in assessing what art can do and what they want their art to do. This is particularly central to overtly political art (Rosler, 1984). The analytic entity “audience” is meaningful only in relation to the rest of the art system of which it is a part, and as part of the society to which it belongs (Rosler, 1984). This is not to say that the question of audience must disappear in a welter of other considerations, but rather that there are certain relationships that must be scrutinized if anything interesting is to be learned (Rosler, 1984). The most important distinctions among members of the art audience are those of social class, the weightiest determinant of one’s relation to culture. In the mediating role played by the market in the relationship between artist and audience, the network of class relations similarly determines the relation between those who merely visit cultural artifacts and those who are in a position to buy them (Rosler, 1984).
Cultural Commodification of Museums
There are societies, after all, in which the social positioning of (what we call) art is not in question. But segmentation is apparent in the culture of late capitalism, where the myths and realities of social life can be seen to diverge and where there is an unacknowledged struggle between social classes over who determines “truth (Rosler, 1984).” In our society the contradictions between the claims made for art and the actualities of its production and distribution are abundantly clear. While cultural myth actively claims that art is a human universal–transcending its historical moment and the other conditions of its making, and above all the class of its makers and patrons and that it is the highest expression of spiritual and metaphysical truth, high art is patently exclusionary in its appeal, culturally relative in its concerns, and indissolubly wedded to big money and “upper class” life in general (Rosler, 1984) .
A mere statistical survey of high-culture consumership will delineate the audience and outline its income level, types of occupation, and attitudes toward the ownership of “culture,” serving quite nicely to show how limited the audience really is to definable segments of the educated bourgeoisie (Rosler, 1984), and a minimally sophisticated opinion poll will suggest how excluded and intimidated lower-class people feel (Kruger, Tucker and Wallis, 1984). There are, however, no explanations in the brute facts of income and class; only a theory of culture can account for the composition of the audience (Kruger, Tucker and Wallis, 1984). Further, there is a subjective, ideologically determined element in the very meaning of the idea of art that is essential to people’s relations to the various forms of art in their culture. The truth is that like all forms of connoisseurship, the social value of high art depends absolutely on the existence of a distinction between a high culture and a low culture (Kruger, Tucker and Wallis, 1984). Although it is part of the logic of domination that ideological accounts of the meaning of high culture proclaim it as the self-evident, the natural, the only real culture of civilized persons, its distinctive features are distinguishable only against the backdrop of the rest of culture. What is obscured is the acquired nature of the attitudes necessary for partaking in that culture, the complexity of the conditions under which one may acquire them, and the restrictedness of access to the means for doing so (Rosler, 1984).
The for-profit world has been swift to explore the full benefit of networked communication to the corporate environment. Museums, by contrast, have predictably invested enormous resources in the microcomputing environment – the power of individual desktops – and the Internet-based environment: how museums connect with their (potential) audiences on-line (Anderson, 1999). The missing step has been connecting museum staff members with each other to maximize the free flow of information and break down communication barriers among departments. But that should not surprise us. The museum culture is one of spirited competition, not only among curators, but also among departments competing for limited resources with little perceived reward for collaboration (Anderson, 1999).
Art Valuation: Cultural and Commercial Substance
The relation between images and value is among the central issues of contemporary criticism, in both the professional, academic study of culture, and the sphere of public, journalistic criticism (Mitchell, 2002). But perhaps the most interesting consequence of seeing images as living things is that the question of their value (understood as vitality) is played out in a social context (Mitchell, 2002). It is not so much that people evaluate images but that they introduce new forms of value into the world, contesting criteria, forcing people to change their minds.
The value and life of images becomes most interesting, then, when it appears as the centre of a social crisis (Mitchell, 2002). Debates over the quality of this or that artwork are interesting, but they are merely minor skirmishes in a much larger theatre of social conflict that seems invariably to be focused on the value of images as much as it is on “real” values such as food, territory, and shelter (Mitchell, 2002).
Surplus value is, as Marx showed long ago, only explicable in terms of a logic of animated images. In order to explain the enigma of value in capitalist societies, Marx (Edited, 1967) notes, it is useless to measure the value of commodities in terms of their practical utility, or labor-time, or any other reasonable, pragmatic criterion. To understand commodities, says Marx, “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race (Marx, 1967).It is the fetishism of commodities, their transformation into living images, that makes them capable of reproducing themselves in ever-increasing spirals of surplus value, accompanied, Marx argues, by ever-increasing social contradictions: exploitation, misery, and inequality.
Nairne avoids the narrative quality of much of the book and even provides Marxist analysis of the “use” and “exchange” value of art (Bessire, 2001). Elsbeth Court’s essay, “Africa on Display: Exhibiting Art by Africans,” also provides an excellent discussion based on specific artists, exhibitions, and cultural events. It is refreshing to read a well-articulated essay that raises the key issues encompassing the display of African art in contemporary Western surroundings. (Bessire, 2001) Going beyond the initial reactionary discourse surrounding MoMA’s “Primitivism” exhibition Court expands on how the display of traditional and contemporary African art has forced art and anthropological museums to acknowledge the large role context plays in displaying art, and specifically African art, in a Western environment (Bessire, 2001).
The reinvention of research and the consequences for examining objects are inseparable. Museum curators and administrators have struggled for a few decades to make the inscrutable more easily understood (Anderson, 1999). The majority of museum professionals are deeply concerned about how to ensure the primacy of the visitor’s encounter with the original object, and hope to engage the attention of the viewer without unduly prejudicing what he or she finds rewarding in it (Anderson, 1999). The examination of an object in a museum is akin to an imagined conversation between observer and artist or context, mediated by the object. Among the most satisfying features of high-flying conversation is the effortless allusion to fact in order to support judgment (Anderson, 1999).
Museum workers are confronted with the task of sorting this material, which was visionary in its time into an historical order, and to bury it “beneath numbers” on inventory lists as dry as the “artistic storehouses (Frascina and Harrison, 1982).” And for the art historians, those inexhaustible, dry as dust archaeologists, there awaits a new work in the writing of explanatory texts for this sepulchral crypt so that the descendant, if only he doesn’t forget the way to them, can worthily evaluate the past and not confuse the landmarks of “historical perspectives.”(Tarabukin (Edited), 1923).
Museums demand credible art historical and scientific inquiry and often turn to scholars in universities to bolster the research value of their own monographs and exhibition catalogs (Anderson, 1999). That alliance will become increasingly problematic if museums are impelled toward greater openness through electronic publishing.
Tarabukin’s zeal to prevent formulaic research and interpretation from stifling the power and joy of the original object is little different from that of museum educators who toil in the shadow of their more visible colleagues in curatorial departments. Collections management vendors are now struggling to keep up with an ever-more sophisticated and demanding museum-based clientele (Frascina and Harrison, 1982), for whom Tarabukin’s admonition is both legitimate and still fresh. As more museum staff become involved in creating collection-related information, the tyranny of bean- or bug-counting is giving way to a still structured but more broad-based obligation to authoritative documentation (Frascina and Harrison, 1982).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
The United States in 1968 is such a well-covered period. But New York between 1969 and 1974 is not as well known (Kaplan, 2001). This is a period in which the city itself was pictured by artists (Kaplan, 2001). There is a collision of video, performance, the return of a certain kind of content after minimalism. The idea of the body in the city has a particular resonance; it is absolutely fundamental (Kaplan, 2001).
Intelligent agents will radically redefine consumer society in the coming years, and museums have yet to grasp that the sanctity of the original object must be defended in the wake of a commercial tide created by comfort-peddling merchandisers (Anderson, 1999). In keeping with this larger order of change, today’s potential museum-goers and lovers of art and artifacts will actually be less often bombarded with information, because that is the way mass communication works, but not the way robotic “intelligent agents” work. Rather than pursuing every potential consumer, advertisers are learning how to identify the vulnerable, one consumer at a time (Anderson, 1999). Museums will be forced to confront the fact that the competition for leisure time demands a more aggressive case for the experience of the original (Anderson, 1999).
In her recent review of the exhibition Curios and Treasures, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2000 (New York Times, August 18, 2000), Roberta Smith publicly recognizes museum installation as an art form, one that requires an unusual, probably unteachable talent for placing objects in space and in relation to one another, one reason a doctorate in art, does not necessarily a curator make (Bessire, 2001). It does indeed seem that this is the moment for The Power of Display to play a major role in reevaluating the history of exhibition installation and its impact on the reception of art. It is dear that Kiesler and Dorner were indeed installation artists who realigned the public reception of art and helped create an atmosphere that may have eventually led to the creation of installation art (Bessire, 2001).
The Misrepresentation of Minorities in the Arts
Most presentations of non-Western cultural groups in museums have been approached from the outsider perspective (Hutchinson, 1997). Key findings by Hutchison (1997): (1) there have been negative portrayals of ethnic minorities by nonminorities, (2) these negative portrayals have been internalized by ethnic minorities and nonminorities, and are perceived as true or correct representations, (3) such negative portrayals are usually myth or the product of historical racism, (4) there may be sociopolitical, economic, and academic motivations for negative portrayals of ethnic minorities, (5) negative portrayals affect race relations, and (6) negative cultural portrayals influence the in-group perception of racial/ethnic identity among African Americans.
The Predicament of Culture by Clifford (1988) is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford (1988) shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance on the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity; the essential elements and boundaries of a culture; and the clash of the self and “the other” in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations (Clifford, 1988). James Clifford (1988) claims that the modernist age is marked by a sense that “all the beautiful, primitive places are ruined,” that there is a kind of “cultural incest, a sense of runaway history” haunting us, and giving us the feeling that cultural authenticity has been lost.
The analytic entity “audience” is meaningful only in relation to the rest of the art system of which it is a part, and as part of the society to which it belongs (Rosler, 1984). This is not to say that the question of audience must disappear in a welter of other considerations, but rather that there are certain relationships that must be scrutinized if anything interesting is to be learned (Rosler, 1984). The most important distinctions among members of the art audience are those of social class, the weightiest determinant of one’s relation to culture. In the mediating role played by the market in the relationship between artist and audience, the network of class relations similarly determines the relation between those who merely visit cultural artifacts and those who are in a position to buy them (Rosler, 1984).
The Emerging Trends in Cultural Art
Traditionally, change has been interpreted as disorder, as chaos, as loss of authenticity. But in the global intermixture of cultures that we have witnessed in this century, the authenticity of former cultures may not be lost in quite the ways we imagine them to be: local authenticites meet and merge in transient urban and suburban settings, according to Clifford (1988). This complex process of acculturation, of meeting and merging, poses a predicament for the contemporary student of culture: the student of culture must consider both local attachments–regional dialects and traditions, for example–and general possibilities (Clifford, 1988). This predicament is based on the observation that there is no going back, no essence to redeem once authentic traditions yield to the attractions of global culture. Clifford’s book does not see the world as populated by endangered authenticities. Instead, the world makes space for specific paths through modernity. He concludes from this that the time is past when privileged authorities could routinely ‘give voice’ (or history) to others without fear of contradiction. ]
In these last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists (Berger, 1994). These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance preconceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, mass media, and gallery networks, while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village (Berger, 1994). Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing (Berger, 1994). Needless to say, these gestures are not new in the history of criticism or art, yet what makes them novel-along with the cultural politics they produce–is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation, and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some discontinuity and disruption from previous forms of surability between mental faculties, between imagination and thought (Berger, 1994).
Cultural presentations (in museum exhibits, the public media, and the academic and legal arena) of African Americans affect how others view them and how they view themselves (Hutchinson, 1997). Along this line, such presentations determine the historical perspective for understanding minority cultures. This historical account influences not only how contemporary African Americans are viewed, but also how they will be seen in the future (Hutchinson, 1997).
Anthropologists and art historians are presently going into the field, to places not yet industrialized, to find out how arts are made and used in the different cultures (Hatcher, 1999). They provide accounts of the arts in such context, enriching understanding through published works and new forms of exhibits thus putlining how art is made and used in social situations, many of them lively and exciting (Hatcher, 1999). The study of art in context necessitates the finding of many relationships that seem to exist between art forms and all, or nearly all, of the other aspects of human life, and the visual form or style of the arts in a specific society (Hatcher, 1999).
People sometimes are content to look at an unfamiliar work of art simply to respond to its statement directly, but usually they are not content to stop there (Hatcher, 1999); they also want to know some thing about the work, and what the work is about. Such questions involve not only specific information about the particular object, but broader questions about the relation of art to all other aspects of human life. Culture in the anthropological sense means much more than the arts; it is conceived as the sum of all the learned, shared behavior of human beings: how they make a living, produce things, organize their societies, and use language and other symbolic forms (Hatcher, 1999).
Hatcher (1999) compared the relationships and meanings from a variety of ethnographic contexts, to see if there are any regularities or generalizations that apply to all cultures, or whether certain kinds of art and certain relationships are characteristic of certain kinds of cultures. He posited that the study of art as culture calls for the consideration of a great variety of viewpoints and theories from our own and other cultures. The anthropological study of art is not confined to the works of peoples with primitive technologies, but involves all cultures from any time and place (Hatcher, 1999). The traditional emphasis on “primitive art” has existed primarily because no one else was paying such attention to endangered species of art forms, other than those who have been interested in collecting it without the slightest regard for its cultural context (Hatcher, 1999).
While some cultures are represented in such a way that the connection between humans and the landscape is obvious, there are sections of the exhibition where the theme is obscure or somewhat contrived (Miller, 1993).
A significantly large proportion of the gallery space of Art from Sacred Landscapes is devoted to Central American and northern South American chiefdoms, giving these relatively unknown and unstudied cultures equal weight with the great civilizations that existed to the north and south of this area prior to the Spanish conquest (Miller, 1993). The spectacular gold objects produced by the Cocle of Panama, the Tairona of Colombia, and a number of other cultures are always a great draw whenever they are displayed, but impressive ceramic and stone pieces were also produced in this region (Miller, 1993). The energetic and bold abstract zoomorphic forms painted on the surfaces of Cocle pedestal plates, for example, bring us swiftly back to the world of nature after the esoteric imagery of the Aztec (Miller, 1993).
It has been suggested by a number of anthropologists, including James Clifford, that this notion of other cultures and their visual products as a historical and distinctly different in form from the products of our own time, but embodying aesthetic values which can be perceived and judged by the West as “universal,” is an enduring characteristic of traditional approaches to non-Western art (Desal, 1995). This has meant that any analysis of those forms of art which may not fit the idea of “authentic otherness” are considered suspect and not very “good (Desal, 1995).”
In academia today, with its vogue for viewing art as a byproduct of social and political forces, traditional research methods on which scholarship still depends, like establishing chronology by means of close stylistic comparisons of objects, are regarded in some quarters as retrograde (Cotter, 1994). As Edward has pointed out, this notional definition of non-Western cultures or arts as fundamentally different from Western only helps to set them farther apart, and serves to create more one-dimensional views of the art forms (Edward, 1979).
Both The Power of Display by Mary Anne Staniszewski (1999) and Contemporary Cultures of Display, edited by Emma Barker (1999), can play a vital role in introducing the extensive power that museum displays and institutional agendas have on the presentation and reception of art in a museum setting. Staniszewski’s (1999) in-depth analysis illuminates how museum display defined the visual, social, and political interests of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and its impact on twentieth-century museum installation. In many ways these two books represent the “academification” of museum display as a legitimate discourse within the discipline of art history.
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