Seven Days In the Art World

Thornton, Sarah. Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print.

Seven Days… is an outsider’s account of the art world’s sphere in a contemporary context. Through investigative journalism and ethnography, Thornton evaluates seven aspects of the art world, in an attempt to understand how it functions as a whole and what forces are active in its manipulation and articulation. The picture she paints is bleak, portraying an exclusive society of art-consumers and art exhibitioners. Those consumers who make up the largest proportion of money exchanged are shown as having little concern for the artists, the foundation of the pyramid. Thornton also portrays gallery conventions, nationalist conferences of art, the scene of the critics and literature, and the insides of the artist as manufacturer and brand. She sheds light on the operations of this obscurest of worlds and gives personality and face to its cogs.

Society of the Spectacle

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

In this critique, Debord delineates the effect of commoditized culture has on human beings and how it perpetuates itself through modern society by implicit, hidden means. He places us at a time where relationships between people have diminished to the point where consumption is what drives life rather than interpersonal connection or the motivation to understand anything outside the given viewpoint. The Spectacle represents peoples’ experience as mediated through images rather than lived first-hand. Marketing, and today more specifically, branding, attempts to formulate human identity, to distill the variety of possible experiences into certain predestined archetypes. This is a function of power and control at the expense of the whole society, who view appearance, manufactured need, and external adherence to mass culture as superior to the dangerous and unpredictable (as well as genuine and original) possibilities of life outside the norm.

The Medium Is the Massage

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.

Using a mix of visual and written content, juxtaposition and design, McLuhan communicates itself in an experiential way. Everything inside the covers works toward conveying the current situation of media and the viewer, their roles and how they interact. The purpose of his writing is to convey how the conventional boundaries between content and its mode of expression has recently and rapidly degraded. He takes this as a starting point to show how the information we take in forms the way that we comprehend and interpret the world around us. These innovations in communication have become an unconscious filter through which we interact with the things around us, so much so that we are coaxed into following the rhythms established by the mainstream media.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, Jan. 1971. Web. 30 April 2015. < http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists/>

Linda Nochlin’s article poses the question in order to pick it apart and describe, not only why the question itself carries with it incorrect assumptions, but also to describe the barriers which have hitherto prevented women equal or ready access to the art world. She explains that almost all the women artists which we do know of were born white, middleclass, most often to artist families. With this understanding we may predict that gender designation also would discourage acceptance of women in general in the arts, which have, with the exception of music, long been deemed a masculine pursuit. It is not because of a difference in subject matter, but because she was barred from artistic education and prevented access to nude models that woman was shackled from her artistic pursuit in the first place, expected instead to be primarily concerned with childrearing. Nochlin takes on the idea of “genius” which assumes something intrinsic, and notes that in most cases “genius” actually amounts to privilege and circumstance. With a few notable exceptions, mostly women have been prevented the position of “greatness” in the arts, not by internal inabilities, but rather by institutional shortfalls and inequalities.

The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin, Walter. Trans. Harry Zohn. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

            Web. 8 Sep. 2015. <https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm>

This article considers how the physical presence of a work of art is categorically different than the presence of a reproduction. The copy exists unattached to the physicality of the original object, unattached to its specific relationship to space and time. This disconnection, motivated by a need for democratic access to objects across space, results in disenchantment, a loss of the “aura” which belongs solely to the original. Film has this disenchantment built into it, Benjamin elaborates. By involving a mechanical device from the start, those portrayed are, even while in the act, disconnected by experience from the result. It has no connection to their life as experienced first-hand. In addition, the capabilities of the eye of the camera open up entirely new fields of perception. We see things in ways impossible to the human eye. Time stops, space takes on new proportions, new angles. At the same time, it opens up a new field of appreciation in which the viewer is put in the privileged position of heightened awareness by the camera’s viewpoint. It represents a prepared general reality which requires nothing of the particular viewer. This is a far cry from a painting, which is a solitary window into the mind of another, not tailor-fit to the perceptual powers of the mass.