What Is the Purpose of Art outside the Context of Decoration - Essay Example

Question What is the purpose of art outside the context of decoration 'A Thousand Words' Art's unique strength is that it speaks many languages.Like mathematics, the visual arts accessible to the literate and the illiterate, the Chinese laborer, the Bolivian military officer, the US university student. While each viewer brings his own set of expectations and his own cultural context to a certain piece of art, he is not limited by language barriers, education, or literacy. While tools certainly exist to aid artistic comprehension, a painting is accessible on many levels and to many groups of people. The old adage of 'a picture is worth a thousand words' came into being precisely as a reflection of visual art's powerful impact on human beings. As such a formidable tool, visual stimuli have played an important role in both publicity and advertising (propaganda), and other forms of public art-different parts of society at different points have created art to send messages, or created art to demonstrate the beauty, the potential, or the ugliness of something. While public art exists in many incarnations, from the seemingly innocuous logo to the graffiti at the bus stop to the almost universally-identifiable swastika or cross, its careful manipulation and is an extraordinarily powerful political and economic tool. The advertising industry has capitalized on art's flexible nature, and makes billions annually off our susceptibility to the visual. Images have a long history of manipulation and an important role in propaganda. From the US Army's famous War Bonds posters of World War II to Maoist propaganda, images have been used for hundreds of years to send powerful political messages to the world's illiterate masses. The media, famous for its use of photography, has successfully changed the course of wars, stirred public opinion, ignited arguments, and evoked sympathy through skillful manipulation of images. The US Army's innovative use of artistic images and paintings raised more than XXX in War Bonds between 194 and 194 One particular poster shows a valiant nurse in a bloodstained uniform cradling a wounded soldier; in the background a fascist monster with cunningly painted green eyes lurks. The monster-in reality, probably a German soldier as young, poorly-educated, and confused as our own-is depicted as subhuman, a creature whose only purpose is to thwart American democracy and to kill our men in uniform. The artist's use of color, context, and detail carefully and clearly fulfills his social purpose: if the Average American Citizen wants to keep these terrible killers off of our shores, he must purchase War Bonds. The War Bonds posters, thanks to this artist and a handful of others, were extremely successful. JC Lenneydecer, iconic poster illustrator during WWII, used powerful, quotidian images such as the Boy Scout to evoke feelings of patriotism and good (ER1). The images portrayed in these pieces of public art were stimulating, convincing, and terrifyingly real. Likewise, the image of the American icon 'Uncle Sam' grew to represent something much greater than art. Although the government did not formally assimilate the image of Uncle Same until the 1950s, it had already become a pivotal part of the average citizen's conception of the government (Ketchum vii). The personifcation of this figure helped to make him that much more 'real', a presence to which one must respond as if one were responding to one's uncle. Conversely, art provokes understanding of our own surroundings; art assists us with defining our sense of place. The cultural icons with which we surround ourselves are largely artistic, and largely specific to our parts of the world. In the United States we are intimately familiar with a thousand small logos, each of them carefully designed to be both visually appealing and to fulfill a certain purpose. We see this art every day in something as commonplace as a the Greenpeace logo, showing the Tree of Life, or the Nike logo, a constant reminder for one to be all that he can be. We look at the recycling logo-three curved arrows forming a circle-and our minds immediately identify that image with an environmental theme. The logo's organic shape calls to mind the natural world, the logo's blues and greens remind us of the oceans, the clouds, the forests, the components of our physical environment. The designers of the recycling arrow have succeeded in conditioning us to associate their art with a certain series of actions, and we register that message's meaning visually long before we can articulate it. Logos, perhaps the most visible and most prolific pieces of public art, have perhaps the most direct and lasting impact of all the images with which we come into daily contact. Millions of American schoolchildren can immediately recognize the MacDonald's logo, the golden M, while only XXX percent can find France on a map. As visual creatures, our openness to the visual stimuli of our environments cannot be underestimated. While few houses in the world are without some sort of artistic adornment, fewer still are without consistent access to social and visual stimuli, each one of them carefully developed and designed to achieve maximum impact with a context of visual attractiveness. Works Cited: Ketchum, Alton. Uncle Sam: The Man and the Legend. Hill and Wang, 1959. Electronic Resources: American Art Archives, American Art Archives, www.americanartarchives.com Works Referenced: Craig, Lois A. The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in Unites States Government Buildings. MIT Press, 1978. Crawford, Anthony R., editor. Posters of World War I and World War II in the George C. Marshall Research Foundation. 1979 University Press of Virginia Levin, David, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. 1959 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Question 2: How does a work of art become iconic 'Warholism: Art as Icon' A work of art becomes iconic when it speaks to the human condition, and when it has found an apt combination of time and place. The world is rife with artistic talent and technical skill-the former being a testament to the fact that, out of more than six billion souls on earth, a good percentage of them will possess artistic inclination, and the latter a product of millions of training grounds for artists, both formal and informal-however, artistic icons are few. Technical skill, the ability to precisely depict a shadow or an anatomical fact through paints, pencils, or other media, is not rare. Many so-called 'great' works of art are produced and never recognized for what they are, paintings which languish in private collections, or an exposition which receives unfavorable reviews and never advances beyond a semi-unknown gallery in Chinatown. Perhaps their timing is simply wrong. A 'work of art' (a phrase that in the vernacular represents the highest form of praise) becomes an icon when its execution is sufficient to enable the fulfillment of its social purpose. The ever-popular Mona Lisa speaks to the mysticism of women, a subject which never grows old or outdated. Mona Lisa's expression of mystery is unsolvable. Monet's water lilies, while initially popularized for their groundbreaking style and innovative use of color and brushwork, express a beauty and tranquility that is both timeless and elusive. In both cases the technique enabled the transmission of the piece's message. While individual intellectual and technical merit are important aspects of 'art as icon', the fact cannot be ignored that the arts are manipulated to represent, deconstruct, and reconstruct society according to the priorities of those in power. While some wishfully state that art is the only remaining purity on earth, I would submit that the arts are as manipulated as much, if not more so, than many other aspects of the human experience. As a product of this manipulation, certain pieces become iconic in part because of their inherent validity, and in part because they have been elevated to a place of social relevance within a current context by those whose interests they serve. Take, for example, Charles Dickens. While literature is often separated from 'art' because of its form, its function in a greater social context is largely the same. With the advent of the literary prize, works of 'art' that had previously been created for their artistic merits alone became commercialized. As James P. English writes in Schaffer's book, In Britain literary awards had, until the early nineteenth century, largely been restricted to schools and universities-institutions within which it was, after all, normal practice to promote competition among writers and to rank their works according to precise hierarchies of value. To some extent, these devices of educational apparatus anticipated later, extra-curricular forms of the literary prize, with their tendencies to become entwined with the political and commercial agenda (162). Dickens' works speaks directly to issues and values of his Victorian his era-Christianity, moralism, and the London underworld-and as such serve a distinct social purpose. It was very convenient to have the public reading about the streets within the context of Victorian righteousness, and easier still when the politicians and the statesman could leave this informal education to the likes of Dickens. Literary prizes gave Dickens institutional weight, and thus institutional approval. His novels were publicly branded as 'good', given a certain artistic seal of approval, and launched into artistic circles on the part of the critics, who saw in his stories an opportunity for moral and intellectual education for the masses. To take a very different example, Frida Kahlo's work became iconic because it spoke so poignantly to the feminine condition in a time when women worldwide were just beginning to rattle their proverbial shackles. Kahlo's piece The Little Deer (1946) shows her own head on the body of an impaled deer, dripping blood, an expression of panic on her face. While it doesn't take a psychologist to extract social commentary from Kahlo's work, her images evoked, and continue to evoke, feelings of identification in women. Her use of color, image, and her semi-realistic brushwork ensured that her images were recognizable and accessible to viewers of different cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Women look at Kahlo's work and see themselves. Though statistics on the feminine condition abound, with data available on everything from earnings to domestic violence, Kahlo's paintings are immediately recognizable as representative of a singular, feminine experience that transcends both culture and time. Andy Warhol's famous contribution to pop art-his series of paintings depicting the soup can-became an immediate icon because it fulfilled its social function and its visual function simultaneously and powerfully. Warhol was working in an era in which artistic experimentation and pop style were popular, accessible, and enticing. His technique was fresh. His colors were acidic and synthetic, and his subject matter was an object so quotidian that everyone from the New York critic to the average American housewife could appreciate his pieces. Warhol's work spoke indirectly to American consumerism, to the era of processed food and tin cans, to garbage, to the commercialization of everything; the American public, with different levels of sophistication and nuance, understood. Likewise, Warhol's Absolut Vodka paintings, which were used in "Absolut Warhol" advertisements, became iconic pieces of public art for the same reason: they were comprehensible and accessible (ER 1). Warhol's artistic execution and the technical 'success' of his pieces reinforced their pertinence and their relevant social message. For art to become iconic depends in large part upon social context. Manipulation is inevitable, by critics, by the media, by a thousand interested parties, but for art to become lasting and impermeable, its technical success must be equaled or surpassed by its social relevance. Works Cited: Schaffer, Brian W, Editor. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel. 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Electronic Resources: Wrbican, Matt, Archivist, The Andy Warhol Museum. ANDY WARHOL CHRONOLOGY Andy Warhol Museum. http://edu.warhol.org/20c_chron.html Works Referenced: Fryd, Vivien Green. Art & Empire. Yale University Press, 1992. Cohn, Terri. Nature, Culture, Public Space 1998 by the author. Lippard, Lucy. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. 1993 Harper Collins Publishers Read More