CHAPTER 1
The Cultural-Niche Theory of Art
THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY artist Piet Mondrian (1937) wrote that he imagined a future where we no longer just had paintings hanging on walls, but lived in realized art. The items of domestic life would all be art. We would live in art. He wanted artists to make this art so balanced that people would live their lives in its harmonies. In a sense, that future has come to be. We live in realized art. We have art on our bed sheets and on our T-shirts. We make fashion choices of color and line, even on our towels and our toilet paper. We see art images everywhere. There is a diversity in the kinds of art that we see around us. There are advertising posters on the walls of stores. There are illustrations in magazines. There are streams of images broadcast to us over television. We are indeed living in realized art.
This realized art, however, is not in a harmonious universal style as Mondrian was envisaging. It consists mostly in forms of art considered banal, sentimental, and in bad taste by most in the Fine Art artworld. Further, because so many people have no interest in Fine Art, it is often thought that visual art has somehow lost its relevance and potency. People ask what the point of art is, and whether it is worthwhile spending public money on art. When people think of art, they think of Fine Art, and the influence of Fine Art seems to be in decline.
However, although Fine Art seems to be in decline as a cultural force, visual art has more power in culture now than it ever had. Visual art is not all Fine Art. There is a diversity of kinds of art in contemporary culture. Besides Fine Art, there is also Popular Art, Design Art, and advertising. What Fine Art does for us is just a small part of the total cultural value we get from art. As traditional culture recedes from memory, and technology changes our lifestyles, people look for new values and lifestyles. These new values and lifestyles are carried by the art broadcast to us over the mass media and on the products we buy. The mass-media arts define our heroes and tell us about the good. Advertisements define pleasure and lifestyle. With mass-market goods we dress our bodies and houses in art, thus using art to define who we are. These contemporary visual arts play a large part in shaping our values, fantasies, and lifestyles.
If we want to know what visual art is all about in contemporary culture, it seems a good idea to look at the causes for the existence of these different types of art. To understand what art is, we should ask ourselves not just the traditional question of what these art forms all have in common which makes them all art, but we should also ask questions about how these various visual art forms are different from each other, what social functions and agendas they serve, and why some people like one sort and some people another. In the following chapters we will try to answer such questions. We will discuss the social and historical forces that have shaped each sort of art. We will discuss the part each sort of art plays in shaping our current mentality. We will discuss what each sort of art does for people, and what its powers are. We will look at Fine Art’s power for giving us an aesthetic emotion, and Popular Art’s power for giving its viewers vicarious experiences and heightened emotion. We will discuss the power of Design Art to structure our identities, and of Advertising Art to give us desire. We will look at the overall effect of these various kinds of art on our mentalities. We will look at the dialectical evolution of visual art in Western culture, focusing on the life histories of these four kinds of art.
We will approach visual art from the perspective of the cultural-niche theory of art. This theory uses a biological metaphor, looking at the different kinds of art as cultural forms of life which each have certain constitutive features and personal history. We will look at the various kinds of art as entwined but separate forms of life evolving in relation to each other and to the surrounding culture. Looking at art this way gives us insight into the role of visual art in culture, and into the direction which culture and art are evolving. It gives us insight into why artists accept one stylistic dogma rather than another, and what sorts of cultural forces cause art to change. It gives us an approach to the problem of how to compare works of art cross-culturally and across time.
Giving a general idea of the cultural-niche theory will be the subject matter of this chapter, then in the following chapters we will look in detail at each of the main cultural niches of art in contemporary culture. We will discuss the life history of each type of art from a cultural-niche perspective, showing how each type of art has evolved to have its own concerns and powers, and the cultural needs that each type of art fills. In the last chapter we will discuss the evolution of culture and art, and the effect of visual art on the evolution of the way we think. We will discuss the cultural agendas carried by visual art in our new age of electronic media and mass market goods.
1. THE DIFFERENT VISUAL ARTS
Art and Social Class
As we look around in our contemporary world we see that there are several different types of visual art impinging upon us. As we said, we see Popular Art, Fine Art, Design, and advertising. The first question that comes up is the question of what differentiates these types of art. What makes something Popular Art, for example, and not Fine Art or Design Art?
Most commonly, people have differentiated types of visual art by what class they serve. The social historian Arnold Hauser (1958) writes that there are as many different art trends running parallel to each other in any given historical period as there are cultural strata in the society. These trends in art correspond to various lifestyles and levels of education. For Europe and the United States, the basic cultural strata have been the educated and aristocratic class, the middle class and urban masses, and the country folk. A different type of visual art corresponds to each of these cultural strata. According to his analysis of art along class lines, the major types of art are Fine Art (fig. 1.1), Popular Art (fig. 1.2), and Folk Art (fig. 1.3). Fine Art serves the educated upper class, Popular Art is the art of the middle classes and urban masses, and Folk Art is the art of the peasant classes.
As a first approximation, looking at art this way does tell us something about the difference between these types of art. As Hauser writes, it was the aristocratic class who supported the Renaissance and Enlightenment academies and bought Fine Art for their collections. Fine Art was made from the beginning to reflect the tastes and serve the needs of this educated upper class. To serve the needs of the educated and aristocratic class, Fine Art is often critical of the status quo. It tends to grapple with fundamental human concerns, and challenge the viewer to change his or her perspective. This sort of art is meant to be mentally and aesthetically engaging.
FIGURE 1. An example of Fine Art: Henry Moore, Recumbent Figure, 1938. Green Horton stone, length c. 54″. Tate Gallery, London.
In contrast to this, as Hauser writes, Popular Art is made by individual artists for popular taste. The artists that make art for popular taste are often professional artists who are themselves members of the elite classes with respect to art. Artists making art for popular taste are educated into the accumulated tradition of European Fine Art and culture. However, unlike elite artists who tend to express their own taste and life orientation in their art, the artists making Popular Art tend to pander to the taste of their clients.
The peasant classes, according to Hauser, are served by yet another form of art, Folk Art. The themes in Folk Art speak to what is common to all in the group. It is not thought of as having individual authors; rather it is passed down from one person to another, and no individual owns it. This sort of art is tightly constrained by fixed conventions. Folk Art is made by the folk for their own consumption. It is crafted art.
However, although there are different types of art, and these arts do have their origins in part in the needs of different classes, that is not what really distinguishes them in the modern context. Hauser’s Marxist conception of class is less appropriate for differentiating the visual arts of today. In the modern context, what is more fundamental than class in differentiating various contemporary visual arts is their supporting institutions, ideologies, and distribution systems. Fine Art is displayed in museums and galleries, and tends to be individually hand-made items which are appreciated within the context of Fine Art ideology and history. Fine Art is art produced outside the mass-media and mass-market systems. Fine Art is art for art’s sake, made for no other purpose than to be appreciated as art.
FIGURE 1.2 An example of traditional Popular Art: M.I. Hummel figurine, The Photographer. Hummel® and M.I. Hummel® are used under License from Goebel
© ARS AG, Zug/Switzerland.
With respect to Popular Art, besides the older forms of Popular Art, paintings and sculptures produced for popular taste (fig. 1.2), the majority of contemporary Popular Art is the commercial art that is broadcast on the mass media. Popular Art images are the illustrations in magazines and books, and on greeting cards and calendars. They are the images on television and in the movies. This art is made for a whole spectrum of class tastes, not just the tastes of the middle class. These mass-media arts are targeted to a range of ages, incomes, and ethnic groups.
The Folk Art of the European peasant classes was the craft objects of everyday life. These objects have been replaced by mass-market goods. For example, Figure 1.3 shows a hand-made quilt with a double ring pattern of the sort traditionally given to women at their wedding. Today factory produced mass-market quilts with the same pattern can be bought at the store. In general, we no longer make the things we use; we buy them, and most peasant craft knowledge has been forgotten. Thus, although there are still a few pockets of Folk Art here and there, for most of us the functions crafted goods once played in ordinary life are now played by mass-market manufactured goods. Thus, in Western society, Folk Art as the art of the peasant classes has been replaced by Design Art, targeted not just to the peasant class, but to all classes in society.
FIGURE 1.3 An example of contemporary traditional Folk Art: handmade quilt with a double ring pattern traditionally given to the bride at her wedding.
The Design Arts
The Design Arts are new forms of art created by the needs of the Industrial Revolution. Design Art is the art we see on the products we use. The flower decorations on sheets and tissue boxes are Design Art (fig. 1.4). The visual forms of our houses, cars, furniture, and clothes are all Design Art. The designs of efficiently operated machines in factories are also Design Art. The distinctions between the various Design Arts are distinctions of function. The Design Arts include such things as fashion design, package design, industrial design, interior decorating, and architecture. We can think of design as the creative act of shaping objects to be useful and attractive. Through their understanding of the consumer’s psychology, designers try to make the product seem more desirable. The modern designer plays the roles of artist, engineer, and market researcher. The designer makes the styling of products and the form of new products.
The Design Arts have different ideological concerns than those of Fine Art or Popular Art. With the Design Arts there isn’t a concern with what makes something art. The ideological concerns for Design Art are what constitutes functional form and what the role of decoration should be. Design Art is concerned with function and with style. Putting style on products makes them more attractive. It makes us buy more products as we throw out old ones, not because they are no longer usable, but because we no longer like their style. The consumer “decorates” his or her surroundings and person with this Design Art. Style sells, and designers sell style along with the primary function of the product.
FIGURE 1.4 An example of Design Art : tissue box.
Design Art is the art that is most married to industry. It participates in the most recent ideology of Western culture, the ideology of design. There are close conceptual similarities between the insights behind computer software technology and those embodied in Design Art, as we will discuss. We can find the ideology of design ...
