Popular Pleasures

An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture

Paul Duncum

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350193420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Today's many popular aesthetic pleasures have a very long history. Paul Duncum considers the historical critical discourses, and socio-political issues raised by aesthetic pleasures in fifteen thematic chapters. Using illustrative examples from the past, present, and across cultures, he challenges the idea of any decline of cultural standards and argues that no grounds exist for cultural pessimism. Refusing to condemn popular culture on the basis of taste, he reserves critique for the socio-political ideologies aesthetics invariably serve. Art history, film, cultural studies, and philosophical aesthetics are each employed to show that the sensory/emotional lures of today's popular culture are mostly identical to those of premodern fine art. They include the violent, the horrific, the sentimental, the exotic, the erotic, and the humorous. Some of these pleasures derive from our evolutionary biology; they are all an important part of what it means to be human, and central to understanding contemporary society. Examples are wide-ranging, including British seaside postcards, Disney films, Nazi propaganda, burlesque, modern advertising, as well as many exemplars of fine art. The book reveals fresh insights for all those studying visual culture, art history, aesthetics, media studies, and media and art education.

1

A Realistic Style

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Chapter Outline

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What is Realism?

Idolatry and Ideology

The Search for Realism

The Pleasures of Realism

Realism and Reality

Veridical, Virtual, and Verifiable

The Pokémon Go phenomenon of recent years brought augmented reality into the mainstream. Throughout much of the world, people delighted at being able to superimpose a computer-generated image on the real world. Yet augmented reality is only the most recent example in a long history of attempts to create either new levels or different kinds of visual realism. Among painters and sculptors, the attempt is clearly evident in ancient Greece and Rome, and while it later declined under the influence of early Christianity, in the West it was rediscovered in the twelfth century. It has continued unabated ever since. Toward the end of the nineteenth century modernist, avant-garde artists turned their backs on the then centuries-old tradition of pictorial realism, but popular taste has remained decidedly grounded in faithful representation.

What is Realism?

Realistic images mimic, imitate, or copy the appearance of things. They simulate or resemble closely in such a way that viewers are happy to make believe that the imitation stands in for the thing represented (Chilvers 2012). This is verisimilitude, a faithful rendering of the appearance of something without any intent to confuse reality with representation. As viewers, we pretend in the reality of the representation. Unlike illusionistic images discussed in the next chapter—images that intentionally attempt to conflate images with reality—realistic-style pictures do not fool us. We may be drawn in, but we are not taken in.

Cinema audiences know that a giant ape or a dinosaur involves a deception. They cannot always know that they are looking at a fabricated set or a computer-generated backdrop, but they know they are looking at a film. A duel consciousness is evoked by realism in which viewers simultaneously accept the picture as real while always remaining aware that a picture is a picture. Paintings are framed and thus bracketed off from their surroundings, and with many, even highly realistic paintings their material surface is not entirely transparent. Their surfaces reflect light, and as soon as a viewer moves it is clear that the view a painting offers does not move with them. Photographs of lost loved ones are sufficiently real to bring them to mind, but also sufficiently unreal to remind us that they are gone (Hirsch 1997). Violent and horrific images are each sufficiently real to arouse anxiety while safe enough to enjoy. There is no deliberate attempt actually to deceive on the part of the image-makers, and on the part of viewers no mistaking realism for reality. We are delighted, not deceived.

The skills of realism can astonish and mystify. In the past, they have been equated with witchcraft or at least believed to be magical. For two centuries prior to the invention of “movie magic” people watched projected images by means of magic lanterns, and today the special effects company of George Lucas is called “Industrial Light and Magic.” Even now, living in an age of photographic realism, we can still be dumbstruck at an even more vivid rendering of reality than previous experience had led us to expect.

Idolatry and Ideology

Yet such pleasures have long been subject to sharp criticism. To begin at the beginning: writing in the early fourth century BCE, Plato held a low opinion of the visual arts in general, due partly to their being imitative and partly because they offered pleasure without a serious purpose. Setting himself against the visual arts of his day, that were seeking to satisfy the pleasures of imitation, he argued that realism ignored the spiritual ideals of which things were mere manifestations. Imitating only obvious, external appearances, pandered to base, popular taste and, more importantly, it was dangerous because realistic images were unreliable as sources of knowledge. Knowledge was only to be found by penetrating to the soul of a thing. The mere likeness of things was “a man-made dream for waking eyes,” and dreams were notorious for their distortions of the true state of things (cited in Gilbert and Kuhn 1953: 33). Plato wrote, “Mimetic art … is an inferior thing cohabitating with inferior” (cited: 36). Imitation provided pleasure for its own sake, and pleasure alone could never be justified. Imitation was both trivial and dangerous. Of the ten categories of human beings he generated and arranged in descending order according to their worth, he categorized visual artists as sixth. It could have been worse.

The Hebrew Bible also condemned realism not because it was trivial but because it was akin to idolatry, of conflating images for the things God had created and thereby reducing God’s own work to mere representations (Fumaroli 2011). The biblical injunction against realistic images is nothing less than a legal contract between God and the Hebrews: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).

It was only by gradually rejecting the idea of realism as inherently evil that realistic imagery became possible, though a fear of realism remains active today. Today, much of the criticism leveled against popular imagery has at its heart the assumption that realistic representations are powerful for being realistic. They hail us by seeming to represent the real and therefore to be true, wherein lies their power to influence (Mirzoeff 2005). They are dangerous because false ideas and suspect values are the more easily conveyed by them to a gullible public. As literary theorist Roland Barthes (1977) says of photographic images, they appear a “lustral bath of innocence” (49). If danger does not lie with idolatry, it lies with false ideology. Because realism helps signify ideas, beliefs, and values for the largest number of people, totalitarian regimes have uniformly insisted on realistic styles in their attempt to propagate their ideologies to the broadest possible number of citizens (Golomstock 2011). Similarly, commercial enterprises employ pictorial realism to relate to the broadest possible range of consumers, thus encouraging an ideology of consumption where the good life becomes a goods’ life.

On the other hand, photographic illusion was dismissed by modernist artists for showing nothing but the obvious surface of things. It was rejected as unimaginative and trivial. The French poet Charles Baudelaire declared that the publics thirst for “the exact reproduction of nature” spelt the ruin of “whatever is left of the divine” (cited in Turner 1987: 60, 59). Compared to modernist fine art, with its aspiration to express innermost feelings and reveal hidden truths, the camera was simply a recording device and photographs mere trifles. Moreover, echoing Plato, more recent pessimistic, postmodern critics conclude that the current plethora of imagery ends up signifying nothing. In the “Evil Demon of Images,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1987) claims that because we now see everything we see nothing; we see only surface, not significance.

Thus, from ancient to recent times realistic images have been accused of being either too unimportant to take seriously or dangerous. They are either trifles or terrors. Yet despite the longevity and harshness of the criticisms leveled against realistic style imagery, none appear to have affected their popularity.

The Search for Realism

Ernst Gombrich’s (1972) classic text The Story of Art, the history of premodern art, from the twelfth century to the nineteenth century, appears as largely a sequence of attempts to create either ever-greater levels and/or different kinds of realism. And the attempts have not been confined to painting. As different media were developed, they each took up the challenge: printing, photography, the cinema, television, and computer games. From today’s perspective, the initial appearance of realism in each of these media produced poor results, yet our current expectations for realism are due to subsequent developments in these media. Each of these media trended toward a higher level of realism or some new kind of realism.

Painting

Giotto di Bondone, working in twelfth-century Italy, is usually credited with the first major shift from the medieval focus on spirituality expressed through abstraction to a more material-based view of the world explored thorough the close observation of nature. Giotto resurrected a long-discarded sense of solidity for his figures, and although his figures do not strike us today as overly realistic, they wowed his contemporaries. He established a new goal for artists, and a new expectation for patrons and public. Henceforth artists would need to satisfy a desire for realism if they were to succeed.

Figure 1.1 Giotto di Bondone, Scenes from the Life of Mary: 7. Nativity of the God Bearer, 1303–5.

The drive for verisimilitude was often frustrated by artistic ability, the expense of materials and processes, as well as available technologies, but the direction of development was set. The essential nature of painting was imitation; imitation was both its single defining characteristic and its primary value. Whatever ideas and values artists expressed, or truths they revealed, they did so by means of a realistic style. Artists imitated the spirit of things by imitating their appearance in physical matter, and the better the imitation, the better the art (Dickie 1997). Paintings were like open windows through which the subject was seen, or a veil drawn to reveal the scene behind it (Alberti [1435] 1972). The material surface on which paint was applied was a transparent membrane behind which scenes were created.

In the business of pleasing private patrons, and later the public, artists were always in competition with each other, and competition drove artists in search of different and better ways to achieve life-likeness. Artists corrected their previous habits of working from age-old schema with what their eyes told them, a process Gombrich (1960) called “schema and correction” or “formulae and experience” (64, 126–52). They corrected their inherited schema for depicting things on the basis of their perceptual experience, going beyond what they thought they knew by what they trained themselves to see.

During the nineteenth century, artists split into two main camps. Academic artists maintained the mimetic tradition, but avant-garde artists, explored in Chapter 4, broke away in favor of expressing their own subjective experience. Modernist art historians and aestheticians sidelined the former group, regarding them as pandering to low, popular taste (Clay 1978). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the position of mimetic painting as the dominant form of popular imagery had already been relinquished to high-resolution print media and photography.

Printing and Photography

The illustration of books began in the fourteenth century with the crudity of woodcut, but it was soon superseded by etching and engraving, both of which enabled far finer detail (Ivins 1953). Engraving produced better results than etching but etching, being a simpler and far less expensive process, prevailed, and, in turn, was overtaken by lithography. Aquatint, which offered fine graduations of tone, was developed, and then color aquatint was soon introduced, which was then superseded by half-tone printing with its even more subtle graduation of tone. Ivins (1953) comments: “Always the exactly repeatable image that gave the most detail in the same space won out” (123). By the 1920s most magazines and newspapers were regularly reproducing photographs.

Similar to modern print media, the development of photography was the culmination of many technical developments. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many devices were either refined or introduced that created realistic images, or at least attempts thereof (Mannoni, Nekes, and Warner 2004). They proved exceptionally popular in an emerging commercial economy based on appealing to a broad public. For the first time in human history a large proportion of the population was able to participate in the economy as serious players, and they immediately gravitated to the magic of realistic imagery. The rising middle class of the early nineteenth century, materialists to the bone, wanted their likenesses made. The stage was set for the invention, simultaneously in 1839, of daguerreotypes, an early form of photography, and photography as we know it today, “photogenic drawings,” as they were originally known (Warner 2014).

Unlike anything hand-drawn, photographs appeared to represent the way things actually looked. Promoters of photography claimed that because it was a “chemical and physical process,” photography was “not merely an instrument that serves to draw nature; it gives her the ability to reproduce herself” (cited in Nunberg 2007: 9). The truth of photography seemed self-evident; it was the pencil of nature. The poet Edgar Allan Poe declared, “If we examine a work of art by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature disappear—but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more accurate truth,...