High Culture vs. Low Culture // 14th December 2011
High Culture vs. Low Culture // 14th December 2011
High Culture and Low Culture
Introduction
The urge to criticism is almost natural within us – day in, day out we make critical evaluations of one sort or
another. And this tendency is inevitably attached to our pursuit for quality of life. Distinguishing between good
and bad has been the realm of philosophical debate for centuries. In relation to the pursuit of good/bad in art
philosopher have established the realm of enquiries known as Beauty, Taste and Aesthetics.
The term avant-garde in its first usage in relation to art, referred to the ability for art in general to be the ‘avant
garde of society’, the ability for art to exercise a positive influence on society. By the late 19th century the term
was adopted from its political usage at the time, and came to denote specific artistic tendencies that outdistanced
the contemporary artistic movements. By the early 20th century the term is adopted in art criticism and there
exists a notion of a plurality of avant-gardes in competition with one another. In the ideology of the avant-garde
two currents exist – a right wing current and a left wing current. The right wing current has been the most
prominent and according to this tendency innovation is the sole objective of avant-gardism. The left wing current
holds that artists should be progressive on a social and political level and should be committed to class struggle;
however, artistic innovation in this context is potentially perceived as decadent, elitist and bourgeois. In the past,
the left wing trends which have avoided artistic innovation because of its elitist implications have run the risk of
following academic traditions in art, (for example the Mexican Muralists). Avant-garde artists who align
themselves with the Left are therefore faced with a dilemma of opposing interests. Defining elements of the avant
garde are:- (1)Its linear conception of history – what the avant-garde artist achieves now, will be what other artists
follow on to emulate in the future. (2)Historical Determinism – this is the idea that avant-garde will eventually
become incorporated and function successfully in the future. (3)Evolutionist Conception of History – In the
ideology of the avant-garde there is always an implied notion of progress; progress toward correcting the problems
avant-garde is an elite minority. The irony here is that the avant-garde began as an assault on the bourgeoisie.
Roland Barthes posed in ‘The Death of the Avant-Garde’ - it was dying because it was recognized as significantly
artistic by the same class whose values it rejected.’ The avant-garde ideology justifies the role of the artist and
the ways he/she might operate, e.g. subversive, experimental, oppositional, revolutionary, dandy and so on. The
avant-garde in the 20th Century has become an essential part of the art market and is both sought out and
supported as official culture; examples today would include:- the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi’s
contemporary art collection, and corporate sponsorship in such forms as the BT New Contemporaries exhibitions
of the world.
Taste & Beauty
Significant contributions were made in the 18th C. as to the nature of beauty. Philosophical enquiry shifted from
considering the nature of beautiful objects, to the way ‘men’ react to beauty and to the idea of beauty being a
subjective, psychological response – the idea of ‘beauty being in the eye of the beholder’. For a number of
philosophers and aestheticians, inherent within the idea of perceiving beauty, is the notion of being ‘able’ to
perceive beauty, having the mental faculty to do so. Connoisseurship and Taste for the aristocratic gentlemen
were predicated around the transcendental faculty for appreciating beauty and therefore evaluative judgements
were tenable. The appreciation of beauty was considered an important and morally uplifting quality for the
aristocracy. By the 19th C. the various philosophies of Beauty and Taste began to emerge into what we know as
the philosophy of Aesthetics.
Clive Bell’s Theory
Aesthetic experience may roughly be described as the experience of viewing beauty. For Kant, “Beauty in its
aesthetic sense can be defined as the ‘quality’ in an object which when viewed gives pleasure.” Form becomes
the essential quality, and aesthetic readings of art tend to pursue the formal rather than other modes of analysis.
Clive Bell’s influential aesthetic theory makes this approach clear by castigating the distractive features of
narrative/”descriptive” pictures. Significant Form is the quality within paintings/sculpture that makes them Art.
However, for Bell (like others), one has to have the faculty to appreciate ‘significant form’. This makes his
argument circular and impossible to contradict – thus, for a viewer contradicting Bell’s claim, Bell could simply
reply that such a viewer did not have the sensitivity to appreciate aesthetic form.
Art for Art’s Sake
One effect of Bell’s thesis is the total rejection of descriptive genre painting. In its place is the adoption of an Art
for Art’s Sake stance. Such a stance is integral to the ideology of the Avant-Garde. For a number of theorists in
the first half of the 20th C. (see Adorno & the Frankfurt School, early Greenberg), avant-garde production was the
key to what was good and could be seen as oppositional to popular art forms and kitsch which were seen as a
threat to civilised culture.
Greenberg’s Theory
The alignment between the Avant-Garde and Modernism was to be entrenched within the theoretical writings of
Clement Greenberg. Greenberg, like Bell, sees figurative art as getting in the way of aesthetic experience. Being
responsive to the aesthetic quality of an object requires a contemplative mode of being ‘disinterested’. Greenberg
talks about approaching art with ‘the eye’ alone – and that this should be the sole criteria for judging art if we are
to distinguish good from bad. However, the question needs to be put, is art just about pleasing the ‘eye’? Is it not
the case that art is also about engaging the mind? In that respect Greenberg’s later theoretical position does not
progress his earlier critical stance towards Kitsch.
Kitsch
For Greenberg and others kitsch could be characterised as the various forms of popular culture, such as
Hollywood movies, advertisements, and commercial art. The more accurate meaning of Kitsch actually refers to
those objects which draw from and aspire to High Art, although their appeal to popular taste would always be a
primary criteria: However, the term is more commonly used to refer more broadly to popular cultural artefacts and
is interchangeable with terms like ‘cheap tack’, ‘trashy’, ‘bad taste’.
High & Low
The distinction between High Art and Low Art presents a number of problems. However, I would like to draw
attention to two of those for now. Firstly, with what kind of authority should we take and consider those claims to
Art which fix themselves firmly within the realm of the popular, the easily accessible, digestible and intelligible?
Where might we place ‘serious’ fine art production (the kind located on Fine Art degree programmes and within the
pages of Artforum) in a culture which proposes Ikea prints, tiger and elephant drawings and limited edition
collectors plates as fine art also? And secondly, how should we cope with the fact that the realm of Low Art has
successfully been ‘raided’ by modern art – Manet, Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Koons etc, - and
become subject matter for High Art?
Evaluation
How might we evaluate good and bad? “Well, it all comes down to personal taste” is a popular subjectivist
response, but one which I would say amounts to bad criticism. This approach equates ‘I like’ with ‘is good’, and
has a number of problems. Firstly, we often like what we know to be bad, and dislike what we know are good.
Secondly, statements such as “I like this painting” or “this sculpture is crap”, don’t reveal anything about the
works themselves, but tend more to be facts about the person making the statement. Alternatively, the
intuitionist response, would posit that a viewer makes a judgement based on intuition; this avoids the problems
relating to like=good, however, this approach is still subjective in character and judgements are impossible to
substantiate. A third and more satisfactory approach explores the criteria and contexts for what might constitute
good. Applying the philosopher R.M. Hare’s relativist approach, it is acknowledged that the criteria for ‘good’ will
shift according to context. Given the expanded practice of contemporary art, it is no longer relevant to apply only
those evaluative criteria appropriate to ‘traditional’ art, e.g., skill, naturalism, narrative content. The close of the
lecture, therefore, invites the audience to consider what evaluative criteria might be employed, (with
discrimination), to contemporary art, in making the judgements ‘good art’ / ‘bad art’
