Lecture 4 - Popular Culture

Critical positions on the media and popular culture

What is culture?

1.    Way of life

2.    General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.

3.     Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance.

Marx’s Concept of Base/Superstructure

Where the base directly determines the content and form of the superstructure, the super structure then reflects on the base and influences it.

Raymond Williams (1983)

4 definitions of popular

Lesser then a real culture such as art and mass production. Needs a taste setter, historically the ruling classes are the taste setters.

·      Well liked by many

·      Inferior kinds of work

·      Work deliberately setting out to win favour with people

·      Culture actually made by the people themselves

Inferior or residual culture

·      Popular press vs quality press

·      Popular cinema vs art cinema

·      Popular entertainment vs art culture

Mural paintings, people have no right to judge them by societies standards because they have been tought in a different way.

Popular culture can start off by representing the people then then end up representing a few.

Society had a comman culture and there was a tiny  superculture

the first time this changes (base/superstructure) is with industrailsation and urbanisation, people are condensed together physically but clearly separated.

working class moved into slums. The higher class retreat to the nicer areas of the city’s.

This physical separation causes a change in culture to keep the lower class occupied. (own forms of litrature, music, pub…). After years you will see a working class culture which is very much different to a upper class culture.

Matthew Arnold (1867) Culture & Anarchy

Culture is:

·      The best that has been thought and said in the world

·      Study of perfection

·      Attained through disinterested reading, thinking and writing

·      The pursuit of culture

Anarchy

·      Culture polices “the raw and uncultivated masses”

·      “The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor…”

Leavisism – F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis

“Culture has always been in minority keeping” – there has always been an elite to defend the culture.

Says basically working class culture is a form of distraction. Drugs, cheap trills, ways to break away fro reality.

Frankfurt School

Theodore adorno & max Horkheimer

Reinterpreted marx, for the 20^th century – era of late capitalism”

Defined “the culture industry”:

2 main products – homogeneity and predictability

“all mass culture is identical””

“as soon as the film begins, its quite clear how it will end, and who ill be rewarded punished or forgotten”

Popular culture vs affirmative culture

Holy oaks:

They way it has been marketed into and repackaged through the culture industry.

Adorno on popular music

Standardisation

Social cement

Produces passivity through rhythmic and emotional adjustment.

Real culture has been lost:

Individualisation

Imaginisation

Benjamin Walter

Mass production and new production technology has allowed us to redefine culture into how we want and the possibility of challenging high culture.

Lecture 3 - Marxism & Design Activism

Marxism & Design Activism

Aims

·      To introduce a critical definition of ideology

·      To introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy

·      To explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects

·      To introduce “culture jamming: and the idea of design activism

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the, however, is to change it.”

Marx, K. (1845)

Marxism is:

A political manifesto, leading to socialism, communism and the twentieth century conflicts between capital and labor

A philosophical approach to the social sciences, which focuses on the role of society in determining human behavior, based on concept of dialectical materialism

What is Capitalism?

·      Society where the control of the means of production are held in private hands.

·      A market where labour power is bought and sold (even people)

·      Production of commodities for sale

·      Use of money as a means of exchange

·      Competition/meritocracy

Communist Evolution

1.     Primitive Communism: as seen in cooperative tribal societies.

2.     Slave Society: Develops when the tribe becomes a city – state. Birth of aristocracy

3.     Feudalism: aristocracy becomes the ruling class. Mechants devlop into capitalists.

4.     Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the real working classes.

5.     Socialism: dictatorship of proletariat: workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.

6.     Communism: a classless and stateless society.

Marx’s concept

Base

Forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills.

Relations of production – emplyer/emplyee, class, master/slave.

Superstructure

Social institutions – legal, political, culture.

Forms of consciousness – ideology

By changing the base (captilism) you would change the super structure being politics are way of thinking everything.

The state:

“but a committee for managing the comman affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” marx and engels 1848

The queen is a figure head not in charge.

the bourgeosisies, get the state to set laws, get army out to control.

Ideology sets up a system of ideas or beliefs which benefits the political party.

Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of “false consciousness”

“The ruling class has to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”

Karl Marx, (1846)

Art as Ideology

The only peiople able to be artists are the people who are eductated, women weren’t allowed to make art either. So the only people making art are Rich white men, making art for people who are rich. Made by rich people for rich people.

Society = Economic, political & ideological:

Ideology is a practice through which men and women “live” their relations to real conditions of existence.

Ideology offers false, but seemingly true resolutions to social imbalance.

Becomes a mechanism for how we live our lives.

The media as ideological state apparatus

·      A means of production

·      Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)

·      Media creates a false consciousness

·      The  individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture,

The media controls politics.

Lecture 2 - Tecnology will liberate us

Technology will liberate us

Books

Digital currents, art and the age of mechanical reproduction,  art and the age of mass media.

Summary

·      Technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness

·      Technology trigger important changes in cultural development

·      Walter benjamins essay “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change.

A copy can either be a work in its own right or merely just a representation of the original.

Machine Age: Modernism

·      Benjeman claimed that technology is parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist.

·      Dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original

·      The aura and uniqueness of art

Its only due to technology where we have to refer to the original, encountering the original is distinct from a copy because of the uniqueness of its aura.

Photography

Photography can produce multiple viewing points…

The camera eye has a variable gaze.

 Photography had overturned the judgment seat of art a fact which the discourse of modernism found hard to repress (lovejoy pg 36)

The value of Art and Design can be distorted as soon as it reaches production. For instance if a celebrity reproduces the same doodle does it make it more valueble?

Marx persuas the effect of technology on society.

Fraud persuas the materialism with technology

Kinecticism

Explores the way we look at space time apparently….

Pre cursor to cinema photography.

Etienne-jules marey

Images used as a link into dematerialism.

With photography comes dematrialism of art and design.

With technology our images are coded ordered and styled, development of art and design merging together.

Karl Marx & technology

Associated with the term technological determinism. How technological determines economical prodction factors and affects social conditions

Dialectical issues

·      Technology drives history

·      Technology and the dicision of labour

·      Materialist view of history

·      Technology and capitalism and production

·      Social Alienation of people form aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism

The electronic Age: Postmodernism

Post modern Post Machine

·      Many electronic works were still made with modern aesthetic

·      Mergence of information and conceptual based works

·      The computer a natural metaphor

·      A spirit of openness to industrial techniques

·      Collaborations between art and science

Rosenburg

Projects texts over photography.

Simulation and Simulacrum

·      It is the reflection of a profound reality

·      It masks and denatures a profound realiy

·      It masks the absence of a profound reality

·      It has no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum

Jean Baudrillard (1981)

A copy of a map isn’t just a copy it is an object and form in its own right. What do we call original and what do we call a copy.

John Wlaker and art and mass media; Art in the age of mass media

Art uses mass media (1990 – 2000)

Margot lovejoy; Digital currents

Digitial potential leads to multimedia productions

Technological reduction of all images so they are

Lecture 5 - The Gaze and The media

The Gaze and the Media


Vanity - the mirror is a device which shows the women is looking at herself in the mirror

Alexandre cabanel

Raises hand which party covers eyes, other slightly bend, this gesture emplys that shes just waking from sleep or just about to go to sleep. This allows you to look at her body but not have her looking back at you.

Titians venus of urbino.

She is aware of us but she is inviting. Gives us the idea that shes a wealthy women with servants in the background.

Manet - Olympia

Manet represents modernism a bit. she is a symbol of a assertive female presence, the flowers been given to her by an admirer. She looks you straight in the eyes....

Jeff Wall - Picture for women

the women has the absorbed gaze and posture of manet's barmade. The male gaze. seperates the shot in 3rd's to show the diferences between the model and the male artist.

Coward, R

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets. she poses in a way where u want to look at her body but her eyes are covered so you dont "feel bad" at stairing at her.

Eva Herzigova

shes looking down at her self and not at the viewer, the "hello boys" is an inviting piece of text allowing you to stair at her and some form of flirtation produced. Normalising putting her body on the street.

Male advertising.

reflects the male body and beuty is connected with strength and the gym, they all look you straight in the eye. "the gaze"

• 1950's cinema the male takes the active role where the women takes the passive role

Barbara Kruger

Leaves us with ambigiuous statements, she is offering us the side of her face instead of the full gaze.

Sarah Lucas

Self portrait of food on her body, this is to show that the female body is there to be consumed. 

Reality TV

Passively consuming somehting which isnt reality TV, the directors cut out the bits which will get most views and produce their bais view on what they show the people.