Mass Image Culture
New Royal Academy - first formal art school and the school or the royals and elites of society, people who went here were taught that there was a particular idea of the fine arts, a hierarchy of the artistic disciplines. (Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry)
The Making of the English Working Class (1963) - the side effect of the city and urbanisation, for the first time in England you had a condensation of people forced together, condensed cultures and a noticeable separation between the classes. Because of their separation from the galleries and Royal academies, people started to make and write their own art and culture for the people. The working people also started to then create their own political culture.
John Martin (1820) Belshazzar’s Feast - managed to beat the system as he took this painting and sold reproductions of his painting and made lots of money off it. Because of the new print culture the everyday man would now be able to own great pieces of art, which they wouldn't have ever been able to before.
Culture VS Popular Culture
Culture: ‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’, study of perfection, attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking, the pursuit of culture, seeks ’to minister the diseased spirit of the times’ What he meant was that all of the print culture was a threat to Englishness and that this new direction is a bad route to go down and it was fine as it was. (Matthew Arnold - 1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’
Leavism - F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis -
- Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country
- For Leavis - C20th sees a cultural decline, standardisation and levelling down
Opinions of culture are always political
- Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy)
- Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (cultural) authority
It's not made with a rule book and it's a radical movement that is revolutionary.
School of Design (1836) - forefathers of our art schools, they had a specific role to train people for industry and had a political role of teaching print culture, institutions that celebrate traditional culture alongside mass culture
‘Aura’ and the Politics of Print
(Creativity, Genius, Eternal Value, Tradition, Authority, Authenticity, Autonomy, Distance, Mystery), Aura is all of these things and more and the impression that you get when you look at a piece of art and are amazed by the talent. It's people talking about paintings in fancy words to describe how amazing they are and making art more special than it is. This is all down to you believing that someone is better than you, more talented than you and this way of thinking makes fascism possible as it creates a culture where people are happy to be lead and dominated.
Once you can take that image and mass print it, it takes away the aura that surrounds pieces of art and you can make it into anything you like. Introduced the capacity to write their own culture and is not only the culture of the people but also introduced the opportunity for people to fight back against authority, this is the weapon. Behind this is the construction of the people where they don't blindly listen to what others tell them any more.
Contemporary Print Culture
The Panorama - People set up these images of the city and urban space, people could view these godly images and art becomes more like a experience.
Th invention of the photograph created the idea of being immortalised forever in a photograph available for everyone and the need for painted portraits became redundant.
Once you grasp the idea of political, historic possibilities it can be used as a weapon.
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