Photography Essays Art and Media

Photography Essays Art and MediaUsing examples, discuss the relationship amidst fraud and the mass media.Introduction The relationship between artwork and media has continuously been heavily symbiotic, a fact certifyd only relatively recently, with the juiceless(preno(prenominal)inal) wink of pop art in the fifties, only nalwaystheless the lodge has always been present and empowering to both high culture and companys consumers. Consumer culture and art crap invaded each early(a)s territories to the presage where it has wrench im realizable, at times, to tell them apart. The HBO television series, Sex and the city, for example, might be art reflecting life, or art in kneading life, or both, or neither so umpteen of the signifiers we use to recognise art, so many of the effort and effect relationships we took for granted, have got become indistinguishable.On a theoretical level, the media has amplified dainty causes, for good or for bad, and sometimes where bad is a nticipated, the media has been second-guessed or hijacked. On a practical level, forms of media broadcast have much in common with art forms, e very(prenominal)owing for overlaps and ironic jokes, since contemporary technologies enable neatly replicable sign systems- the mass media is a hegemony, and iconography reproduces itself over we look.One reaction to the standardization of jut outry and the new lexicon of iconography came in the form of Pop art. Ironically, of course, Warhols replicable torturetings have an icono natural currency all their consume. By the 1970s pockets of subversion were surfaceing everywhere. Media activists called it culture jamming, the Situationist International called it detourne custodyt (an insurrectional style by which a past form is used to draw its own inherent untruth) the Pistols called it Punk. But it was essentially the like. Culture jamming can be used to describe a broad meander of subversive activity, from the course of graffiti artisans to the radical refacework forcet of billboards by the Billboard press release Front, to pirate radio broadcasts. It is, essentially, an attempt to challenge the authority of the mass media by intend of creative, and generally public, acts of resistance.Adbusters magazine employs culture jamming as its manifesto, transforming it into a loving movement with the revolutionary aim of toppling existing power structures and forging a major(ip) rethinking of the way we live in the 21st century. Their forceful sloganism, together with gaucherie of its inclination, raises suspicions and condemnation. This is the rhetoric of a salesman, and there would indeed appear to be a contradiction between its anti-advertising objectives and its image-based editorial strategies. Nevertheless this is the first time that magazines have really subjectified the image, and a magazine which is non only ab issue figure of speech save also a beautiful piece of craft itself, seems to besieg e the theoretical problem of hypocrisy, somehow.The problem of design today is that it is more mesmerized by the visual, as a realistic imitation or decoration, and non by the image as a subjective narrative and instructive element. As a result of its internal dialogue, however, the image is more than a perception. It is a necessary construction on the brink of fiction, that reveals the dialectic of theatrical performance and presentation.Rick argues that the once homogeneous firmament of intense design has begun to start into two distinct strands. On cardinal side there is passkey practice in all its forms on the other a field which he terms design-culture graphics. This territory is inhabited by designers doing their own, oft self-initiated thing publishing books and magazines, starting websites, and designing and selling T-shirts, posters, DVDs, etc. He refers to Adrian Shaughnessys observations in April 2003s Creative Re adopt magazine stylistically it is usually radic al, adventurous and sometimes level overthrow powerful purposeless.The curious expectation of this assert is the suggestion that the divide has only just happened. Looking stake to Morris and Ruskin, again, we see an extraordinary choose of proto-punk for the center(a) classes, even at the plough of the century. More recently, the division became a true fond cleave, alternatively than an ideological romantic whimsy, with the new wave that followed punk in the late 1970s. Designers much(prenominal) as Brody, Saville, Malcolm Garrett, Rocking Russian and 23 Envelope were so notable because, not only did they shun the mainstream in which designers would once have expected to view work as a matter of course, but they also produced the about inventive and durable British graphic design of the period. Their audience was other young populate. In Britain today, a vast number of young designers pop from design schools and art colleges today with no intention of joining desig ns mainstream. People today want to express their individualism in their work and the thought of a small, informal collective started by a group of friends is obviously attractive as its a sort of extension of student life.Graphic design compete an important usance as a tool of empowerment for those whose fringe status was less of a select, too it gave voice to women and articulating their concerns.The suffragettes contribution to the history of graphic design has been intriguing. Unlike the emancipatory and utopic vision of the modernist movement, the images of the womens movement never positive(p) to a unifying aesthetic dogma. When seen in conjunction with other social and counter-cultural movements that became symbolic of a certain stylistic representation, what is notable about the womens movement is its lack of stylistic unity. While this wasnt intentional strategy, it lots increased resistance to commodification.Much of todays art is conceptually sophisticated enough to reflect both art and life, often anticipating its own responses. The characters in Sex and the City, the ultimate show about and because of commodification, consistently acknowledge social expectation, even if it has become their raison detre to buck those expectations. When the character Charlotte expresses celestial latitude about not working it shows that she has internalized the message that she should work. When she accuses Miranda of judging her she exclaims,You think Im one of those women . . . One of those women we hate who just works until she gets married Here, Charlotte reveals her own view that women should be independent, demonstrating that she herself is conflicted. Her statement has feminist under(a)tones, since it implies that women who change their lives, or who argon mainly oriented to attracting a husband, sacrifice themselves and compromise their identities- appropriately, as this is exactly the set the scriptwriters have in store for her.Charlottes emphasis on the weft defense as a feminist case is an oversimplification and a misinterpretation of liberal feminist goals, although it close up promotes the critical sentiment that women be diverse, and that one womans decision of what to do with her corpse or her life should be in her hands, in spite of what her friends, family, or society dictates.Yet, at the same time it highlights some of the problems associated with liberal feminism as a situation and its frequent misappropriation by women- and perhaps, in this case, the Sex and the City scriptwriters. disinterested feminism is based on the imagination that differences between women and men cannot be explained by biology and and so differential treatment is unjust. The idea is that people should be regarded as individuals, sort of than identified first as men or women, and should thus be able to make decisions based on what is best for the individual. As Montemurro has written,In this episode of Sex and the City, when Charlott e refers to the womens movement, she seems to be referring to the idea that women have been liberated or freed from the constraints of patriarchy and are able to work and attain success at levels similar to those attained by men. Thus, she has the right to decide for herself what will make her happy and satisfied as an individual. If she chooses not to work, then she is not succumbing to traditional feminine expectations rather, she is doing what she sees as right for her and thus she should not be judged for this.She goes on to point out that few women have the ability to make this choice. But the whole debate about choice can be located in the context of oppression in Montemurros terms, Charlottes choice is predicated on other womens lack of choices. In addition, Charlotte even states that Trey suggested she stay at kinfolk, hinting that the idea to stop working has not come directly from her. The criticism of feminisms reactive fictitious character applies here her choice may be her perogative but it is not entirely hers, and the specific choice she has(nt) made stands for the choice (either to stay at home or not) that all women make, with its attendant vulnerability to accusations of reactiveness and passivity. As Montemurro suggests, Charlottes powerful, rich husband has delivered the option to her as a gift of sorts, as if to say, I give you permission to stay home, and Charlotte fails to acknowledge that her choice is made possible only by her subsequent economic dependence on her husband.Charlottes statement that the womans movement is about choice is played as detestationfully comical, distasteful not least because the scriptwriters are conveyancing one of two equally dangerous messages. Either they are communicating they notion that it is sufficient lipservice to feminism to give these issues crass and simplistic treatment, or they are expressing Charlottes charming naivety through the incidental tone of a feminist token. It is as though she entrusts that any choice- motherhood, career, or fetching a cooking class, is of equal value, because the decision is coming from herself. It is a claim made cynically by the media and advertisers, specifically designed to manipulate women who believe themselves to be independent into buying products that appeal to their vanity- products sold on graphic representations of self-indulgence, selling the irresistible idea that women are wallowing in low self-worth and deserve to treat themselves.Womens liberation has become suspect precisely because of this bastardisation the idea that free choice includes bad choices, that female freedom is the equivalent weight of justified narcissism.Increasingly products, weight loss and fashion have been unnaturally presented as aids to a deserving womans betterment, winning feminist ideas of melioration as their selling point- in so far feminists concur that all such strategies only help women to participate in their construction as subservi ent, imperfect, and generally oppressed. Her sterileness is treated with same astonishing crassness, as Tara Flockhart points out,The infertility of Charlotteexcruciatingly painful affliction, is at first mocked by suggesting that she sublimates her emotional pain in affection for her dog (the animal, not the man, in her life)Of course it is not merely female issues which are levied by the media. According to feminist artist and writer Laura Mulvey, the female form is still a battleground for backwash conventions, and it is a battle where, for the most part, media images and visual art are on the same side. For Mulvey, the problem is the equivalence of the female form with desire so long as the male body is not seen as desirable, men remain in control of desire and the activity of looking. It seems to be a commonly held assumption that things are improving, but I would suggest, the male body is more prominently objectified by the media nowadays not as a symptom of female control over the view but as a direct result of the integration of the alert male gaze into the mainstream. This is rapidly overtaking the rise of women, and these sites of homosexual desire are not replacing images of women but are appearing alongside them. It is no improvement at all. Most images of attractive male bodies in the media today arent the result of feminist struggle for equality, but simply more men, gay men, expressing their own desires in public.Virtually everywhere in Hollywood (not to insinuate the internet, TV, magazines, the High Street) we vex Freuds notion of scopophilia the pleasure involved in looking at other peoples bodies as sexy objects. Mulvey has written extensively on viewing conventions as she perceives them to be facilitated by the cinema auditorium itself. The darkness of the picture-house provides a unique public environment where we may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey details how certain cin ema viewing conditions facilitate for the informant both the voyeuristic branch of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ideal ego seen on the screen.There would be no post-modernist art responses to the media, of course, without the massively influential modernist movement that rocked the orbit at the deflect of the century. Long before the Sex and the City girls, modernism aimed to expose traditional society as exposed as something fraudulent. The exponents of the modern aimed to show that nostalgia was two-faced the unity of a golden age had never existed. The modernists only ever wanted to present reality as it was. Since social, political, religious, artistic ideas had been incorporated into this mistaken order, they had to be incorporated into any true reworking of it. It was modernism that impressed upon us the idea that narrative direction- that a story should have a beginning, middle and end was nothing more t han an opiate, artifice grafted onto random existence to form illusions of consistency.ConclusionsThe relationship between media and forms of art is of course not entirely co operative. The mass media has been understood as the servant of capitalist society, and art, as the prototypic free thought its natural enemy. Historically, arts efforts to bring down capitalist structures from within have been very ill-fated, with artists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or perhaps worse- accessories to political agendas. Artists and writers must work harder than ever to devise means of opposing or exposing capitalisms deceptions, but many commentators appear to have reached the conclusion that the battle is barely worth fighting. Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible through art or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to commit suicide,Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative a nd a eonian surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must giving up to the evidence art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the reprobation consumed.Thus the caravan movements in Europe put the artist under pressure to exhibit a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- being a manufacturer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible,There is a lot of talk, not about straighten out or forcing the Enlightenment project to live up to its own ideals, but about wholesale negation, revolution, another new sensibility, now self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalist or rational self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened role for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization.In a sense, the avant-garde has been socially commissioned to forecast the future, to scout ing out new intellectual terrain,Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured contemporaneousness saw its role as declaring its fragmentary reality, its construction, or the construction of the world or idea it aimed to represent. As one writer says,A emblematic modernist story will seem to begin arbitrarily, advance inexplicably, and end without resolution. Symbols and images are used instead of statements. The tone is ironic and understated-mocking of any of its characters or elements that still seem to appeal to the idea of coherent reality. On the other hand, many modernist works are structured as quests for the very coherence they seem to lack. Becau se the quest is a very legendological concept, a lot of modernist writers drop dead to and rewrite myths of the world into their works. Often the faith based on myths (such as Christianity) is apparently revealed as a farce and a fraud-that is, as myth rather than objective reality.Without Modernisms take on the media, its distaste with media stereotypes, there would be no ironic art forms, and without Surrealisms ample achievement, its ability to assimilate its patterns so completely into our unconscious that its images have become a part of us, without this we would have no impressive, delicious, advertising and no self-perpetuating consumer society. It knows our dreams, but it also knows our nightmares. Surrealism may be the triumphant rebellious child of modern art, but it is the heir of capitalist society. As one writer puts it,Historically, surrealism was an art movement of ideas that developed between World Wars I and II and was very prolific. However, today the viewer aut omatically accepts surrealist imagery. Its everywhere we look. One can find surrealism in childrens books, on television, in advertisements, music videos, movies and any other form of mass media. Today a person can see examples of surrealism everywhere without consciously noting that one is looking at a surreal imageBibliographyBataille, George. The Lugubrious Game in Visions of Excess, US University of Minnesota Press (1985) Breton, Andr Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. road US Ann Arbor, (1969) Burger, Peter and Block, Richard, The Thinking of the Master Bataille Between Hegel and Surrealism US northwestern University Press (2003) Burgin, Victor (Ed.) (1982) Thinking Photography. 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