Susan G Josephson - From Idolatry to Advertising: Visual Art and Contemporary Culture: Visual Art and Contemporary Culture

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From Idolatry to Advertising

From
Idolatry
to Advertising

VISUAL ART AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

---

Susan G. Josephson

First published 1996 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1996 by Susan G. Josephson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Josephson, Susan G.
From idolatry to advertising: visual art and contemporary culture /
Susan G. Josephson.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56324-875-1 (hardcover: alk. paper).ISBN 1-56324-876-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. PostmodernismPhilosophy.
2. Popular culture.
3. Art and technology.
I. Title.
N6494.P66J67 1995
701-dc20
94-45412
CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563248764 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9781563248757 (hbk)

To Ruth Gardocki,
for all her generous support
and encouragement.

Contents

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THIS BOOK TOOK SHAPE out of my many years teaching philosophy to professional art students at the Columbus College of Art and Design. There I have had many discussions about what is happening in art, and the future direction of culture with the advent of the computer and television. From these discussions an understanding of the cultural evolution of visual art in all its forms began to emerge. I found that there was no book which really told the philosophy behind all of the visual arts that I could use as a text in my classes. This was the beginning of this book in the form of long handouts to my students which attempted to fill in the gap between what I wanted to teach and the available textbooks.

This book records the conclusions that I came to as I thought through the cultural evolution of each of the different sorts of visual art and tried to piece together their story from the perspective of philosophy. discuss the life histories of design and advertising.

This book is also the story of how art interacts with technology. In my work in Artificial Intelligence research I saw that there is an intimate connection between the evolution of design in engineering and design in art. In both sorts of design there is a growing understanding of how to make and use levels of packaging, and how to approach things from the functional perspective of the artifact. This is discussed in of how art styles affect us also reflects this functional approach. That is, instead of approaching art styles in the traditional ways, I have approached them in terms of the tasks of vision and how art delivers information packaged to be understood at different levels of visual processing. Using this functional approach, I stress what art does for us rather than what art is.

I also tried to address the evolution of culture given the mass media and mass market, and the role of art in the growing marriage between television and computer. As I thought about computers in my work in Artificial Intelligence, I saw that a new sort of idolatry was arising where ^he computers were being asked to be infallible experts giving us advice on everything from taxes to marriage problems and our health. I saw that computers were being used not just as art tools and artists, but also as art objects like the ancient idols. This started me thinking about how other ancient functions of religion were being filled by advertising and the media. This is discussed in .

Because this book has taken so many years to write it is not possible to thank all the people from whom I have gotten insights and encouragement. However, I do want to thank the General Studies faculty at the Columbus College of Art and Design for their help, especially the art historians Margaret Seibert, Michael Swinger, and Beverly Orr for their help on getting the art history right, and George Felton for his help on understanding advertising. I also want to thank the faculty and graduate students at the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research at the Ohio State University for their input into vision and style and the nature of thought from an information processing perspective, especially B. Chandrasekaran, John Josephson, Bill Punch, and Mike Weintraub. Also I would like to thank Will Smith and Alan Govenar for many useful conversations about art and its place in modern culture. And, of course, I must also thank all my many philosophy of art students without whom this book would never have come to be.

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CHAPTER 1
The Cultural-Niche Theory of Art

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THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY artist Piet Mondrian (1937) wrote that he imagined a future where we no longer just had paintings hanging on walls, but lived in realized art. The items of domestic life would all be art. We would live in art. He wanted artists to make this art so balanced that people would live their lives in its harmonies. In a sense, that future has come to be. We live in realized art. We have art on our bed sheets and on our T-shirts. We make fashion choices of color and line, even on our towels and our toilet paper. We see art images everywhere. There is a diversity in the kinds of art that we see around us. There are advertising posters on the walls of stores. There are illustrations in magazines. There are streams of images broadcast to us over television. We are indeed living in realized art.

This realized art, however, is not in a harmonious universal style as Mondrian was envisaging. It consists mostly in forms of art considered banal, sentimental, and in bad taste by most in the Fine Art artworld. Further, because so many people have no interest in Fine Art, it is often thought that visual art has somehow lost its relevance and potency. People ask what the point of art is, and whether it is worthwhile spending public money on art. When people think of art, they think of Fine Art, and the influence of Fine Art seems to be in decline.

However, although Fine Art seems to be in decline as a cultural force, visual art has more power in culture now than it ever had. Visual art is not all Fine Art. There is a diversity of kinds of art in contemporary culture. Besides Fine Art, there is also Popular Art, Design Art, and advertising. What Fine Art does for us is just a small part of the total cultural value we get from art. As traditional culture recedes from memory, and technology changes our lifestyles, people look for new values and lifestyles. These new values and lifestyles are carried by the art broadcast to us over the mass media and on the products we buy. The mass-media arts define our heroes and tell us about the good. Advertisements define pleasure and lifestyle. With mass-market goods we dress our bodies and houses in art, thus using art to define who we are. These contemporary visual arts play a large part in shaping our values, fantasies, and lifestyles.

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